Isaac Mogotsi - A tough love letter to Trump: South Africa speaks its truth
Key topics
South Africans wary ahead of Trump–Ramaphosa meeting
Letter criticises US immigration policy and Afrikaner refugee stance
Calls for US recognition of black South Africans’ historic injustices
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By Isaac Mpho Mogotsi*
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” George Orwell.
Dear Honourable President Donald J. Trump,
I hope this open tough love letter from South Africa to you, Sir, finds you in good health and a positive disposition.
Let me start by also joining millions of Americans who voted you for a second term as the leader of the most powerful country in the world in thanking the Almighty God that he twice saved you from attempted assassinations.
It gives me some pleasure to also congratulate you, Mr. President, on the very turbulent first hundred days of your non-consecutive second term.
Secondly, I join millions of South Africans and other Africans across our beloved African continent in anticipating your coming meeting this week with our President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa with an odd mixture of hope and trepidation, given your recent encounter with president Volodymir Zelensky, the leader of Ukraine, whom I regard as a sock puppet of the UK and the European Union (EU) globalists.
In a panel interview on Al Jazeera TV yesterday, 17 May 2025, if I recall the date well, Alon Pincus, the former Israeli Consul General in New York described you as “erratic, impulsive, unpredictable, lacking consistency and depth” and many other such choice words.
This seems to be the view held by many media pundits across the globe about you.
This alone makes us South Africans to look forward to your upcoming meeting with our Head of State with undisguised trepidation about what may transpire at your joint press conference following the meeting.
Before I proceed further, perhaps let me introduce myself to you, Mr. President Trump.
It is not the first time I pen a letter to a western Head of State like you.
The first time I did so was what I titled “J’Accuse: An Open Letter to Francois Hollande,” then the president of France, which appeared on the online Politicsweb site on 14 October 2013.
I am a black South African who was involved in the anti-apartheid struggle first under the leadership of Steve Bantu Biko, our revered Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) founder and leader, and later as an underground activist and then an exile (you would probably choose to call me an illegal immigrant or a refugee) for eleven years under the leadership of Nelson Mandela’s liberation movement the African National Congress (ANC), which, as you well know, ruled South Africa for the last thirty years until it lost the election last year.
In this context some of your controversial, if not deeply hurtful, views and executive order measures as the second term USA president on immigration resonate deeply with me at a personal level, having been once rendered stateless by the cruel and racist apartheid rulers in my country.
Mr. President, I suspect it will please you to learn that as a black South African I am probably unique in having authored some of the most brutal critiques of the presidency of President Barack Hussein Obama, your predecessor in your first term as the USA president, like my online Politicsweb articles I titled “On Obama’s Visit to Africa 2013,” which appeared on 10 June 2013, as well the other one titled “Maimane and Obama: A Comment,” which appeared on 22 July 2015.
These two articles were a ruthless criticism of president Obama, a fellow black man, America’s first black president and a man you clearly do not much fancy, to put it mildly.
So if elements of this letter sound to you too as a ruthless criticism against you, at least, Mr. President, take solace in the fact that I am an equal opportunity offender and not blinded by any racial loyalties or sympathy to give black leaders an undeserved free pass.
I also belong to the Bakwena ba Mogopa ethnic sub-group in South Africa which is part of the larger Batswana group, also the majority ethnic group in the Republic of Botswana. In terms of my clan within Bakwena ba Mogopa, I belong to the Barolong, whose totem is the elephant.
Gola Tlou Rre Trump! We would greet you if you chose to visit our Barolong lands, meaning be as big and strong as an elephant, Mr. Trump.
Fortunately I will not leave any elephant in the room untouched in the Open Tough Love letter to you, Sir.
This is important because my ethnic sub-group Bakwena ba Mogopa was deprived of its ancestral land around the present-day towns of Rustenburg and Brits through racist forced removals by the white Afrikaners following the 1913 Land Act. These are the same whire Afrikaners some of whom you today falsely regard as deserving a refugee status in the USA on account of what you believe is a “white genocide” taking place against white Afrikaners in democratic South Africa, whilst you care not about what genocides and forced land deprivations white Afrikaners committed against the majority native black population of South Africa for close to 400 years under slave ownership, colonialism and apartheid.
To this day, Mr. President, my Bakwena ba Mogopa ethnic sub-group has not had its stolen land restored to them nor offered reparations for historical injustices visited upon them by the white Afrikaner pseudo republican and British colonial regimes.
And this is the story of all black ethnic groups across South Africa.
I suspect that given a chance to meet you at the White House, the small group of white Afrikaners your administration has just granted the refugee status will recall for your gullible mind and regal you with magical realism long tales about the Great Trek of their white Afrikaner forebears in the 1700s to late 1800s. They may even throw in for effect the story about white Afrikaners defeating the Zulus under King Dingane and entering into a Covenant with God to own our native land. Of course they will choose to omit to narrate to you the many defeats they suffered at the hands of our glorious chiefs of the time like King Hintsa of AmaXhosa, amaZulu King Cetswayo, who also defeated the British colonial army, King Moshoeshoe who founded the Kingdom of Lesotho, King Sekhukhuni of BaPedi Kingdom, Chief Sechele of Bakwena, King Pilane of Bakgatla, Queen Mantatisa (a power and courageous woman leader warrior in our history) of Batlokwa, King Nyabela of the Ndebeles, King Makhado of the VhaVenda people and many others, despite colonisers’ superiority in modern arms.
