South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will meet with the U.S President Donald Trump in Washington DC on Wednesday May 21, 2025, amid strained ties between the two countries.
“On Wednesday, 21 May 2025, President Ramaphosa will meet with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington DC to discuss bilateral, regional and global issues of interest,” the South African presidency said in a statement.
Tensions have been rising for months over a range of policy issues, culminating this week with the U.S resettling a first, very small group of white Afrikaners that Trump claims are facing “persecution” in South Africa.
The visit “provides a platform to reset the strategic relationship between the two countries,” it said.
Trump has repeatedly shared unfounded claims that white Afrikaners are facing a “genocide,” a conspiracy theory that has been widely dismissed.
White South Africans, who make up 7.3 percent of the population, generally enjoy a higher standard of living than the black majority of the country.
Pretoria has said Trump’s offer of refugee status to Afrikaners is “entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.”
