It’s not every day that the President of the United States showcases your own article in the Oval Office to drive a potent political message to another country’s leader.
But that is just what happened to me today.
I was truly surprised when, during his meeting with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, Donald Trump, 28 minutes into the interaction, unexpectedly launched into a discourse on the ‘genocide’ of white farmers in South Africa – brandishing my Mail article as supporting evidence.
The article, printed earlier in February, was even cited by the President, quoting from the headline: ‘White South Africans are fleeing because of violence and racist laws,’ he relayed to a visibly uneasy Mr. Ramaphosa, creating a charged moment akin to his prior confrontation in the same office with Ukraine’s President Zelensky.
And it is clear President Trump feels deeply about the dreadful atrocities faced by white South Africans in the so-called Rainbow Nation that I described in detail in the article.
As I revealed, the Trump administration was preparing to take in 59 white South African farmers as refugees, rescuing them from an epidemic of murderous attacks on their community which have largely been ignored by the South African government – and the rest of the world.
Donald Trump ambushed South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa with a lecture on the ‘genocide’ of white farmers in his country – and waved Sue Reid’s Mail article under his nose as evidence
South African farmers and residents support Donald Trump outside the US embassy in Pretoria
When I visited South Africa’s farmlands outside Johannesburg while researching the article, I met families from the Afrikaans’ community who have lived there for generations and have suffered the most terrible abuse in recent times.
At the little church they attended in the village, one of the older ones told me pitifully: ‘We have been here for 300 years. We stay because we have nowhere else to go. This country is ours too.’
To South Africa’s enduring loss, some of the young Afrikaaners can abide their treatment no longer and have uprooted and left for pastures new in the US.
They are now farming on the sprawling cattle ranches of Arkansas ‘because there is no future for us back home’. They are meeting American girls, marrying, putting down new roots as they escape the race-baiting hatred that assails them relentlessly in their homeland.
So much was hoped for from South Africa back in 1994 when former freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, who had been released from jail to worldwide jubilation, became President. When the great church leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu talked of a ‘Rainbow Nation’ at peace and harmony irrespective of skin colour.
Gone were the evils of apartheid, a hated, despised system where blacks and whites were segregated by law in school, in their jobs, on the streets, on buses and even at the beach.
Generations of black South Africans had been grotesquely victimised by apartheid, and it was the Afrikaaners (mainly of Dutch Protestant descent) who were – rightly- blamed for introducing it.
Those Afrikaaners have paid the price in the post-apartheid era. And how.
The pendulum has swung so far that the whites now find themselves brutalised beyond imagining. Murders of white farmers are commonplace. The killings are committed by rampaging young black men – often jobless and angry that the post-apartheid years have not lived up to their promise, with an all but bankrupt economy and rampant corruption.
Afrikaans’ widows live with memories of watching their husbands being tortured by these savage gangs before the inevitable end comes with a gunshot to the temple or a spade hammered into their heads.
One of the rising political party leaders in South Africa is Julius Malema. He is a Marxist who attracts crowds of thousands of young blacks and has a vile song he chants at the microphone during his rallies.
‘Kill the Boer’, it goes. The Boer is, of course, a term for Afrikaans farmers and the crowds he attracts all join in, chanting his horrific anthem.
Has he been stopped from singing it? No. In fact, the South African courts have ruled he must be allowed to do so whenever he wishes.
Today history was made at the White House as, at last, the US President told the watching world of this this new ‘genocide’. And whether it was my article that he used in his argument or not, that can only be a good thing for South Africa and its people – whatever their kith or kin.
