South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said he will meet Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit next week, less than a month after the South African president was ambushed in the Oval Office.
Mr Ramaphosa said his main aim was to reset relations with the White House during the summit in Canada.
“I am going there to have bilaterals with the chancellor of Germany, the prime minister of Canada and, of course, I will also be meeting President Trump, who we met at the White House,” he told reporters in Pretoria.
He had the merest hint of a smile before addressing one of the reporters directly and breaking into laughter: “You were there when they started dimming the lights…”
Once the lights were dimmed, that White House meeting became a video screening about violent crime in South Africa, with the president holding aloft a sheaf of news cuttings about the persecution of white farmers in Mr Ramaphosa’s country.
The Trump administration has welcomed families of Afrikaner farmers to the US as refugees.
And Mr Trump used the visit of his South African counterpart to make the case that they were the victims of racist violence.
“We have many people that feel they’re being persecuted, and they’re coming to the United States,” he said. “So we take from many … locations, if we feel there’s persecution or genocide going on.”
He screened a video showing rows of opposition leaders making incendiary speeches and rows of white crosses which Mr Trump claimed were the graves of murdered white South Africans.
He also brandished printouts of news stories describing violence and murder in South Africa, although some eagle eyed observers noticed that a picture supposedly showing a burial site was actually from a report about women being killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
However, Mr Ramaphosa told reporters the meeting had been a success and that he wanted to use his trip to Canada to discuss trade relations.
“It’s important for us to reposition ourselves in the turbulent geopolitical architecture,” he said.
World leaders from the world’s most developed economies are due to begin arriving in Alberta on Sunday.
Mr Trump and his trade policies will cast a long shadow over the two days of meetings.
Mr Ramaphosa is due to host world leaders at the G20 later in the year and has invited the American president to attend.
“We are going to use it as a platform to begin to consolidate what we want to achieve in November, when the G20 leaders’ summit takes place here,” he said.
“I am hoping that when we meet with the various other leaders of various countries who are part of the G7, we will be able to interact meaningfully with them.”
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