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In a salient moment with the leader of South Africa, President Donald Trump played a video that he said showed “burial sites” for a thousand white farmers — the victims of what he has called a genocide — along a roadside in South Africa.
It actually showed a 2020 demonstration bringing attention to the issue of violence against farmers of all races in South Africa.
Trump made his comments during a May 21 Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa a week after the U.S. accepted the first white South African refugees, whom Trump has described as victims of genocide. Ramaphosa pushed back against the claim that there is a white genocide happening in South Africa, and in response, Trump had a staffer dim the lights to play a video.
Pointing to the screen, which showed an aerial view of a rural highway dotted on each side with white crosses, Trump said, “These are burial sites, right here. Burial sites — over a thousand of white farmers. And those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross and there’s approximately a thousand of them. They’re all white farmers. The family of white farmers.”
“I’d like to know where that is, because, this — I’ve never seen,” Ramaphosa said.
“I mean, it’s in South Africa,” Trump said.
Rather than burial sites, as Trump claimed, the video showed a demonstration following the August 2020 murder of Glen and Vida Rafferty, who had been killed during a robbery at their farmhouse in Normandien, a rural area about 200 miles southeast of Johannesburg. The crosses along the road were meant to memorialize and draw attention to the many farmers who have been killed over the years.
There is a real issue with South African farmers being killed. Although some have cast the killings as a “white genocide,” experts say that’s not accurate, as we wrote recently. Rather, they said, most of the violent acts are committed during robberies in a country where most of the wealth and land post-apartheid are still owned by a relatively small white minority. White people own about 72% of the farm and agricultural holdings despite making up about 7% of the population, according to a 2017 land audit report commissioned by the South African government.
And, experts told us, while there is a high rate of murder and violence in the country, there is no evidence that white farmers are being singled out. According to police data, murders of farmers are less than 1% of all murders in South Africa. There were 51 murders on farms in 2022-23, figures that aren’t delineated by race, out of a total of nearly 27,500 murders in the country.
“On average, 76 people are murdered in South Africa every day according to 2023/2024 official police statistics,” Lizette Lancaster, of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told us in an email.
“Robberies and murders on farms are recognised as a serious problem by all sectors of society,” she said, going on to explain, though, that “almost all South Africans from all walks of life will agree that there is no white genocide. The government has reacted to persistent claims of a white genocide and the conflation of that with farm murders since Democracy in 1994.”
In an interview with South Africa’s public broadcasting news service, Darell Brown, a farmer who helped organize the demonstration featured in the video Trump showed, said, “The message we’re trying to convey is: farm murders must stop. I don’t mean just murders of white commercial farmers. Farm murders must stop.” He explained that the roadside crosses were representative of farmers who had been killed and called on the government to take the issue seriously.
The demonstration was held on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2020, and took place along the P39 highway between the Raffertys’ home and the nearby town of Newcastle.
The South African news website IOL quoted a participant in the demonstration, Bob Hoatson, as saying that the initiative was not about white farmers: “It was for people from all walks of life who were concerned about farm murders,” he said.
During the Oval Office exchange, Trump asserted, “When they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.”
But according to Lancaster, it’s not true that “the government is willfully ignorant (e.g. police) or the security sector is actively complicit in the crimes committed against vulnerable groups.” In South Africa, she said, “government, public sector and community partnerships are yielding results. Farm murders have gone down, rural safety strategies are now in place, and there is nothing particularly exceptional about how gruesome these murders are when you look at the scale of violence in townships, for example.”
In the case of the Rafferty murders, three men have been convicted and are serving time in prison.
“The lives of farmers, farm workers and farm dwellers as well as every citizen of the country, black and white, matters,” then Deputy President David Mabuza said after the Rafferty murders, as he convened a meeting to discuss programs to curb violence against farmers. “It is for this reason that government will continue to work with the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster to ensure prevention as a priority in dealing with farm murders.”
While violence remains a serious issue in South Africa, the video Trump played did not show 1,000 “burial sites” or prove there is a white genocide in the country.
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