False data distort complex picture of South African farm murders
- Published on March 10, 2025 at 12:52
- 10 min read
- By Cintia NABI CABRAL, AFP France
- Translation and adaptation Tendai DUBE , AFP South Africa
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When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a bill on January 23, 2025, regulating expropriations and giving the government powers to repossess property without compensation — in certain circumstances — there were howls of protest both near and far (archived here).
US leader Donald Trump announced he was cutting off all future funding to South Africa because the government was “confiscating land” and “treating certain classes of people very badly” (archived here).
“Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?” chimed in South African-born billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk on February 3, 2025.
Although Trump’s “confiscation” claim was baseless, social media erupted.
Viral French posts helped to revive claims of an ongoing “massacre” and “genocide” against white farmers in South Africa.
“There is a genocide in South Africa. 60 white farmers are killed every day by black South Africans. That's just the official figure,” reads an X post published on February 3, 2025, by a French account called “France for Trump”.
The post has been shared thousands of times and includes an image of a white woman carrying a child.
“White victims are not only being killed, they are being tortured, raped, skinned alive, burned, cut into pieces. Truth will triumph thanks to Trump!" the post adds.
The same account shared a similar post containing images of people who have been beaten or injured.
AFP Fact Check debunked the French claims.
English-language posts also circulated on Facebook and Instagram with claims that “4,000+ farmers have been killed since 2018”. These posts came from accounts called “Dailyforumcenter” and their timelines are populated with right-wing content from the United States.
However, both sets of claims – 60 white farmers killed each day and 4,000 since 2018 – are not supported by statistics, experts say.
Farm murders
Researchers told AFP Fact Check that they rely on credible records that track the number of murders and attacks on farmers in South Africa.
These include statistics from the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA), a union of mainly Afrikaans farmers, and AfriForum — a minority rights organisation for Afrikaners.
According to the latest report published by AfriForum in May 2024, 49 murders took place on farms in 2023, consistent with the 50 deaths it recorded in the previous year (archived here).
This is roughly in line with the TAU SA figures that Johan Burger, an independent crime analysis consultant, sent to AFP Fact Check, which shows 50 farm murders in 2023 and 32 in 2024 (archived here and here).
The average in the last decade is somewhat higher: 63 people have been killed on South African farms each year, according to TAU SA (635 murders from 2014 to 2024).
Crime statistics released by the South African Police Service (SAPS) include data on attacks and murders on farms, but these are less reliable because data collection was interrupted in 2007, Burger said (archived here).
This was echoed in a South African Human Rights Commission report investigating security issues in farming communities, which stated that police statistics are too broad as they include non-farmers living on “small holdings”, often located in rural areas (archived here).
Even taking into account their wider definition of farm attacks, South African police statistics on farm murders are vastly lower than the figures claimed in the viral French posts.
For example, authorities recorded 447 murders on farms between October 2023 and September 2024, according to data collated by AFP Fact Check using the last four quarterly police reports. This equates to an average of 1.22 people killed per day, proving the claim about “60 farm murders per day” is baseless (archived here, here, here and here).
Furthermore, the police figures do not specify the race of the murder victims nor the perpetrators involved in the attacks on farms.
In a 2017 policy brief for the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Burger wrote that 87.6 percent of farm murders since 1990 were white victims and 12.4 percent were black (archived here).
Black people make up 79.8 percent of the population, and white people 8.4 percent, according to Statistics South Africa (archived here).
Under British rule, South Africa's 1913 land policy known as the "Natives Land Act", prevented black people from buying or occupying land, forcibly displacing families (archived here).
Although the apartheid law was repealed in 1991, most commercial farmland currently remains in the hands of the country's white minority: in 2017, white farmers held 72 percent of the land, according to the most up-to-date government figures (archived here).
Misrepresented figures
While the claims use exaggerated figures, farm murders and attacks in South Africa are undoubtedly a reality (archived here).
“When you have 50 to 60 people, mainly Afrikaners, killed every year, with families murdered through acts of torture, you cannot ignore the problem,” said Jean-Yves Camus, head of the Observatory of Political Radicalization at the Foundation for European Progressive Studies.
However, Camus said it would be “absurd” to speak of a “genocide” against white people or white farmers, especially when compared to the total number of murders each year (more than 19,000 in the first nine months of last year).
Yet, the topic is a recurring disinformation theme on social media.
Using reverse image searches, AFP Fact Check found many of the pictures used in the viral French posts came from websites that started appearing in the early 2000s with testimonies from white South Africans about black people allegedly attacking them (archived here, here and here).
False data was used then as it is now to perpetuate the idea of a “white genocide”.
One blog post published on April 18, 2009, claimed that there had been “3,048 farm deaths” since the end of apartheid in 1994.
According to the TAU SA data (see earlier screenshot), a total of 2,295 people were murdered on farms between 1990 and 2024, including farmers, family members, employees and visitors.
This is just more than half the “4,000+ farm murders since 2018” claimed on social media, covering a period spanning many more years. AFP Fact Check could not find any research close to corroborating the claims of more than 4,000 farm murders in the country, let alone of white farmers.
The last official report by the government on farm attacks, published in 2003 by a committee of inquiry, found that 1,254 farmers were killed in the years 1991-2001.
Independent analyst Burger said a government tally has not been conducted since then which further complicates assessing the scale of the problem. This is why he advocates for a “credible and unified central database” (archived here).
“It has not yet happened and this is why we often see wild claims and misinformation,” Burger added.
High crime rate
The murder of white farmers is part of a larger insecurity issue in the country.
South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world: 19,279 people were killed between January and September 2024, according to aggregate data from the last three police reports, equivalent to 70.6 murders a day (archived here, here and here).
The context of total and average homicides nationally means the claims of “60 farm murders a day” are wildly exaggerated.
Calling the social media posts “blatant lies”, Lizette Lancaster, head of the crime and justice information centre at ISS, said the real “risk is predominantly in urban areas”.
Young black men are most likely to be killed in South Africa, Lancaster added (here, here and here), because “violence is concentrated in specific hotspots in the country that are in low-income, high-density informal settlements in urban areas” (archived here, here and here).
“South Africa has an armed robbery problem,” Lancaster told AFP Fact Check on February 11, 2025, and the phenomenon “spills over to small semi-rural and rural small holdings or farms”.
Politicised issue
Lancaster said the issue “has been politicised by specific interest groups into a narrative about ‘farm killings’ or by the far-right as a ‘white genocide’”, but added it “affects all South Africans”.
On February 8, 2025, US diplomatic spokeswoman Tammy Bruce announced that the United States was ready to take in “persecuted South African farmers” as refugees (archived here).
Ramaphosa, in response to the Trump administration, denied any intention to “confiscate land”, while legal experts said the new land law in South Africa clarifies the legal framework for expropriations (archived here).
The country’s foreign ministry condemned the reaction to the Expropriation Act as a “campaign of misinformation” and “propaganda” (archived here).
“It is disappointing to observe that such narratives seem to have found favour among decision-makers in the United States of America,” the ministry said.
AFP Fact Check has previously debunked claims related to farm murders and farm attacks since 2018 (here and here).
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