By Tim Cocks and Nellie Peyton
JOHANNESBURG -U.S. President Donald Trump made several false statements and misrepresented some facts about the alleged persecution of South Africa’s white minority during a contentious Oval Office meeting on Wednesday with President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa tried to rebuff the assertions but was frequently interrupted by Trump, who repeated the claims. Trump had staff play a video consisting mostly of years-old clips of inflammatory speeches by some South African politicians that have been circulating on social media.
Among the claims contradicted by the evidence:
1. There is a genocide of white farmers in South Africa.
This conspiracy theory has been propagated by some fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It has been circulating in global far-right chat rooms for at least a decade, with the vocal support of Trump’s ally, South African-born Elon Musk.
Supporters of the theory point to murders of white farmers in remote rural parts of the country as proof of a politically orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing, rather than ordinary violent crime.
They accuse the Black-majority led government of being complicit in the farm murders, either by encouraging them or at least turning a blind eye. The government strongly denies this.
South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with an average of 72 a day, in a country of 60 million people. Most victims are Black.
South African police recorded 26,232 murders nationwide in 2024, of which 44 were linked to farming communities. Of those, eight of the victims were farmers.
The high court in Western Cape province ruled that claims of white genocide were “clearly imagined and not real” in a case earlier this year, forbidding a donation to a white supremacist group on those grounds.
2. The government is expropriating land from white farmers without compensation, including through violent land seizures, in order to distribute it to Black South Africans.
The government has a policy of attempting to redress inequalities in land ownership that are a legacy of apartheid and colonialism. But no land has been expropriated, and the government has instead tried to encourage white farmers to sell their land willingly.
That hasn’t worked. Some three-quarters of privately-owned farmland is still in the hands of whites, who make up less than 8% of the population, while 4% is owned by Black South Africans who make up 80%.
In an effort to address this, Ramaphosa signed a law in January allowing the state to expropriate land “in the public interest,” in rare cases without compensating the owner. The law requires authorities to first try to reach an agreement. It still hasn’t been used.
3. The “Kill the Boer (farmer)” song sung by some Black South Africans is an explicit call to murder Afrikaners, the ethnic group of European descent who make up the majority of whites and who own most of the farmland.
The song dates back to the resistance against apartheid, when Afrikaner nationalists controlled the country. In one of the video clips Trump showed, firebrand opposition leader Julius Malema of the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is singing the song.
Three South African courts have ruled against attempts to have it designated as hate speech, on the basis that it is a historical liberation chant, not a literal incitement to violence.
In a statement following the meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa, the EFF said it was “a song that expresses the desire to destroy the system of white minority control over the resources of South Africa” and that it is “a part of African Heritage.”
4. Trump played a video clip that showed a long line of white crosses on the side of a highway, which Trump said were “burial sites” for white farmers.
The video was made in September 2020 during a protest against farm murders after two people were killed on their farm a week earlier. The crosses did not mark actual graves. An organizer told South Africa’s public broadcaster, SABC, at the time that the wooden crosses represented farmers who had been killed over the years.
5. The opening scene of the White House video shows Malema in South Africa’s parliament announcing “people are going to occupy land. We require no permission from … the president.” It also shows another clip of him pledging to expropriate land.
Some land has been illegally occupied over the years, mostly by millions of desperate squatters with nowhere else to go, although some land seizures are politically motivated. The land is usually unused and there is no evidence the EFF orchestrated any land invasions.
(Reporting by Tim Cocks, additional reporting by Siyanda Mthethwa, Nellie Peyton and Milan Pavicic, editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)
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