President Donald Trump created quite the spectacle during Wednesday’s Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in his attempt to bolster his claim of a white “genocide” happening in the country. However, some of the evidence Trump presented has turned out to be false.
Trump displayed numerous printed articles and played a nearly 5-minute-long video montage to reporters at the White House that he claimed proved that white Afrikaner farmers were the victims of a genocide in South Africa.
“Death, death, death,” Trump said as he held up one printed article after another after playing the video of what he claimed were “burial sites” of “over a thousand” white farmers who were murdered by presumably Black South Africans. However, FactCheck.org has determined that the video actually showed a 2020 demonstration–not a burial site–to bring attention to the deaths of farmers of all races, and not just white farmers.
President Trump also displayed an image of what he claimed were body bags of white farmers who had been murdered in South Africa; however, Reuters reported that the image was of humanitarian workers burying bodies in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The outlet said the image was a screengrab of a Reuters video in February after deadly battles against Rwanda-backed rebels who had captured the city of Goma.
Trump’s insistence on a white genocide taking place in South Africa follows years of conspiracy theories from far-right, fringe groups. It has been amplified by South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who is a close advisor to the president and leads the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency.
While crime in South Africa is high, data shows that most murder victims in the country–more than 26,000 in 2024–were actually Black. As for farmers themselves, only 44 murders were linked to farmers. Only 7 of those murders were white.
At the heart of the real conflict with farmers in South Africa is the disproportionate amount of land owned by white Afrikaner farmers, as a result of the country’s decades-old apartheid system, which segregated and disenfranchised Black South Africans. Though they comprise only 7% of the population, they own 75% of the farmland.
A law signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa in January intended to begin a legislative process to redress land inequality. It essentially allows the government to seize private land. President Trump has repeatedly pointed to the law as evidence of white farmers being targeted. However, the South African government has said no land has been seized. The government also said it has instead tried to encourage white farmers to willingly sell their land, reports Reuters.
Trump’s fascination with pushing falsehoods about South Africa and the treatment of white farmers has been criticized by activists as an attempt to push a white greivance politics that mirrors Trump’s anti-DEI policies in the United States.
“In a global context, Trump is seeking to fully normalize white exceptionalism and white grievance, which necessitates sullying and then destroying the beauty of Black resistance and Black excellence, which are like kryptonite in the face of a radicalized version of whiteness,” Joseph Tolton, a Pan-African activist and founder of Interconnected Justice, previously told theGrio.
He continued, “As a master racist, he knows well that Black resistance and Black excellence must be fully eviscerated in order to realize Trump’s global vision of the unbridled rule of ‘whiteness.’”
