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.