I am sure what your white Afrikaner refugees in America will also omit to tell you is that Paul Kruger, their first President of their Boer Republic of Transvaal, so humiliated Kgosi (Chief) Mamogale More of my Bakwena ba Mogopa for “insubordination” (meaning his resistance of Kruger’s cruel colonial rule) that Paul Kruger viciously whipped my Chief in front of his subjects, which criminal and dastardly act forced Chief Mamogale More to decamp his entire Bakwena ba Mogopa sub-group and undertake a veritable Great Trek of about 500 kilometres to seek refuge and solace from King Moshoeshoe of the Lesotho Kingdom, a small mountainous country you falsely and cruelly claimed in your last address to the American Congress that no one in the world has ever heard about, to the sickening sniggering of your Republican Congressmen and women, including very visibly your Speaker Mike Johnson.
Interestingly, your white Afrikaner refugees will also not tell you that Paul Kruger died as an immigrant and refugee in Clarens, Switzerland in 1904, because they fear that you will refuse to associate yourself with descendants of a leader who you will probably view negatively as an immigrant and a refugee.
I am also sure that these white Afrikaner refugees you are hosting in America will not tell you about the great story of the two African American missionary couple of Kenneth and Malista Spooner who arrived in South Africa and soon in 1914 established the Pentecost Church, originally called the Assembly of God, in the Bakgatla village of Phokeng, Rustenburg in 1914.
Sixty years later in 1974 I was confirmed in that great Christian church founded by two great African American missionaries sent from America to our land by the Almighty God.
Today a branch of that original Pentecost church founded by Rev. Spooner called the International Pentecost Holiness Church (IPHC) founded by Father Modise is one of the biggest churches in Africa, whose first Head Office was and still remains in my ancestral village of Rabokala in the North West province of South Africa.
I am almost certain these types of stories about black South Africa’s very close spiritual and Christian connection to your great and powerful country the white Afrikaner refugees you are hosting will never share with you, Mr. President, let alone with the great American people.
Mr. President, but the real story is that those two African Americans missionaries triumphed as black foreigners to our land to establish a house of Christian worship against all odds in 1914 in a deeply racist Union of South Africa established by Britain and the white Afrikaners in 1910, South Africa’s first ever united Nation-State, and in a fierce as well as polarised inter-faith competition with the white Afrikaners’ deeply racist Dutch Reformed Church, which also tried to proselytise the Bakgatla and Bakwena ba Mogopa of our region in present-day North West province as inferior Christians.
Because of the brutal and slave-master treatment Paul Kruger and his white Afrikaner henchmen subjected my Bakwena ba Mogopa and the Bakgatla to, (Bakgatla people being the sub-ethnic group of the black billionaire Patrice Motsepe, whom you know well), our people either joined the English missionary church or joined Rev. Spoor’s Pentecost church, or most remarkably, would rather travel a distance of over 500 kilometres, another of the black Great Treks of the time, to the port of Durban in Natal in the East Coast to go and beg the German Lutheran missionaries living there to come to our area to minister to them, instead of allowing themselves to be proselytised and ministered to by white Afrikaners of Paul Kruger. This is how the Lutheran Church and the Pentecost churches remain very powerful Christian denominations in our area to this day.
It’s interesting Mr. President Donald Trump that whilst many white South Africans like to deride the lack of educational achievements of former South African president Jacob Zuma, Paul Kruger was exposed to only three months of formal education, which makes former president Zuma highly educated indeed by comparison.
I am sure that Elon Musk too, after contributing so generously to your second term election campaign, does not tell you, Sir, about this dark side of white Afrikaners crying so-called “white genocide” persecution against them in South Africa.
[Mr. President, if you and your White House advisors are interested to read more about how the African Americans Rev. Kenneth Spooner and his wife Malista established my Pentecost Holiness Church, now one of the greatest churches in Africa with close to five million worshippers from several countries in Africa, feel free to read the article by Frank Tunstall titled “K.E.M. Spooner, IPHC’s First African American Missionary” available on www.hughsnews.com. The story of the Spooners’ ennobling missionary work is told in more detail and in more colourful terms in one of our great but unheralded freedom and anti-apartheid fighters Naboth Mokgatle’s The Autobiography of an Unknown South African, which you can download in whole from Internet Archive’s www.archive.org. Another important work shedding a bright light on the phenomenal work white American missionaries did to provide religious nourishment and educational opportunities in South Africa and the USA to black South Africans who later founded the ANC is the author Moss Mashamaite’s book on the ANC founder Pixley ka Isaka Seme, who studied at Colombia University in New York titled The Second Coming: The Life and Time of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, The Founder of the Nation, Chatworld Publishers, 2011.]
