“I just thought that he is so uninformed, truly uninformed,” Ramaphosa said. “I realized that he is looking at South Africa through a completely, sort of, foggy lens, without realizing the real, real harm that apartheid did. In my view, he was just dismissive.”

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa (left), condemned U.S President Donald Trump’s refugee policy as "racist."

Associated Press

Ramaphosa described his meeting with Trump last year as a “spectacle” and an “ambush,” where the U.S president baselessly accused him of not doing enough to stop “white genocide” in his country before proceeding to play a misinterpreted video and pointing to printouts of articles claiming mass killings.

Trump welcomed 59 white refugees from South Africa last year, has imposed steep tariffs and has cut American aid. Ramaphosa has disputed Trump’s claims that white Afrikaners are being racially persecuted.

“I do think the Afrikaner policy is racist,” Ramaphosa told the Times. “It is that racist sort of demeanor that we want to be able to whittle down so that he can see the truth of the situation.”

The South African president said there is “no white genocide and there is no grabbing of land, of white people’s land,” adding that “white farmers are not being driven out of the country and badly treated.”

The White House, however, defended Trump in a statement to the Times, saying he has a “humanitarian heart” and is bringing attention to “the harrowing stories of Afrikaners.”

Trump boycotted the G20 summit in Johannesburg last year over claims of the country’s violent persecution of Afrikaners. He also barred South Africa from the upcoming G20 summit slated to be held at his golf resort in Florida this year, claiming the country “demonstrated to the World they are not a country worthy of Membership anywhere.”

“I think he’s just bereft of any reality about what South Africa is all about and what it stands for,” Ramaphosa told the Times. “We are rather amazed at the attention he gives to us. We are a small country, and we are no threat to the United States.”