Trump video on S.African farm murders contains many falsehoods

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.

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."

Image

Screenshot of the video posted to the White House's official X account, taken on May 23, 2025

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 (archived here and here). 

They do not mark the sites of graves.

Image

Screenshot of a 2020 article on the procession, taken on May 22, 2025

The murderers were convicted to life imprisonment in 2022.

Read more about the crosses clip in this fact check. 

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.

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.

Image

Donald Trump holding up the blog post printout (AFP / JIM WATSON)

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 video by Indian news outlet WION that used footage supplied by Reuters (archived here).

Read more about this image here. 

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.

Two days after the White House talks, South African police minister Senzo Mchunu said that the country does not face a "white genocide" and that claims to the contrary are "totally unfounded and totally unsubstantiated."  

Presenting the quarterly crime statistics, he said that two farm owners were murdered between January and March 2025 and both of them were black.

One farm dweller, two farm employees and one farm manager also lost their lives in attacks on farms over the quarter. Only the farm dweller was white, Mchunu said.

"We don't deny that the levels of crime in the country are high," he said, but it "cuts across all divides, rural and urban areas".

Twelve murders on farms were recorded in the previous quarter, from October to December 2024, of which only one victim -- a farm owner -- was white, the minister said.

AFP Fact Check has previously written about how false data has distorted the complex picture of South Africa farm murders.