Mr. President, as a man of God and good Christian, I believe that your eyes, ears and heart are not open only to the three decade cries of whiter Afrikaners, one of the most privileged and richest white communities on Earth, allegedly suffering since 1994 under a democratically elected government in our country which is very friendly to your great and wonderful country the United States of America (USA), but also to the almost four centuries of unanswered cries of black South Africans regarding the land dispossession, racial oppression, dehumanisation by law and many and repeated REAL (and not the imagined one, like the one which exists only in your mind) genocides they suffered and committed by the British and Dutch/white Afrikaner colonialists as well as white Afrikaners apartheid rulers in our country, especially the cries of us black Christians who are the children and followers of the great Pentecost Church which was founded by two black angels of God sent from the USA, namely Rev. Kenneth Spooner and is wife.
This is especially so, Mr. President, because when your great and powerful country America entered into and fought in both the First and Second World Wars, we black South Africans were on the side of your country and its allies, and many of our black ancestors fought in the trenches on behalf of America and her allies, although the cruel British colonial governments and the white Afrikaners-led governments refused our black soldiers to carry arms to shoot at your German enemies because they could not bear the sight of black soldiers killing your white German enemies. Such was the crude and primitive racism of the time.
If anything, once Russia and the rest of the USSR, America and their allies defeated Hitler in 1945, white Afrikaners set up a mini Hitlerite regime in South Africa they called apartheid in 1948.
On the other hand so greatly inspired by the ideals America and the UK fought for in the Second World War, as embodied in the 1941 Atlantic Charter signed by president Roosevelt and British prime minister Churchill, the leading liberation movement of the era in our country the ANC adopted the African Claims document inspired by the Atlantic Charter.
Did any white Afrikaner grouping of the time adopt any policy document inspired by the Atlantic Charter, Mr. President?
Of course not.
Incredibly, many white Afrikaners at this time were members of the fascist outfit called the Ossewa-Brandwag or the Ox-Wagon Guard, founded in 1938 by John Vorster, among others, the man who later became, believe it or not, the prime minister of apartheid South Africa from mid-1960s until 1979, and which outfit allied itself with Adolf Hitler’s fascist wars against European countries like Russia and the rest of the USSR, France, Poland, the UK and Benelux countries as well as against the ancient African country of Egypt.
[Mr. President, you can read the full story of this in the New York Times of 28 November 1977 under the title “Vorster Recalls, With Bitterness, 17 Months Spent As a Detainee, and a Paper Draws Parallel with Biko.”
Amongst other things this New York Times article stated:
“In a newly published biography, Mr. Vorster speaks bitterly of the privations he experienced in World War II when the Government of Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts detained him for 17 months on suspicion of undermining South Africa’s participation in the struggle against Nazi Germany…Mr. Voster recounts how he was held for 10 days without exercise in a small and ‘extremely murky’ cell normally used for blacks…”].
The greater bitterness of John Vorster oozed from his skin not so much at the privations during his detention, but at the fact that he was “…held for 10 days without exercise in a small and ‘extremely murky’ cell used for blacks…”
Unbelievable!
It is important to note in passing, Mr. President, that your blatant and insistent interference in South Africa’s internal affairs regarding white Afrikaners is a clear violation of the core principles of the Atlantic Charter co-signed by America, as are your unbelievable verbal indiscretions regarding your neighbours Canada and Mexico, as well as with regard to Panama, Greenland, which is part of Denmark and Gaza, which is part of Palestine.
There really is no honour in your profoundly undiplomatic verbal shenanigans in this regard, Mr President.
It is noteworthy, Sir, that the same leaders of AfriForum and Solidarity like Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets who have fed you and elements of our administration hoary tales about a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa against white Afrikaners regard or regarded John Vorster as well as former apartheid prime minister PW Botha, a man Sir Robin Renwick, the former British Ambassador to South Africa during the presidency of former president Nelson Mandela viewed in his book as “someone who was in fascist territory,” as their white Afrikaner folk heroes to this day. [See my online Politicsweb article under the title “Fascism in South Africa: Then, and now?” which appeared on 01 March 2015]
President Trump, how do you bring yourself and the great American people as well as the White House to associate with such people?
And some of these same people today you call and host as white Afrikaner refugees fleeing from a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa against white Afrikaners, which “white genocide” exists only in your confabulated mind and febrile imagination, but whose ancestors in two World Wars fought against America and her allies, were deeply aggrieved that the great American Congress in 1986 overrode the pro-apartheid American president Ronald Reagan’s veto against the Congress-approved Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA). That override of Reagan’s presidential veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by the glorious American Congress was the first and only time in the last 20th century, as you must know, when the legislative arm of America slammed down and choke-held the head of the American Executive branch, metaphorically speaking.
For black South Africans like myself who were in the trenches in the struggle against the heinous apartheid regime of white Afrikaners, the American Congress’ override of president Ronald Reagan in 1986 represented the very best and noblest of what America stood and stands for and what the great American nation is all about.
It was America’s finest hour, in our eyes.
It saddens me deeply to have to tell you, Mr. President, that your unprovoked and highly immoral embrace of the canard about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa allegedly against white Afrikaners represents the basest and ugliest of what American power elites like you Sir are all about and is as dangerous and demeaning as the lies president George W Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others told about the so-called Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Mr. President, to your eternal credit you opposed that war of president George W. Bush under a false pretext and you continue to hold the view that the war against and invasion of Iraq was unjustified. Even more, you do not hold your predecessor George W. Bush in high esteem either.
