Donald Trump should visit a black beer hall in South Africa 

If Donald Trump and Elon Musk really want to know if there is a “white genocide” happening in South Africa, as they claim, I’d suggest they start in a beer hall.

Such speakeasies are common in the black townships around Jo’burg and in rural areas. Size varies from a shed to a small aircraft hangar, some are licensed, others not, and as a journalist, it’s where I read the pulse of the nation. The townships are where millions scrape by on next to nothing, crowded in shacks with few street lights and open sewers, while the political elite enjoy they mansions in the city.

I am always the only white face in a sea of black. I don’t own a gun and move about engaging with drinkers who are mostly under the age of 30, the majority unemployed. And across countless visits in half-a-century, I have never had a word of angst or been asked to leave.

Rather, the welcome is warm and people talk about things you’d hear in a New York pub: sport, family, cost of living. The added topic here is unemployment and occasionally I’ll say, “hands up those who are out of work.” At least half and often more.

Talk about land or farming is rare, as you’d expect in a country now 70 percent urban and where the flow from rural areas to the city is growing. School is free and most of the black youth can explain algebra or give you a line from Shakespeare. Engage with final year students in Chicago and ask how many want to herd goats or grow pumpkins. Same here.

In the beer hall I listen to those who dream of making it big in the world of business, art, music, even journalism. Tragically, no matter their education, few find a steady job and if they do it will be in retail, perhaps a laborer or pulling weeds in gardens of the rich. Not farming.

Yet the fantasy persists that black people want and are stealing vast tracts of farmland. Trump has called it a “white genocide.” In their bruising Oval Office meeting on Wednesday, the President – briefed by Elon Musk – showed Ramaphosa photos of white farmers who had been murdered in gruesome fashion, beaten or burned alive, chopped with axes, tied up and tortured with boiling water. All true. But not common.

Being born black in Africa doesn’t mean you have farming in your DNA. These days it’s a mix of science and economics, taught at university then honed by experience. Do the Swiss have a genetic skill for banking or does the French brain carry in it a recipe for soufflé?

Genocide Watch’s founding president, Dr. Gregory Stanton, insists there is no pattern to rural killings in South Africa. They are instead “opportunistic crimes”, by thieves seeking easy targets “but that doesn’t make it genocide”.

In court cases where police have arrested the killers, nyaupe is often a problem. Pronounced nya-oo-peh, it is a mix of cocaine and rat poison that causes a rapid high and is ultimately lethal. But addicts can also experience a loss of reason and conscience, carrying out mindless violence while robbing victims in order to buy more of the drug.

That still doesn’t explain why the US president is so obsessed with South Africa. He’s right that Pretoria has racist laws on its books. Critics say the system known as “black economic empowerment” or BEE has mostly enriched the elite in Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress (ANC). Certainly it’s done little to tame the hideous levels of unemployment.

Trump confronted Ramaphosa with footage of Julius Malema, who leads a minority party not in the coalition, calling for the seizure of land. At rallies he chants “Kill the farmer” and courts in South Africa have ruled this not to be hate speech.

Ramaphosa had no answer as to why his government had not outlawed such calls to violence, which would lead to a jail term in the US or Europe and in most of Africa.

For now, he must head home if not in disgrace then, like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with little to show for the trip.

And he could do better. Strengthen the laws on hate speech and pave roads in the townships, improve sanitation and put up more street lights. Ignore the major newspapers that lean to the Left and are virulently anti-Trump.

Ramaphosa had come to America to reset relations with Washington. But there’s more important work to be done at home. Maybe the next time he meets Trump and Elon, it should be in a beer hall. They might all learn something valuable.