US President Donald Trump ambushed his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa at talks Wednesday with a video meant to support unfounded claims of the "persecution" of white farmers.
Trump intended the 4:30-minute video played at their meeting in the White House, and which has been widely shared on social media in recent weeks, to be evidence of a campaign to kill white farmers in what he says amounts to a "genocide".
But the video contained many falsehoods.
Trump demande des comptes au président de l'Afrique du Sud Cyril Ramaphosa au sujet de tous ces fermiers blancs massacrés par milliers dans son pays depuis des décennies. Il lui montre la vidéo dans laquelle Julius Malema exhorte ses militants à tuer les Blancs : "kill the Boer". pic.twitter.com/xeToU6XX4A
— Hervé Ryssen (@insoumix2) May 22, 2025
The crosses are not gravesites
One clip shows white crosses erected along a winding road where dozens of cars and trucks are lined up.
"These are burial sites," Trump said. "Those cars are... stopped to pay respect to their family members who were killed."
The footage is from a 2020 protest where crosses were placed along a rural road following the murder of a couple on their farm in Normandien, according to videos and press articles from the time.
They do not mark the sites of graves.
The murderers were convicted to life imprisonment in 2022.
The politician featured is not in government
Another scene plays into Trump's claims that the government is expropriating white farms and shows a politician saying: "South Africans occupy land, that's who we are."
"These are people that are officials," Trump claimed.
But the speaker is not in government. He is the leader of the radical left opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, Julius Malema.
The EFF came fourth in last year's elections with only 9.5 percent of the vote. It has never been in government.
'Kill the Boer' is an anti-apartheid chant
Malema is shown in the video chanting an infamous struggle-era song, "Kill the Boer, kill the farmer".
Trump suggested this was a real call to kill "boers", who are farmers from the Afrikaans minority that led the previous apartheid government.
The highly controversial chant is decades old and was a rallying cry during the struggle against white-minority rule, which ended in 1994.
There have been several calls for it to be banned but the courts have ruled that it should be considered in its historical context.
An image from the Democratic Republic of Congo
After showing the video, Trump held up a stack of printed articles he claimed documented farm murders in South Africa.
Among them was a blog post about tribalism in Africa from a little-known website called "American Thinker", with a photo showing members of the Red Cross in white hazmat suits handling body bags.
"Here's burial sites all over the place, these are white farmers who are being buried," Trump said.
But the image is a screengrab from a February YouTube video of Red Cross workers responding after women were raped and burned alive during a mass jailbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo city of Goma, according to its caption.
The grab was from a blog post published by Indian news outlet WION that used footage supplied by Reuters.
White farmers are not 'killed in large numbers'
"These people are being killed in large numbers," Trump claimed, showing the articles that he claimed reported on the murders of "thousands" of white farmers.
While farmers have been killed, their numbers are small in the larger context of crime in South Africa, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum, which has long pushed a campaign to shed light on farm murders, counted 49 such killings in 2023.
In comparison, police recorded a total of 27,621 murders between April 2023 and March 2024 -- about 75 people killed every day. Most of the victims are young black men in urban areas.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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