The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is expected to take the golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen with him to meet Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday, as the government attempts to reset relations with the US amid Trump’s accusations that it is fomenting a white “genocide”.
Ramaphosa’s appeal to Trump’s love of golf, with the potential inclusion of Els and Goosen reported by South African local media, is part of his efforts to avoid a public dressing down of the kind Trump gave to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in February.
The US has cut aid to South Africa and welcomed a plane-load of white South Africans as refugees, claiming they have been victims of racial discrimination. South African officials and businesspeople are also worried that Congress will not renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) when it expires in September, ending tariff-free access to the US for goods including citrus fruits, nuts and cars.
“The trade relations are the most important, that’s what brought us here. We want to come out of the United States with a really good trade deal,” Ramaphosa told South African reporters in the US.
“Ernie Els was actually the person who, over the past month talked Trump into agreeing to the meeting,” said the billionaire Johann Rupert, the founder of Switzerland-based luxury goods conglomerate Richemont, which owns jewellery brand Cartier, who will also join the trip.
Rupert has known Trump since 1996 and has played golf with the US president and Els. Rupert, thought to be South Africa’s richest man, told South Africa’s News24 that he and Els visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in March 2024, months before Trump’s re-election, to ask him to keep AGOA.
Far from being victims of a genocide – as in the telling of Trump, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk – Rupert, Els and Goosen are examples of successful white Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists who ruled South Africa during its decades of apartheid, legally mandated racial segregation and discrimination in favour of white people.
South Africa was set to offer Musk a deal to bring his Starlink internet service to the country, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Musk has railed against affirmative action laws that would have required him to give up 30% of equity to non-white investors. Ramaphosa did not comment on any discussions with Musk when asked by South African reporters.
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, did not reply to questions about the delegation to meet Trump or Rupert and Els’s role.
