White South Africans genocide lies

USA president Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into a zone of spite where he routinely ambushes foreign leaders for ridicule in front of a friendly media. This time South African president Cyril Ramaphosa had to endure video footage and images of the ‘evidence’ of a genocide and persecution of white farmers in his country. Trump alleged the footage showed graves of more than a thousand murdered white farmers, and “it’s a terrible sight… I’ve never seen anything like it. Those people are all killed”, he opined.

Trump recently granted asylum to 59 Afrikaners (descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 17th Century) alleging they were “victims of unjust racial discrimination”. The group includes Charl Kleinhaus who in 2023 shared antisemitic views on social media, the kind the current Trump administration purports to be strongly opposed and are grounds for immigrant deportation.

In the montage of clips shown to Ramaphosa in the Oval Office was footage from opposition rallies in which participants sang, “Kill the Boer” – a controversial anti-apartheid song often perceived by critics as invoking violence against white farmers. Trump intimated that reflected South Africa’s official position on white farmers. Trump also referred to one clip as showing a burial site of white farmers, and evidence of a genocide and persecution of white South African farmers.

In previous judgements, courts had categorised the song as hate speech, but recent judgements have ruled that it can be legally sung at rallies as judges argue that it makes a political point and does not directly invoke violence.

We are now accustomed to the President Trump’s Oval Office unconventional engagements where he simply rearranges his prejudices in place of reasoning. On Wednesday, 21/05/2025, it was his efforts at reasoning and proving that Ramaphosa’s government was a dysfunctional, race-obsessed institution that ignored the persecution and genocide of white South African farmers. Something he declared he had never seen before. The hypocrisy is astounding; this is a man who has proudly spoken of his desire to drive Palestinians out from Gaza.

The cursory manner with which Trump lies shows a man with no regard for facts and devoid of moral integrity; although he confidently stated the footage showed thousands of graves of murdered white farmers, Trump could not say where in SA the alleged ‘burial site’ was located when pressed by Ramaphosa.

It has also become clear that Trump and his team deliberately misidentified a Reuters image; the image of purported dead ‘white farmers’ came from a Reuters footage in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), not South Africa. The image was shot by a Reuters journalist team in February 2025 in the City of Goma after being allowed access by the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels after their capture of the city following deadly clashes with DRC forces. The blog post that Trump showed Ramaphosa during the White House meeting was published by American Thinker, a conservative online magazine, about conflict and racial tensions in the DRC and South Africa.

Meanwhile, the video footage of ‘evidence of a burial site’ played to Ramaphosa by his spiteful host, President Trump, as ‘proof’ of ‘a genocide taking place in South Africa’ and the ‘persecution’ of white South Africans was located to a spot along P39-1, a stretch of a tarred single carriageway road which runs along the edge of farms in the remote hills of KwaZulu-Natal connecting the small towns of Newcastle and Normandien.

The white crosses were part of a roadside memorial in KwaZulu-Natal province, erected in 2020 to honour Glen and Vida Rafferty, a couple killed on their farm. The memorial was a symbolic protest of farm attacks. As explained by one of the Raffertys’ neighbours, businessman Rob Hoatson one of the organisers of the crosses event, “It’s not a burial site, but it was a memorial”.

Ramaphosa accepted that violent crime is a problem in South Africa and his government is struggling to contain it. However, he refuted the suggestion that white farmers were disproportionately targeted. On 23/05/2025, South African Police Minister (Senzo Mchunu) provided statistics of farm killings between January and March of this year; of the six people killed, five were black and one was white; two were black farm owners, two black workers, a black farm manager, and the white victim lived on a farm. According to Mchunu, the previous quarter – October to December 2024 – recorded twelve murders on farms; one of the twelve victims was a white farm owner.

Lack of moral clarity is Trump’s strength; he will not stop at anything if the end justifies the means. During the Oval Office meeting with Ramaphosa, he lowered himself to the level of displaying images that were either misrepresented or misidentified just to ‘prove’ white farmers genocide and persecution in South Africa. While violent crime is rampant in South Africa, it is not racialised, all races are equally exposed. In fact, data shows, more blacks are killed in farms than white South Africans. There is no evidence of violent land takeovers from white people by black people, and the government has condemned threats of violence against white farmers.