Ramaphosa withstood Trump's bizarre ambush – but he let down South Africans

The dust is still settling from Donald Trump's latest 'ambush' in the Oval Office. What started off as a series of pleasantries about golf between the US president and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa's delegation quickly turned into a lecture – complete with a video screening and reams of printed-out news articles – about how a white genocide is supposedly under way in my home country.
The delegation was largely successful in correcting that narrative. It emphasised that crime affects South Africans of all races and that white citizens are not specifically targeted. Zingiswa Losi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, rightly pointed out that in rural areas, it is Black women who bear the brunt of violent crime.
On the surface, this might all seem like a familiar conflict – one between Trump's deluded and emboldened hard-right vision of the world and a country's leadership trying its best to stick to the facts without aggrieving the beast too much (South Africa is still facing 30% tariffs, after all). But as an investigative journalist and researcher who focuses on land dispossession and reform in South Africa, to me the encounter looked different. All I could see was a missed opportunity.
One spark for this ongoing showdown between the Maga movement in the US (allied with some white Afrikaners in South Africa) and the African National Congress (ANC) government has been the introduction of a land reform act that was passed in January. The law aims to address the inequalities of the white-minority-rule era by tackling an issue that has been ignored for too long in post-apartheid South Africa and lies at the root of many of our problems: land. To explain why, let me return to the subject of golf – a subject that feels all the more appropriate given that, at Trump's request, Ramaphosa's delegation included professional golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen.
I've written extensively about golf courses and golf estates. Take the suburb of Fourways in northern Johannesburg, which contains some of the most exclusive and luxurious golf estates in the country. With homes that sell for tens of millions of rands, these enclaves serve South Africa's wealthy elite. Among their many amenities such as private lagoons, nature trails, sports fields and high-end restaurants, the most coveted is safety. In a city with high rates of car hijackings and home invasions, their surveillance systems, access control and electrified perimeter walls offer peace of mind that is a luxury in Johannesburg.
Inside those walls lies a world largely insulated from the realities of South Africa – a world that is overwhelmingly white, even though more than 80% of the South African population is Black.
Before Fourways became a hub of luxury living, it was an agricultural region made up of farms and smallholdings. The land was seized in the 19th century by Afrikaner settlers who forced the original Black residents into labour tenancies. Stripped of land rights, those tenants could only stay on their ancestral land if they worked it for the settlers.
In the 1980s, as apartheid began to falter and the prospect of democracy grew, many white landowners sold their farms to private developers and fled the area or the country. The labour tenants were left behind, only to be forcibly relocated to underresourced townships such as Alexandra and Soweto. They lost not just their homes and livelihoods but also family graves and burial plots that could not be moved.
Some 30 years into democracy, the former labour tenants of Fourways, like the majority of South African land claimants, are still trapped in a backlogged, corrupted land-claims process with their hope dwindling that they'll ever be granted compensation or restoration of their land rights.
This is why it's so tragic that Ramaphosa's team has been framing the failure of land reform as proof of successful race relations. It's as if they're effectively saying: 'Look – there can be no 'white genocide' in South Africa because white people own 72% of farmland!' This is factually correct. However, our inability to redistribute land, and thus create a more equitable and sustainable South Africa, is not a marker of national unity. It is the ANC's most glaring policy failure, one the government is only belatedly trying to fix with this controversial law.
The crowded, impoverished townships where the state relocated Black South Africans under the Group Areas Act remain among the most dangerous places in the country. Generations of South Africans have been cut off from the wealth-building power of land ownership. Here's the key point: this economic exclusion, combined with mass unemployment, fuels the very crime that the delegation insisted affects everyone equally.
I appreciate that it may not have been the right occasion and Trump was probably not a receptive audience for a nuanced conversation. Still, it saddens me to think of the resources poured into this mission to correct the damage being wrought by a malicious, white supremacist agenda in South Africa and the US. Meanwhile the historically dispossessed South Africans who need these resources most are left to flounder, overlooked as the true victims of the violence of the apartheid regime and the dark shadow it has cast over our young democracy.
Most Black South Africans will never be able to afford to move to areas such as Fourways. They live in places the government once designated for removal, with limited access to jobs, safety or infrastructure. They are the ones most exposed to violent crime, not those living in fortified golf estates and large fortified farms.
Zanele Mji is a writer, investigative journalist and podcaster based in Johannesburg, South Africa

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Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. 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Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here is it acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good.