For this I salute you, Mr. President.
So it baffles me and many other South Africans that you would today swallow bait, line and sinker the blatant lie peddled by Kallie Kriel, Ersnst Roets, AfriForum and Solidarity about a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa against white Afrikaners, unless you desire to use that lie as a false pretext to attack and invade South Africa for taking apartheid Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Today you openly and publicly slander the democratic government led by black South Africans who in those two World Wars fervently supported America and her allies and offer a bizarre refugee dispensation for some of the descendants of white Afrikaners who supported Imperial Germany in the First World War and supported Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
Mr. President, this is flipping reality and history upside down.
This is peak historical dishonesty on your part, Sir.
Mr. President, did you know that the leading white Afrikaner intellectual , historian and author Hermann Giliomee in his book The Afrikaner: Biography of a People (Tafelberg, 2003), reveals that the one biggest single factor which triggered the white Dutch group to embark on the Great Trek, beginning in 1835 from around colonial Cape Town, and who later became white Afrikaners, was when the colonial British empire abolished the abominable and deeply inhumane practice of slavery in its colonies in, including in what became South Africa, in 1834?
So, Mr. President, picture for yourself this in your mind:
A full 30 years before the greatest American president ever, Abraham Lincoln, signed the glorious Emancipation Declaration setting free African American slaves in America, the Dutch in South Africa, later to be known as the white Afrikaners, fled in 1835 from colonial British empire‘s own emancipation of slaves in British colonies, which included the Cape colony, through the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 which freed no less than 800 000 slaves.
The author and public commentator Patric Tariq Mellet shows in his phenomenal book The Lie of 1652: A Decolonised History of the Land (Tafelberg, 2020) just how prevalent and widespread slave-owning was among the British and Dutch colonialists in what became known as South Africa.
Slave ownership, like gold and diamond, was a foundational stone – the original sin – in the creation of South Africa as a modern nation state from 1910.
A white nation in Africa formed because it fled from colonial Britain’s Cape colony when imperial Britain abolished slavery in its African colony of Cape of Good Hope?
Mr. President Donald Trump, can you wrap your mind around that?
Is the fact that the Great Trek started a year after the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1834 a black swan event or more than just a coincidence? Is it a smoking gun?
Hard to wrap one’s mind around the implication of Hermann Giliomee’s link between colonial Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1834, the white Afrikaners’ Great Trek of 1835 and what Giliomee calls a Biography of a People.
Imagine what would have happed to the world if the American Confederate States had defeated the glorious and immortal president Abraham Lincoln and succeeded to establishe a powerful slave-owning Confederation and a slave-owning Nation State in the southern half of present-day United States, just because they opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration.
How would the modern world view such an emergent nation?
Can you imagine that?
It is nearly impossible to reconcile the fact that the descendants those Great Trek white Afrikaners who fled the emancipation of slaves by the colonial British empire are today the white Afrikaner refugees fleeing from what you mischaracterise as a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa to the glorious and beautiful land and a Union of States, otherwise famously known worldwide as the United States of America (USA) created by Abraham Lincoln through the fire of the American Civil War following his signing of the glorious and immortal Emancipation Declaration to free African Americans who were stolen as commodities from their ancestral lands in Africa.
The irony of it all truly boggles the mind.
Yet the truth is, President Trump, that white Afrikaner politics which inspired the creation of apartheid in South Africa in 1948 drew great inspiration from the Confederate States of America which opposed president Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of African American slaves, from the subsequent Jim Crow era and from the overt racism of America’s Deep South.
Mr. President, there is no escaping the fact that democratic South Africa of today, warts and all, is also a labour of love of millions upon millions of white, black and in-between Americans who opposed the system of apartheid in South Africa in the past.
Madeleine Albright, former USA Secratry of State, wrote in her book Madam Secretary: A Memoir, how greatly she was honoured to meet former President Nelson Mandela when she served as America’s Ambassador to the UN in New York. She compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington, a truly great honour. (Madam Secretary: A Memoir, with Bill Woodward, Miramax Books, 2003, page 447)
An even greater and more impressive American patriot than Secretary Albright in the person of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the highly popular and much loved President J.F. Kennedy and the father of your current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., blasted white Afrikaners’ apartheid system in a great and immortal “Ripple of Hope” Speech to the University of Cape Town (UCT), Cape Town, at the pinnacle of apartheid rule in South Africa in 1966, perhaps the greatest American speech after Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on democracy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 I have a Dream Speech.
So it is just unbelievable and even weird that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chooses to remain silent in the face of your ongoing vulgar public ad hominem, provocations and denouncing of democratic South Africa Robert. F. Kennedy did so much and courageously to bring up, even at a great personal risk, on account of a ghost of non-existent “white genocide” against allegedly white Afrikaners in South Africa, something I am sure his heroic and beloved father, who got to know South Africa first-hand, unlike you President Donald J. Trump, would not be happy about were he alive today.
But your unfounded blue lies about democratic South Africa also spit on the grave of the person I consider the greatest American diplomat of all time, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, who opened the door to America’s recognition of Nelson Mandela’s ANC in 1986 as a just and worthy national freedom movement, thus dealing a mortal diplomatic blow to the international respectability pretences of white Afrikaner apartheid rulers of the time. From this point onward, we knew the days of apartheid in South Africa were numbered.
President Trump, I am also a child of Alexandra Township, my birthplace, in Johannesburg, which used to be one of the very few black freehold urban residential spots, like Sophiatown, in colonial and apartheid South Africa and which was founded in 1912, the same year the ANC of President Ramaphosa you will soon meet was founded.
Sophiatown was later demolished in a forced removal campaign undertaken by the white Afrikaner apartheid regime.
[Read the full story about Sophiatown’s forced removal in the British Anglican priest Rev. Trevor Huddleston’s Naught for Your Comfort book]
Alexandra Township has the dubious distinction of being the only terrible poor black urban settlement that was neglected by the British colonial administrations, the racist white Afrikaner apartheid rulers, recently by the democratic ANC governments of the last thirty years and now is being neglected by the Government of National Unity (GNU) formed last years by the ANC and the white liberal (but often illiberal and racist) Democratic Alliance (DA) of Helen Zille, following our epochal 2024 election.
So if there is one deprived community in South Africa which has been neglected for over a century but richly deserves your presidential sympathy, Sir, it is this community of Alexandra Township, and not your so-called white Afrikaners victims of a so-called “white genocide”, which is a figment of your hyperactive imagination perhaps fuelled by too many Coca Cola cans you drink daily, reportedly.
Read more:
Mr. President, it is incredulous that you are able to see and ventilate to the whole world through your very popular and powerful Truth Social platform almost every other day a non-existent so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa, yet choose to supply apartheid Israel with bunker bombs and other devastating munitions to carry out a REAL genocide in Gaza in broad daylight and in plain view against Palestinians and which REAL genocide is being watched and witnessed on TV by the entire world, the first genocide in human history to be broadcast live on TV and social media platforms every day, but which you condone, have not condemned in the very strong terms you condemn your phantom and non-existent so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa allegedly against white Afrikaners and about which others accuse you, as they did Genocide Joe Biden, of being actively complicit in through arms transfers to apartheid Israel in support of War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and through your loony “Riviera in Gaza” mutterings.
Mr. President, you must be taking the whole world, including the overwhelming majority of the great American people, for imbeciles. Or maybe you do not take yourself seriously?
Nevertheless I am very happy, Sir, to inform you that I am your great admirer in a different context.
You are the only world leader I know of who once retweeted my tweet before Twitter unjustly banned you from its micro blog site. Not that you knew or cared much about me. But the gesture meant a lot to me, a nobody in Africa to be retweeted by the mighty, very rich and globally renown Donald J. Trump.
Unbelievable.
What a great honour it was, Sir.
You will recall that at the time, before you founded your Truth Social platform, you were wont to retweet stuff very critical of President Barack Obama.
Under a Twitter nom de guerre I was using at the time, I posted on Twitter something very critical of what I percieved as president Barack Obama’s unbecoming public humiliation of his beautiful and erudite wife Michel at, of all places, the Memorial Service of Nelson Mandela, when Barack Obama seemed to be openly flirting with a former Danish Premier lady in attendance at the same Memorial Service, who I think is now a big shot at Mike Zuckerberg’s Meta, if I am not mistaken, to the visible irritation of the then First Lady Michel Obama.
Once you (or your Twitter bot farm team) got hold of my tweet, you or they retweeted it. I was so over the moon. Delighted does not begin to describe my elation at your or their gesture.
Thank you Mr. President and or your team for that.
That was my fifteen minutes of global glory, my one second when I flew very close to the Sun.
I write to you also as a former South African diplomat who has nothing but great love for the great American people, especially Native American, African American, Jewish, Hispanic, progressive white American and Indian Americans, who made my stay of several years on Manhattan, New York, such a truly magnificent, unforgettable and inimitable time in my and my family’s life. My late wife considered our stay in New York as the best time of her life, compared to our stay in our own country, our honeymoon in Paris, France in 1995 and our subsequent stay of two years in Geneva, Switzerland where I served as a South African diplomat for two years.
There is no greater compliment my family can pass to your great and very hospitable American people than that.
It was during my stay in New York that I discovered something eye-opening to me, which was that South Africa and New York share a profound colonial history of having both been both colonised by Holland, South Africa from 1652 and New York from 1614.
Did New York under the colonial Dutch serve as a colonial laboratory for the colonisation of South Africa and Surinam? The same Duke of York after whom New York is named would later head colonial Britain’s Royal African Company which later took the Cape colony from the Dutch.
Unbelievable.
As a matter of fact, Mr. President, one of my sons, Gabriel, was born in New York and mid-wived by great American Jewish doctors at one of New York’s elite maternity hospitals.
So Mr. President, your unbecoming rants against and tirades about the 14th Amendment and citizenship rights of foreigners born in America, legally or otherwise, is not a distant matter for me, although I have consistently discouraged my son Gabriel from viewing himself as an American in any sense, as I believe that he is first, foremost and lastly an African in South Africa and that he has much more to contribute to the development of our beautiful African continent and its incredible peoples, where his business skills are much more needed. But this does not detract from my larger point regarding your utterances on the 14th Amendment.
