Keypoints:
- Mahama defends South Africa’s history
- Slams Trump’s apartheid-era revisionism
- Calls to preserve African memory and truth
THE recent White House meeting between US President Donald Trump and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa was supposed to focus on diplomatic cooperation and continental partnerships. Instead, it veered sharply into dangerous ideological territory when Trump levelled false claims of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa.
These comments are not merely offensive—they are reckless. They distort history and risk stoking racial division at home and abroad. They attempt to manufacture fear, undermine reconciliation efforts, and rewrite the memory of apartheid, one of the most brutal systems of racial oppression ever devised. In a time of global unrest and rising populism, such dangerous rhetoric cannot go unanswered.
As Africans, we understand that words are not neutral. They carry power. And throughout history, language has been weaponised against us—not only to justify colonialism, but to perpetuate its effects long after formal occupation ended. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o once observed that ‘language conquest, unlike the military form, wherein the victor must subdue the whole population directly, is cheaper and more effective.’ Trump’s falsehood is a textbook case of that weaponisation.
A shared African journey of liberation
Africa’s history is deeply interconnected. Our struggles are not isolated, and neither are our triumphs. In 1957, Ghana became the first Black African country to achieve independence from colonial rule. In his iconic address that day, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, declared: ‘Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.’ That was not just rhetoric—it was a call to action.
And we answered that call. When the Sharpeville massacre occurred in South Africa in 1960, resulting in 69 deaths and over 100 wounded, Ghanaians marched in protest and offered shelter to South African freedom fighters. Solidarity was not just symbolic; it was practical, emotional, and political. Because we recognised that our destinies are shared. We recognised ourselves in the oppressed peoples of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, and beyond.
As a 17-year-old in 1976, I was struck by the haunting image of Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy killed during the Soweto Uprising, his lifeless body carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo. That photograph haunted me—and continues to haunt millions across Africa. It represented the agony of an entire people, but also their unwavering courage. While I was free to imagine my future, Hector and hundreds of others were forced to sacrifice theirs in the pursuit of dignity.
These stories are not distant memories. They are the emotional fabric of our political consciousness. And they must be told—repeatedly—because forgetting would be a form of betrayal.
Apartheid’s long shadow
The end of apartheid did not erase the deep racial inequalities entrenched by nearly five decades of legalised segregation and two centuries of colonial rule. Today, white South Africans make up less than 10 per cent of the population, but they control more than 70 per cent of the country’s wealth.
There are still communities such as Orania and Kleinfontein where Afrikaners live in isolation, operating their own schools, using their own currency, and memorialising apartheid-era leaders. At the entrance of Kleinfontein stands an enormous bust of Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called architect of apartheid. In Orania’s cultural museum, busts of apartheid’s leaders are on display—with the exception of FW de Klerk, the president who helped dismantle that system.
If Afrikaners feared for their safety, they might seek refuge in these settlements. Yet many continue to live across South Africa, free to conduct business, raise families, and participate in public life. There has been no systematic persecution, no state-sponsored effort to displace them. In truth, if Black South Africans had wanted revenge, they could have sought it when the scars of apartheid were still fresh. Instead, they chose peace and reconciliation.
Trump’s calculated distortion
President Ramaphosa was caught off guard by Trump’s claims. Accompanied by a series of misleading images—including burials reportedly from the Democratic Republic of Congo—Trump’s narrative painted a picture of Black South Africans rising in vengeance against whites. It was false, inflammatory, and designed to provoke.
Ramaphosa refuted the claims, stating that his government does not endorse any policy of racial discrimination. Yet Trump refused to back down. His assertions were not grounded in fact—they were grounded in ideology, and they echoed a dangerous white nationalist narrative that has gained traction in some quarters of American society.
Such narratives rely on erasing context and memory. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, ‘If you want to destroy a people, you destroy their memory, you destroy their history.’ That is precisely what this falsehood attempts to do.
Preserving memory is resistance
Memory is a form of resistance. It flows through generations—told in stories around dinner tables, shared in song and literature, preached in churches and discussed in classrooms. It tells us where we’ve come from and reminds us of what we’ve survived.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o also wrote: ‘The process of knowing is simple. No matter where you want to journey, you start from where you are.’ And we, the children of Africa, journey forward with memory as our map.
We do so not only for ourselves but for those still trapped in systems of oppression. We do so for children in Sudan, for those dying in the mines of the Congo, for refugees turned away at the borders of the wealthiest nations. Our present is fraught with real crisis—real genocide, real hunger, real injustice. To fabricate a genocide where there is none is to spit in the face of those enduring the real thing.
A warning for all
This is not simply a South African issue. It is a warning for all who value truth, justice, and reconciliation. We cannot afford to be silent while history is manipulated to serve political ends. We must speak, and speak loudly.
Africa’s future demands truth—and the courage to protect it.
This article was adapted from an original opinion piece written by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama for The Guardian (UK). The original version is available at theguardian.com.
