U.S. policy toward Africa

Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.

JA International Correspondent

Only a minority of U.S. presidents have ever visited Africa. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first sitting president to visit the continent, meeting Winston Churchill in Morocco in 1943. Since then, visits have remained relatively rare. Of 54 African countries, only 16 have ever hosted a sitting U.S. president, and there have been just 52 such visits in total. So, even though there may be a temptation to chide him over it, Donald Trump was not the first president who never touched down on African soil.

Because most presidents before the mid 20th century never traveled to Africa, and several later presidents also never went, Trump is not unique in this respect. What is unusual is that in the modern era – when presidential travel is common – he is one of the few recent presidents to skip the continent entirely during a full term.

Beyond that, Donald Trump stands out uniquely for the way he has referred to African countries. Once in a 2018 White House meeting on immigration, he called Haiti and several African nations “shithole countries,” a remark widely condemned as derogatory and racist. He later publicly confirmed using that phrase to describe those countries.

However, it is interesting to note that U.S. immigration policy has designated South Sudan among other countries around the world as a destination for immigrants or asylum seekers who are among people trying to enter or stay in the U.S.

In May 2025, U.S. officials placed eight non South Sudanese men on a deportation flight whose intended destination was South Sudan, using it as a third country to receive them. After a lower court ruling paused the expulsions, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to initiate deportations to third countries like South Sudan with limited advance notice. The men were then flown to South Sudan, arriving around July 4–5, 2025. U.S. and international outlets describe this as the completion of the first deportations to South Sudan after the legal battle.

Trump later singled out South Africa for retribution. On May 21, 2025, he conferred with Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa, and held a contentious bilateral meeting broadcast live in the Oval Office at the White House.  

Among the topics they addressed were the controversial issues of land reform and farm attacks in South Africa, the latter of which Trump claimed disproportionately affected white farmers. Trump also confronted Ramaphosa with claims of “white genocide” against Afrikaners in South Africa, which Ramaphosa, together with other members of the South African delegation, strongly denied.

Trump had earlier instituted an exception in U.S. immigration policy that was especially designed to encourage white Afrikaners to leave South Africa and move to America. The phrase “Afrikaner refugees to the U.S.” today refers to a new, highly politicized refugee track created by the Trump administration in 2025 that prioritizes white, Afrikaans speaking South Africans (and some other minorities) for admission and resettlement in the United States. 

In February 2025, President Trump launched a special initiative, officially called Mission South Africa, framed as a refugee pathway for white South Africans (especially Afrikaner farmers) and other “disfavored minorities” said to be facing race based persecution and land seizures. This was implemented through Executive Order 14204, which both cut off U.S. foreign aid to South Africa and instructed U.S. agencies to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees” and grant them expedited pathways to U.S. citizenship.

The Afrikaner track was created while the broader U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) was largely paused or sharply reduced, with the overall annual ceiling reportedly slashed from 125,000 to about 7,500. 

On May 12, 2025, the first organized cohort of 59 Afrikaners arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport under this program, where they were greeted by senior State Department officials and given resettlement assistance—an unusually public welcome for a refugee intake. They had undergone an expedited review that took months rather than the years typical for many other refugee groups and were brought in on a U.S. government chartered flight.

American policy toward Africa has moved from a marginal, largely Cold War–driven concern to a broader mix of security, economic, and humanitarian interests, but it still lacks a fully coherent long term strategy compared with other great powers. U.S. policy toward South Africa has shifted from Cold War–era tolerance of apartheid, to active sanctions during the 1980s, to close partnership after 1994, and now to a much more confrontational, sanctions leaning posture under the current Trump administration.