Mr. President, in my previous life as a political exile, I spent eight years in the 1980s as student in Moscow, Russia under the then USSR. I used a passport for the trip to study in Moscow issued to me by the great anti-apartheid government of the United Republic of Tanzania under former President Mwalimu Julius Nyerere. That was one of the privileges extended to me and other South African political exiles and which privileges were denied to us by the racist apartheid governments of white Afrikaners but extended to us by many governments of the world such as in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Mozambique, Zambia, Lesotho, Botswana, Angola, Somalia, Egypt, Yemen, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Finland, USA, Canada, Australia, Russia, the UK and others, another proof positive of the value of international cooperation round migration and citizenship issues for the vulnerable groups of the world, a crucial point you seem determined to undercut during your second term presidency.
However, Mr. President, I am very impressed by your greatly admirable, very unique - for an American president - deep appreciation and refined understanding of the undeniable great attributes of the Russian civilisation in all their manifestation and for your highly measured and refined approach towards and understanding of Russia and the great Russian people in all their diversity and glory.
I regard this as your greatest foreign policy strength.
As a matter of fact when you visited Russia in 1987, it was the year I qualified with a Masters’ degree in History from one of Moscow’s universities. Wouldn’t it have been great if chance had made our paths to cross in Moscow, Mr. President? I remember briefly meeting the son of the then ravishingly beautiful CNN correspondent Jill Dougherty in Moscow at the time at one of public events in Russia.
I must say that I found what was said and written about you being a “cultivated…asset” of Russia for 40 years, just because you and your wife Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg at the time, as reported by The Guardian (UK) newspaper of 29 January 2021, among other outlets, as deeply distasteful, profoundly demeaning and offensive.
Imagine what that would make of us who studied for years in Moscow and other great Russian cities at the time.
I write to you, Mr. President, as someone who used to enjoy some occasional high price and high value lunch or dinner with my family at your New York Trump Tower’s grill restaurant, as we occasionally did at Hyatt Hotel on 42nd sStreet, both of which were a walking distance from where we lived on corner 39th Street and First Avenue near the New York United Nations (UN) Head Office.
The amazing respect, warmth and hospitality we were always accorded by your highly competent staff at Trump Tower on 5th Avenue are so much at variance with the jarring crudeness and coarseness of your verbal assaults when talking about democratic South Africa since you began your second term as the USA president that I really struggle to believe that those hurtful and hateful words come from the mouth of the same great owner of Trump Tower where my family and I were always treated with so much proper decorum, dignity and utmost respect and where we always felt like home from home.
What happened to you since, Mr. President Trump, to change you so much?
You may be shocked and pleased at the same time, Mr. President, that in all my stay on Manhattan island and during my many visits to the other boroughs of the great New York City like Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, as well as to other states like New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington DC and when visiting Philadelphia, “the City of Love” in Pennsylvania, which I used to call “my weekend dance floor” for its very happening social party scene, not once did I ever experience any form of racism from white Americans.
None. Zilch.
This was so especially when I would attend the basketball games of the Knicks, then a dominant conference force in the mid-1990s. I watched them play courtesy of an American friend. I am thus very delighted to learn that the Knicks have again this year qualified to reach the conference finals as they did in 1994 and 1999.
Well done Knicks!
What crude treatment I occasionally received on Manhattan would paradoxically be from foreign yellow cab drivers who could not always express themselves fluently in English as we haggled over what amount of fares I should pay for this or that ride. Even then I was stingy with the Jeffersons (the greenbacks).
Yet, Mr. President, believe it or not, although in my close to five years living in New York I never once experienced racism from white Americans, I was and have been subjected to crudest and most execrable personal and legislated racism in my own native South Africa from some members of the ethnic white Afrikaner group you falsely now claim are subjected to a so-called “white genocide,” especially before 1994, but even many times after 1994.
In case you think I am making this up on the hoof to embarrass you and to play black victimhood, I invite you to read a piece written by Helen Grange under the title “What is the most racist thing that has happened to you?”, which appeared in The Star (SA) newspaper thirteen years ago. Grange, a veteran and highly regarded white South African journalist, interviewed me and a few other black South Africans regarding our experiences of racism in democratic South Africa.
Helen Grange quoted me thus in that article:
“In 2003, in the company of my kids, an irate young Afrikaans guy shouted “Kaffir” at me. He felt I cheated him out of a Menlyn mall parking slot, but sped off when I confronted him about it. Also, I have never experienced anything like the racist rants from bloggers to my Politicsweb articles on DA’s Lindiwe Mazibuko and Helen Zille.”
I assure you, Mr. President, I have experienced several more such nasty racist incidents from some members of the same ethnic group you are now conferring a victimhood status on through your white Afrikaner refugee status.
But to be fair to the overwhelming majority of good and patriotic white Afrikaners who desire and work towards making sure that democratic South Africa succeeds and are also deeply aggrieved and offended by the racist tropes about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners in democratic South Africa you traffic in, I lived for many years in a predominantly white Afrikaner suburb of Kilnerpark in Pretoria, which is situated close to the Union Buildings, our seat of national executive power, without experiencing white racism from my fellow white Afrikaner residents, although only a handful of us black people lived in that suburb at the time.
