South African President Ramaphosa visits Washington
Last Wednesday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa met his US counterpart Donald Trump during his visit to the United States. It was the first official visit by an African head of state to Washington since Trump took office. Ramaphosa’s trip was aimed at resetting bilateral relations between South Africa and the United States. The South African delegation wanted to pay particular attention to bilateral economic cooperation as well as trade and investment.
However, during a live televised meeting with press representatives in the Oval Office, these issues were initially pushed into the background. Trump presented a video documenting alleged violence against white South African farmers and falsely accused the South African government of genocide against the white population. Trump also showed the South African delegation photos that demonstrably originated from other contexts, in some cases even from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ramaphosa disagreed, condemned the extreme statements in the video, including statements glorifying violence by some opposition politicians, and emphasised that he and his governing coalition deliberately exclude such forces. His country has a problem with crime, but this violence affects all population groups in South Africa, especially black people.
While international media in particular spoke of an ‘ambush’ for the South African president, South African observers agree that Ramaphosa was well prepared for such a confrontational meeting. His delegation for the public meeting included Johann Rupert, South African billionaire and entrepreneur, John Steenhuisen, South African Minister of Agriculture and Chairman of the Democratic Alliance (DA), Zingiswa Losi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, as well as golf legends Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, which was seen as a strategic move to address Trump on a personal level. In addition, Ramaphosa was praised by the majority for his calm and matter-of-fact response, although some wished for a much stronger rebuttal to the US President’s false accusations.
Tensions between the USA and South Africa had already escalated significantly weeks before the meeting in the Oval Office. At the beginning of the year, President Ramaphosa signed a controversial law authorising the expropriation of land without compensation in certain cases. This was met with harsh criticism from the Trump administration, especially as South Africa had previously filed a genocide suit against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which was strongly criticised by the USA. In February, Trump responded by suspending important aid payments and offering white South African Africans refugee status in the USA. The diplomatic crisis intensified further in March when South Africa’s ambassador in Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled (press review CW12/2025). The arrival of the first Afrikaners admitted as refugees in the USA last week fuelled the debate further, accompanied by Trump’s renewed, internationally controversial claims of alleged murders and land expropriations of white farmers.
Despite the public confrontation, Ramaphosa was satisfied at the end of his visit. Trade and investment played the hoped-for role in the bilateral talks behind closed doors that followed the high-profile appearance in the Oval Office. US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and his South African counterpart Parks Tau also took part. The extent to which the talks also centred on the possible market entry of Elon Musk’s company Starlink in South Africa was not initially disclosed. Already on Tuesday evening, the South African government is said to have signaled to Musk that, in the IT and communications sector as well — just like in the automotive sector — alternatives to the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) regulations, which require a 30 percent ownership stake by Black people, are to apply, which would open the market to multinational companies. Ramaphosa also took the opportunity to invite Trump to the G20 summit, which will take place in South Africa in November, and to make it clear that he would like to personally hand over the G20 presidency, which will go to the USA in 2026, to Trump. The U.S. President has at least not declined the invitation, which is seen as a positive sign for the development of bilateral relations.
International Court of Justice issues judgement in territorial dispute between Equatorial Guinea and Gabon
On Monday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled in favour of Equatorial Guinea in the decades-long territorial dispute between Equatorial Guinea and Gabon over three small, mostly uninhabited islands in the Gulf of Guinea. The three islands, Conga, Mbanié and Cocoteros, are located in a region with potentially significant oil and gas reserves and were previously claimed by both countries on the basis of different legal documents. Accordingly, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon had not asked the ICJ to rule on state sovereignty, but had jointly requested it to clarify which agreements under international law are valid between the two countries.
Gabon’s central argument, the so-called Bata Convention of 1974, was categorised as legally non-binding by the fifteen judges in The Hague by a vote of 14 to 1. The version presented was merely an uncertified copy and the original document could not be found to this day. Instead, the court recognised a treaty from 1900 between Spain and France, which regulated the colonial ownership claims, as binding. This means that the islands were transferred to the country after Equatorial Guinea’s independence from Spain in 1968, which now confirms its claim to sovereignty.
However, the judgement also means a revision of the land border between Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Recent border demarcations along the Kyé River are therefore invalid, as the treaty between France and Spain, which stipulates a straight line as the border, also applies here. Some media falsely reported significant territorial gains for Gabon, including the towns of Mongomo and Ebebiyin, an unsubstantiated claim that was neither confirmed in the judgement nor in a joint statement. Furthermore, the Court ruled that there were no valid treaties defining the maritime boundary between the two countries and invited them to negotiate it jointly.
The territorial dispute between the two Central African countries dates back to the early 1970s. After Equatorial Guinea initially had control of the archipelago, Gabon ousted Equatorial Guinean soldiers from Mbanié in 1972 and occupied the island with its own military. After a series of regional peace conferences, which according to Gabon culminated in the Bata Convention, inter-state tensions temporarily faded into the background, but became more explosive again in the 2000s with the growing interest in oil and gas resources in the region. In 2016, after years of UN mediation, both states agreed to submit the dispute to the ICJ and officially filed the case in 2021.
The judgement, which is now binding under international law, means that Gabon must end its military presence on the island of Mbanié, which has been in place since 1972. A spokesperson for the Gabonese presidency announced that dialogue would be sought with Equatorial Guinea in order to find an amicable solution for implementation on the basis of the ICJ ruling. The Gabonese media were rather disappointed by the judgement. Criticism was directed at both Gabon’s legal strategy and the catastrophic state of document archiving, particularly concerning records such as the Bata Convention.
The judgement could bring the decades-long dispute over the resource-rich waters to an end. Both countries are economically heavily dependent on oil, but are confronted with declining production volumes and a lack of investment. The now clarified ownership structure could facilitate investment in exploration and production in the affected marine zone. Although it remains to be seen how quickly and without conflict the ruling will be implemented, both countries emphasised that they continue to strive for peaceful relations. The necessary negotiations on the maritime border also offer room for manoeuvre for both governments, which only intensified their economic cooperation in March of this year by agreeing to merge the electricity grids of their two countries.
In other news
The mausoleum for Thomas Sankara, designed by Francis Kéré and his Berlin-based studio Kéré Architecture, was opened in Ouagadougou on Saturday. The internationally acclaimed Pritzker Prize winner from Burkina Faso dedicated the impressive building to the former president and his twelve companions, who were murdered on 15 October 1987 in a coup that brought Blaise Compaoré to power. Now, at the site of the assassination, the former seat of government Conseil de l’Entente, stands a memorial in the shape of an eye with descending steps symbolising the 13 murdered revolutionaries. The building is made of locally produced laterite and clay bricks and is spanned by a 34 metre wide dome. Inside, the graves are arranged in such a way that each grave is individually illuminated by the sun during the course of the day. The memorial site is part of the larger Parc Mémorial Thomas Sankara project, in which a memorial space is to be created on an area of 14 hectares, including an amphitheatre, educational facilities and a 100-metre-high tower with a viewing platform at a height of 87 metres, alluding to the year of Sankara’s death. There are also plans to create a green promenade as a regenerative landscape to honour Sankara’s environmental legacy. The project is being financed entirely by the government of Burkina Faso. The government was represented at the official opening of the mausoleum by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo.