Video of S.Africa crosses screened by Donald Trump shows 2020 protest, not ‘burial sites’
- Published on May 22, 2025 at 23:35
- 4 min read
- By Tendai DUBE, Gaelle FAURE, AFP South Africa
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The 4:30-minute video presentation contained several falsehoods, which AFP wrote about here.
The video, made up of a compilation of clips, was also published by the White House’s official account on X.
It closed with a long aerial shot of the white crosses, played from an X post by an account called @realMaalouf.
The post's text read: "Each cross represents a white farmer that was murdered in South Africa. And some people still deny that white South Africans/Boers are persecuted and say they don't deserve asylum because they are white."
The account published the video on May 12, 2025.
Other posts that shared the video claimed that each cross represented a white farmer killed between 2018 and 2022 or 2023.
While playing the footage at the White House, Trump commented: "These are burial sites. Right here, burial sites. Over a thousand white farmers."
He added: "Those cars are…stopped there to pay their respects to their family members who were killed."
The footage does not, however, show burial sites.
Video from 2020 protest
By conducting reverse image searches taken from the video, AFP found local media articles which explained that the video showed a protest on September 5, 2020, near Newcastle in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province (archived here).
According to these reports, symbolic wooden crosses were erected along the road where protesters took part in a procession of vehicles that included tractors, trucks, motorcycles, and helicopters.
The procession was in protest against farm killings after a couple from the Normandien region were found murdered on their farm (archived here).
The murderers were convicted to life imprisonment in 2022 (archived here).
BBC Verify geolocated the footage to a spot near Newcastle, a town in KwaZulu-Natal province. Google Street View imagery showed matching roads, foliage, and hills in the distance.
The latest available imagery, from 2023 -- some three years after the protest -- showed that the crosses were no longer in place.
BBC named Rob Hoatson as the person who organised the display of white crosses back in 2020 and cited him as confirming that the convoy was not a "burial site" but a "temporary memorial" and that the crosses have since been removed (archived here).
Online, some commenters linked the video the Witkruis Monument memorial site, which also features crosses symbolising farm deaths, but is located some 500 kilometres away from where the 2020 procession occurred.
South Africa recorded more than 27,600 murders in the 2023/24 financial year, according to police data, which averages to just over 75 a day.
Most of the victims were young, black men in urban areas, the statistics show.
On farms, plots, small holdings and other agricultural land, there were 436 murders in 2024, according to police figures that include farmers -- who are mostly white -- and black farm workers.
Statistics from the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA) show farm murders average about 50 a year across all races.
AFP Fact Check previously looked into how false data has distorted the complex picture of South African farm murders.
During Ramaphosa's visit, Trump also brandished a stack of printed articles that he claimed documented a genocide taking place against white people in South Africa.
Mixed into the deck of papers, however, was a months-old blog post featuring a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo, as AFP reported here (archived here).
A group of around 50 white South Africans (archived here) arrived in the United States for resettlement on May 12, 2025, after Trump granted them refugee status as victims of what he called a "genocide".
Trump essentially halted refugee arrivals after taking office, but is making an exception for the Afrikaners despite Pretoria's insistence that they do not face persecution in their homeland.
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