Red Spiral, the printer of my latest self-published book Whispering against the Wind: Democratic South Africa’s Search for National Identity, 2011 -2022 (CEDIA Publishers, 2024) is a white Afrikaner couple. We are busy laying a foundation to partner, own and jointly launch a bigger commercial publishing house.
As former president Nelson Mandela liked saying, there is good in every man and woman, irrespective of race, faith, gender, sex, nationality or belief system.
There is tremendous good in you too, Mr. President, despite the liberal and globalist media trying to portray you as a one-dimensional ogre.
In this regard I personally did not agree with our former South African Ambassador to the USA Ebrahim Rasool characterising you as leading “a global white supremacist movement.”
I do not even quibble with his lack of proper diplomatic decorum in uttering those hurtful words to his presidential host as a diplomatic Envoy of our State President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa to the USA. The substance of his remarks was also profoundly and factually incorrect, in my view.
Truth is you have been much more tougher on white-led and white majority countries like Canada, Brazil, Australia, the countries of the European Union (EU), which you have claimed, credibly, that it was formed “to screw the USA”, than you have been on black-led South Africa.
That’s not how someone leading “a global white supremacist movement” would behave, in my book.
But what I immensely struggle with in my mind is my failure to convincingly rebut your Vice President JD Vance and former USA Vice President Kamala Harris’s damning accusation that you are “a fascist.”
Just think of this, Mr President:
Two USA Vice Presidents of the great USA (one Democrats and the other Republican) in the last two decades agree on one and only one thing, that, Mr. President Donald J. Trump, you are “a fascist” or “America’s Hitler.”
[See Samantha Putterman’s PBS News’ article under the title “Fact-checking JD Vance’s past statements and relationship with Trump” of 15 July 2024 where she alleged that your Vice President JD Vance though that you might be “America’s Hitler.”]]
Incredible. Don’t you think so, Mr. President?
Frankly, Mr. President, you do strike me too as what I would call not an outright and dyed-in-the-wool Mussolini-type white fascist, but what I would rather call a borderline fascist, to build on a term used by your current Vice President JD Vance and Genocide Joe Biden’s former Vice President Kamala Harris to describe you, meaning a sort of continual dive-in and dive-out fascist, if you get my point.
Does this make sense to you, Mr. Presideent? I hope it does to the majority of American people.
I think Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool mixed up the phrase “a leader of a global white supremacist movement” with the term “fascist”.
In the classical Georgi Dmitrov and Third Communist International’s definition of what “a fascist” is, it leans heavily towards the ideology of National Socialism of Adolf Hitler.
For example, I for one regard Spanish and Chilean dictators Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, respectively, as fascists. But no one in their sane minds would regard them as leaders of “a global white supremacist movement”. They, more like you, Sir, catered primarily for their white working and super rich oligarchic classes and pursued own countries’ First policies. The same with former apartheid-era white Afrikaner Prime Minister and State President PW Botha, as brilliantly alluded to by Sir Robin Renwick in his book. Only an insane mind would accuse white Afrikaner Prime Minister and State President PW Botha, a fascist by any other name, of being ‘a leader of a global white supremacist movement.” For me the King of a the global white supremacist movement seems to be the podcaster Tucker Carlson, a close buddy to Ernst Roets, amongst other white Afrikaners.
Neither was I ever amused, Mr. President, by how your dear South African friend and fellow Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) billionaire oligarch Patrice Motsepe, my neighbour by our ancestral villages here in South Africa, was roughed up badly by the black Commentariat class here in South Africa for declaring that “Africa loves you” when a few years back the two of you met at some occasion and was subsequently compelled to retract his words in your praise.
I just hope that you did not take that humiliation from Africa and specifically from South Africa to heart and that it does not today drive you in your current unconcealed, indecent, embittered and unedifying constant verbal assaults against democratic South Africa founded by the great Nelson Mandela.
Mr. President, I have just checked with Elon Musk’s Grok app and it says, regarding whether you once referred to African countries as “shitholes,” that, to quote it:
“Yes, Donald Trump reportedly referred to some African countries, along with Haiti and El Salvador, as ‘shithole countries’ during a 2018 Oval Office meeting on immigration.”
Perhaps you need to have an aside with your head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and owner of Grok Elon Musk on this “truth social” from Grok about your sickening and slanderous utterances insulting African countries, Haiti and El Salvador as “shitholes”.
How can a whole President of the great USA refer to foreign countries in such uncouth language?
In spite of all that, Mr President, do know that, maybe to your great surprise, you continue to enjoy a huge fan base across our beloved African continent for your very tough stance against the LGBTQ community, against men in women sports, against white globalists of the UK, EU, Australia, Canada and New Zealand and against America’s forever wars abroad.
You are greatly admired across Africa also for your tough stance in exposing corruption, waste and malfeasance in the USA government bureaucracy, especially regarding the USA AID’s use of American taxpayer dollars to allegedly fund LGBTQ rights and Islamic terrorists in Africa.
Many Africans also appreciate and support your America First and anti-immigration stances, counter-intuitively.
Millions of Africans across our magnificent continent also enjoyed hugely how you deservedly harangued, yes, that the perfect word, and humiliated Volodymir Zelensky, the globalists’ sock puppet from war-ravaged Ukraine, in your recent encounter at the White House. That was classic Donald Trump’s The Apprentice and you even fired Zelensky from the White House soon after that encounter.
Bold move only you could make on the world stage.
Bravo, Mr. President.
This shabbily-dressed Zelensky fella has allowed himself and Ukraine to be used by NATO as an instrument for “the strategic defeat of Russia,” as the Bantustan leader-lookalike Genocide Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austen once infamously put it.
Mr. President, in Africa we just wish that you could one day met out the same White House tough love treatment to the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the UK War Party (misnomered the Labour Party) which publicly boasted that it sent election advisors to join the election campaigns first of Genocide Joe Biden and later of Kamala Harris against you and revealed that they had been doing so even before.
Incredible.
I am sure that they and other EU globalists will do the same during the American presidential election in 2028. Watch this space, Mr. President.
Yet the UK under the same War Party (misnomered the Labour Party) of Keir Starmer and his Foreign Secretary David Lammy (who also once on Twitter on 29 November 2017 accused you, Mr. President, of “promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate group”) is the first country you struck a trade agreement with?
How does that make sense even to you, Mr. President?
Millions of Africans across our ancient Africans continent are pleased by and welcome your cool, very intelligent and measured way you are handling the Russian Federation and your studied resistance to be stampeded into supporting a war between Russia and Ukraine which was clearly provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion, as the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson recently admitted on his X account.
What however appals millions of Africans across our beautiful continent were the dastardly police killings of young African Americans during your first term which gave rise to the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLMM) and your utterly disgraceful and unending public lies and factual distortions about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners in South Africa, your almost second nature habit to lie, as well as by your mindless trade wars since 20 January this year.
No one ever defeats anyone who fights everyone about everything and anything and fights everywhere in every corner of the world all at once in just hundred days, Mr. President.
Choose your fights wisely, Mr. President. And as an ancient Chinse military strategist once counselled, the best wins in wars are those you harvest when you have not even fought for in wars. That is strategic thinking at its best.
Millions of Africans across our continent also greatly like your words of wisdom you uttered during your recent visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, when you railed justly against the ruinous habits and social engineering addictions of self-anointed western nation-builders who know nothing about nations of the Global South they wish to build.
We in Africa only wish that you added apartheid Israel to your condemnation list of fake western nation-builders for seeking to reorder the entire Middle East in its own image through a Gaza genocide and other wars of destabilisation against other Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen
I suspect, Mr. President, that were you to rid yourself of these bogeymen which have become monkeys clinging on your back, you may end up being greatly admired in Africa the way we Africans admire greatly USA president Abraham Lincoln for signing the Emancipation Declaration and for his immortal Gettysburg definition of what democracy is.
Mr. President, we Africans also hope that you will be blessed with the wisdom of the biblical King Solomon and finally realise that it’s totally churlish and childish of you to boycott the upcoming G20 Summit of Heads of State in South Africa this year on account of a patently false and completely debunked Iraq WMD-type claim that there is some so-called “white genocide” against our compatriots, the white Afrikaners, taking place in our democratic country.
This blatant lie is so very beneath the august Presidential Seal of the great United States.
It is certainly beneath you too Mr. President. Please quickly snap yourself out of it because it will massively ruin your presidential legacy.
Mr. President, I believe much of the world is mistaken in seeking to understand you only through your book The Art of the Deal.
I think a good reading of your soul comes from reading your other book Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and Life (HarperCollins, 2007).
In the book you stated, amongst other things, that:
“Small-thinking people who draw negative conclusions will find that their minds will bring them lots of negative thoughts. It’s your choice. Choose the positive.” (Page 274)
Those were wise and profound words of yours, Mr. President, and of the co-author of the book Bill Zanker.
Mr. President, how I wish you would always bear in mind those wise and profound words of yours when you comment about democratic South Africa as well as during your upcoming meeting with our President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa at the venerable White House.
If you choose the positive during the entirety of your non-consecutive second term, Mr. President, not least during your upcoming meeting with our State President, you could become in American and global history as venerable as the greatest and noblest American President Abrahim Lincoln.
It’s your choice, Mr. President.
Choose the positive and not the negative like the unsettling and blue lie about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaners in democratic South Africa.
Choose well, Mr. President. Be wise. Stop telling lies. Gain immortality through magnanimity and not through a disruptive and inconsiderate presidential behaviour pattern.
Again be fair to everyone, as you stated in Think Big and Kick Ass.
But mostly importantly Mr. President, remember the words of Abraham Lincoln:
“You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
I wish you well for your non-consecutive second term and your encounter with President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa today, Mr. President.
*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi Author of the Award winning novel The Alexandra Tales (Ravan Press, 1994) and author of the self-published book Whispering against the Wind: Democratic South Africa’s Search for National Identity, 2011 – 2022 (CEDIA Publishers, 2024).
Founder & Executive Chairman, Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
https://centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com