Julius Malema, a South African politician, was not present for an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday between President Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, but he loomed over the fraught encounter.
A video montage of his apartheid-era chants, which the White House played during the meeting, took center stage and set the tone for Mr. Trump’s repeated accusations of racism and violence against white people in South Africa, who on the whole are much better off economically than the Black majority in the country.
Mr. Malema, 44, is the incendiary, leftist leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, which advocates for the redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans. The party, which he founded over a decade ago, won less than 10 percent of the vote in South Africa’s 2024 election.
He responded on Wednesday to the White House meeting, saying in a statement on X: “A group of older men meet in Washington to gossip about me. No significant amount of intelligence evidence has been produced about white genocide.”
Mr. Malema made headlines in 2023, when, during a rally, he chanted, “Kill the Boer!” a rallying cry against Afrikaans-speaking farmers, who are the descendants of European settlers. The white Afrikaner ethnic minority created and led the nation’s apartheid government.
The chant was popularized during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1990s, when Black South Africans were fighting a brutal and racist regime. Veterans and historians of the apartheid struggle say the song should not be taken as a literal call to violence, an assessment that a South African judge agreed with in a 2022 ruling. But the video of Mr. Malema was seized upon by right-wing commentators, including Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who left the country as a teenager, as evidence of violence against white people.
The song remains controversial within the country; many politicians and ordinary South Africans disavow it.
The African National Congress, the party that has governed South Africa since the end of apartheid and rose to acclaim on the shoulders of Nelson Mandela, distanced itself from the song in 2012, the same year Mr. Malema was expelled from the party.
Once a youth leader and shining star in the organization, Mr. Malema clashed with A.N.C. leaders and became a polarizing figure, calling for mines to be nationalized. He also sought to restyle the party, injecting Black nationalism into the explicitly nonracial organization. His positions and tone increased his popularity with disenfranchised youth, but party leaders worried his rhetoric would harm the country’s economy and reputation.
While Mr. Malema was once an ardent supporter of former President Jacob G. Zuma, the two became locked in a political feud that saw Mr. Malema become one of the former A.N.C. leader’s most vocal and persistent critics. Mr. Malema publicly criticized Mr. Zuma’s spending practices, including the tens of millions of dollars of public money the former president spent on upgrading his private estate, ostensibly for security.
Mr. Malema created the Economic Freedom Fighters, which stands out for its military-style uniform of red berets and jackets, in 2013. His party had an outsize influence in South African politics because of his high profile. But it underperformed expectations in last year’s election and has been weakened by the departure of key leaders over the past year.
Despite fashioning himself as a politician for the poor, Mr. Malema has drawn criticism for his lavish lifestyle, which has included fancy homes, cars and clothes. He has defended his luxurious taste by saying that he needs it to inspire the impoverished.
In 2012, Mr. Malema faced corruption charges related to his ties to a company that had been awarded a $4.1 million road construction contract. The charges were thrown out in 2015 because of excessive delays in the case.
Eve Sampson is a reporter covering international news and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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