During a contentious Oval Office meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with images and video clips that he said show an ongoing “genocide” against white farmers in the country.
But the footage the president pointed to in the dimmed White House room — showing a row of crosses — was not what Trump made it out to be.
“These are the — these are burial sites right here,” Trump said of the footage.
“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. …Those people are all killed,” Trump added.
In reality, the video shows a protest that took place on Sept. 5, 2020, near Normandien, South Africa. The protest was called over the reported murder of two farmers at their home in the area days earlier, according to the local outlet Newcastle Advertiser.
According to the outlet, the crosses were placed along a section of the protest route by volunteers.
The protest was also described in a report at the time from the South African Institute of Race Relations, which produced its own video showing the protest.
Hermann Pretorious, a spokesperson for the Institute, told ABC News, “Those crosses are not graves, yet they are crosses commemorating farm murder victims.”
“They were displayed temporarily as part of a processional protest following the murders of Glenn and Vida Rafferty, who were killed on their farm in Normandien in KwaZulu-Natal. The crosses were removed afterwards,” Pretorious said.
Images from Google Street View taken in May 2023 also show that, as of that time, the crosses were no longer standing.
In another part of the video, there is a person in a red beret who repeatedly chants “Kill the boer, kill the farmer,” and speaks about taking land without compensation.
The person is Julius Malema, who founded the small but radical party Economic Freedom Fighters after being expelled from the African National Congress, of which Ramaphosa is a member, in 2013.
The person in the video who appears in the yellow shirt is former South African President Jacob Zuma, who is now the leader of the opposition uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party.
After Trump played the video, Ramaphosa said the speeches seen in Trump’s video did not represent the policies of his government. South Africa’s opposition agriculture minister also said many parties had worked to keep extremists out of government.
During the meeting, Trump also displayed a printout of a blog post featuring an image of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Trump suggested the image had been taken in South Africa.
Elon Musk, a South African native and a top adviser to Trump, was present for Ramaphosa’s visit to the White House on Wednesday. He has also previously voiced Trump’s allegations that white South Africans are fleeing the country due to “violence and racist laws.”
Ramaphosa, major political parties in South Africa and a South African judge, however, have denied the existence of a white genocide in the country.
In February 2025, a South African court ruled that claims of white genocide were unfounded, calling them “not real” and “clearly imagined.”
While claims of a white genocide have been disallowed by the court, it is true that there is a problem with some farmers being murdered in South Africa.
Some of the murders are gruesome, and the overall murder rate in South Africa is high, with 45 murders per 100,000 people, according to data collected in 2023, but there is no indication that the murders are race-driven.
During the Oval Office meeting with Trump, Ramaphosa said, “There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity are not only white people, majority of them are Black people.”
The White House released a statement after the meeting titled “President Trump is Right About What’s Happening in South Africa,” doubling down on the administration’s unfounded claims of race-driven violence happening in the nation.
The statement has a list of press clippings that they say support their position, pointing to articles from Fox News, Breitbart and the BBC. Many of the clippings in the release refer to individual acts or threats of violence.
ABC News’ Chris Looft, Kerem Inal, Lena Camilletti and Gaby Vinick contributed to this report.
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