--- title: "US ambassador to SA finally shook the right hand" description: "The US and South Africa have had a frosty relationship under the Trump regime, but a recent hour-long meeting might signal the coming of a better understanding between the two nations." type: "OpinionNewsArticle" publisher: "Daily Maverick" site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za" section: "Opinionistas" author: "Ofentse Donald Davhie" author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/ofentse-donald-davhie/" canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-08-06-us-ambassador-to-sa-finally-shook-the-right-hand/" published: "2026-08-06T11:55:25" lang: "en-ZA" word_count: 814 --- # US ambassador to SA finally shook the right hand > The US and South Africa have had a frosty relationship under the Trump regime, but a recent hour-long meeting might signal the coming of a better understanding between the two nations. By Ofentse Donald Davhie · Published 6 August 2026, 13:55 SAST ## Content ![Signpost-Opinion](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/ToEp388PygKxbVnnboBpUQ3buys=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/label-Opinion.jpg) This week, the United States ambassador to South Africa, Brent Bozell, sat down with Firoz Cachalia, the acting police minister, to talk about[“rural crime and ways to combat the violence threatening the farming community](https://x.com/USAmbRSA/status/2084556601323569210?s=20).” A photograph, a handshake, a few sentences of thanks. By the standards of the past 18 months of SA-US relations, it counts as a breakthrough. For most of that period, the relationship has run in one direction. An executive order listing a set of demands on Pretoria and initiating a refugee programme. Of the 7,730 refugees the US admitted in the current fiscal year to the end of June, [7,727 were South African.](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13277) That is almost the entire programme, rebuilt around a single country that until recently sent almost no one. Polling conducted by the [Institute of Race Relations](https://irr.org.za/reports/irr-polling/irr-polling-2026-race-and-race-relations) in March 2026 measured how deeply the Trump narrative had penetrated the public it claims to describe. The polling found 72% of registered South African voters reject the white genocide claim; only 19% accept it. Among white South Africans, the group the policy purports to protect, 50% disagree and 37% agree. The only notable party constituency in which the claim commands more support than opposition is the Freedom Front Plus, a small Afrikaans-speaking bloc, where 54% agree and 40% disagree. Among ANC and DA supporters, the two biggest parties, 76% and 65% reject the narrative respectively. The claim operates as a political niche, not a mass social reality. ### **Violence** However, the White House is not wrong about everything. Violence here is real, it is extreme, and the state has too often failed its first duty, which is to keep people alive and their property intact. A government that cannot do that has lost its argument about sovereignty, and offering refuge to individuals who fear for their lives is defensible. What the White House has wrong is the diagnosis and the cure. The [South African Police Service](https://www.saps.gov.za/resource_centre/publications/police_mag/documents/2026/Special-Edition-4th-Quarter-Crime-Statistics.pdf) reported 58 murders a day last quarter and attributed the cause of the killings to arguments, road rage, revenge and robbery. Most of it happens in public places or between people who already know each other, and it is concentrated in a handful of provinces. That is the signature of generalised violence and a broken policing system, not a campaign against one group. Farm attacks are a separate and legitimate question, but they do not turn the national picture into the one Washington has painted. A resettlement queue does nothing about 58 murders a day. It moves a few thousand people and leaves the machine that produces the violence untouched. Worse, it swaps voice for exit. It removes the very people whose complaints gave Washington its leverage, and it hands the government a sovereignty grievance, which lowers the cost of doing nothing. Pressure that makes inaction more comfortable is not pressure at all. None of this is hypothetical, and none of it is anti-Afrikaner. The correct posture was put to Trump in his own office. When he screened his genocide footage in May 2025 meeting with Ramaphosa, Johann Rupert, the Afrikaner billionaire who lives in the Western Cape, told him the deaths are across the board and not only white farmers, that the worst of it is gang warfare on the Cape Flats, and that what the country needs is Starlink at every small police station. That was the right answer, from exactly the constituency Washington claims to protect. The administration heard it and built a refugee pipeline instead. ### **Safety: It’s made inside a police service** This is why the meeting between the ambassador and the acting police minister matters. Safety is made or lost inside the police service, in investigation, forensics and response, not in a visa office on another continent. The ambassador spent an hour with the person who runs that system. It is the first US move aimed at the place the problem actually lives. What would build on it is exactly what Rupert prescribed: diplomatic engagement and cooperation on the crime-fighting technology the country lacks. Both governments say they want the same outcome. Here is a way to test whether they mean it. The [recent fall in murders](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-06-07-sas-murder-rate-drop-is-worth-celebrating-but-we-need-to-be-realistic/) is the police service’s own work, through operations that began well before this meeting, so no one in Washington should claim credit for numbers they had no hand in. Also, one handshake is not a policy. The ambassador is not the executive order, and a warm conversation can precede exactly nothing. Even so, it is the first thing either side has done in a year that could plausibly reduce the number of South Africans, and locally employed Americans, who end up dead. The question that counts is whether it becomes real technology cooperation on a problem both countries claim to want fixed, or remains a photograph. We will find out, but for once, the needle moved in the right direction. **DM**