South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s US tour was diplomatically successful, but beneath the polished optics lie stark contradictions: A post-apartheid nation still burdened by deep economic inequality and a liberation movement entangled in neoliberal compromises
South Africa’s President and his team-including a considerable cohort of white South Africans, notably Afrikaners — were hosted at the Oval Office by President Trump, immediately following what was hailed as a remarkably successful diplomatic mission to Arab countries, where even Trump himself was bestowed the gift of one Air Force One flight by Qatar-an unprecedented endowment, the largest of its kind ever received by the United States.
In addition to Ramaphosa’s delegation, there was an intriguing presence of an Afrikaner on Trump’s side, Elon Musk. During the meeting, Ramaphosa exhibited enviable political maturity and dexterity, manoeuvring through the maze of Trump’s diplomatic traps with subtlety while carefully avoiding incendiary pitfalls that could have compromised his nation’s delicate balancing act.
During the meeting, Ramaphosa notably sidestepped fraught questions about the so-called “persecuted white Afrikaners,” a narrative amplified by the likes of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has recently sought to expand refugee programmes ostensibly designed to shield white South Africans. Trump, for his part, acknowledged South Africa’s pivotal role in geopolitics. However, earlier this year he had dismissively branded BRICS as ‘dead’-a miscalculation that belies the intricate global recalibrations currently underway.
This Oval Office episode unfolded as Israel prepares for a possible series of pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, an ominous prospect with potential ramifications extending well beyond West Asia. Meanwhile, South Africa continues to spearhead a genocide case against Israel at the ICC — a legal crusade emblematic of its self-appointed role as a global moral arbiter, a paradox that exposes its own unresolved historical and domestic contradictions.
To unpack the import of these events and declarations demands a journey through the turbulent and often tragic arc of South African history, the vicissitudes of its liberation movements, and the dissonant realities that confront the post-apartheid state. It compels one to confront the stark incongruities between high-flown rhetoric and tangible outcomes, between aspirational promises of freedom and the sobering arithmetic of socioeconomic decay.
The African National Congress (ANC), led for decades by icons such as Nelson Mandela, is frequently lionised for dismantling apartheid’s edifice. Yet, as Ramaphosa himself implicitly acknowledged during the Oval Office encounter, the real challenge lies not in achieving political emancipation but in the herculean task of economic liberation — a task that has stubbornly eluded successive administrations. “What we want,” Ramaphosa asserted with diplomatic prudence, “is to create an environment for investments to take place,” signalling a continued reliance on foreign direct investment (FDI), predominantly controlled by white-owned corporations, particularly Afrikaner-dominated economic entities.
This reality is hardly surprising given South Africa’s historical trajectory. The economic structures of apartheid were deliberately engineered to concentrate wealth and power within a narrow white minority, primarily Afrikaners and English-speaking elites. Post-1994, despite the political turnover, these economic bastions remained largely intact. As Patrick Bond, a political economist, noted, “the struggle against apartheid was fundamentally a struggle against the apartheid state, but the economic apparatus that undergirded it survived largely unscathed.”
Mandela’s magisterial legacy — his embrace of reconciliation and nation-building — undoubtedly a triumph in moral and political terms, has also been subject to trenchant criticism. His famous injunction that “we must build a society in which all South Africans, black and white, will be able to walk tall without any fear in their hearts” embodies a noble ideal.
Yet critics contend that this emphasis on social harmony, while indispensable in the post-conflict milieu, has ossified economic inequalities. It arguably deflected urgent demands for structural redistribution, land reform, and radical economic transformation that might have addressed the stark disparities entrenched by centuries of colonial and apartheid-era dispossession.
The ANC’s post-apartheid governance reveals a tragic ambivalence, caught between the demands of social justice and the pressures of neoliberal global capitalism.
This tension is evident in the contentious Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies, which, despite good intentions, have been criticised for creating a nouveau riche black elite often complicit with the very privilege and corruption the liberation struggle sought to dismantle, while the majority remain trapped in poverty, with unemployment near 30% and widespread informal settlements.
The ANC’s political failures highlight a core postcolonial African dilemma: the gap between liberation as rhetoric and governance as reality. As Steve Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement warned, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” yet after decades of freedom, we must question whose minds are truly free and what liberation millions of marginalised South Africans experience.
Ramaphosa’s Oval Office discourse highlighted these tensions. When queried about South Africa’s regulatory environment and the willingness of US companies like Tesla and Amazon to invest, he noted the necessity of creating a “conducive environment” for investment — implying a tacit acceptance of existing economic realities.
The example of Tesla’s negotiation with China to build a gigafactory, circumventing local partnership mandates, was evoked as a model of pragmatic economic diplomacy. Yet, this pragmatism stands in stark contrast with South Africa’s fraught attempts at regulatory reform, particularly in the communications sector, where an “equity equivalent programme” is under consideration — echoing the very legacies of racialised economic control the nation ostensibly seeks to dismantle.
Moreover, the discourse around the so-called “Afrikaner genocide” — a deeply controversial and polarising claim — reflects broader social fractures in post-apartheid South Africa. While violent crime, including attacks on white farmers, is undeniably high, scholars and international observers largely reject framing these events as genocide. Yet this narrative resonates politically in some domestic and international circles, stoking racial fears and complicating nation-building.
Crime affects all communities, but incarceration rates reveal persistent racial and economic inequalities disproportionately impacting Black South Africans. The “white genocide” claim, especially against farmers, collapses under scrutiny: in 2024, eight farmers died amid 26,232 homicides, and no mass land confiscations have occurred since apartheid, exposing societal fracture rather than ethnic cleansing. Allegations of “crimes against whites” expose enduring tensions between diasporic Afrikaners and the post-apartheid state, with such narratives serving as soft power tools that influence global perceptions and complicate South Africa’s political development.
The juxtaposition of South Africa’s efforts at international moral leadership, such as the genocide case against Israel at the ICC, with its unfinished reckoning with inequality and social justice, reveals a profound dissonance.
The post-apartheid state’s self-image as a defender of human rights and international law is undermined by its inability to resolve fundamental domestic contradictions — a disjunction aptly captured by W.E.B. Du Bois’s prescient observation that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line,” a problem that remains obstinately alive and unresolved in South Africa.
The tragic irony is that the very movements that liberated South Africa remain, in many respects, prisoners of their rhetorical legacy — a legacy of hope and liberation that too often masks a reality of governance marked by factionalism, corruption, and unfulfilled promises. Ramaphosa’s skilful diplomacy in Washington, while commendable, is but one chapter in a longer, more fraught story.
The challenge ahead lies not only in maintaining political alliances or courting foreign investment but in confronting the ineradicable legacies of colonialism and apartheid with boldness and honesty.
(The writer is a Colombo based columnist. Views expressed are personal)
