The U.S. president’s meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Wednesday featured a clip cooked up by the White House falsely alleging “white genocide” in the post-apartheid nation. But when pressed as to why Donald Trump lied that thousands of white farmers had been “murdered” in South Africa, administration officials balked.
“The president showed a video that he said showed more than 1,000 burial sites of White South Africans that he said were murdered,” said NBC News’s Yamiche Alcindor, during a press briefing Thursday. “We know that that was not true, and that the video wasn’t true. So I wonder, why did the president choose to show that?”
“No, it is true that the video showed the crosses,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The video showed images of crosses in South Africa about white farmers who have been killed and politically persecuted because of the color of their skin, and those crosses are representing their lives and that they are now dead and their government did nothing about it.”
The clip in question showed a thin strip of highway from Newcastle and Normandein in South Africa. It was not a “burial site” as Trump had claimed, locals told the BBC Thursday. Instead, it was a “temporary memorial” to symbolically commemorate murdered farmers across the country. South Africa has 64 million people in it, but every year more than 26,000 people are murdered, making the country’s murder rate roughly nine times higher than that of the United States.
Studies indicate that the vast majority of murder victims in South Africa are Black or mixed-race men between the ages of 15 and 44 and that most of them are economically disadvantaged.
South Africa notoriously maintained its oppressive system of apartheid through the early 1990s, segregating Black South Africans from white residents and depriving them of civil and political power.
Despite that history, the world’s richest man—and richest white Afrikaner, Elon Musk, has used his platform to push the narrative that South Africa oppresses white people, particularly white people of means, claiming that the nation unfairly restricts white citizens via “racist laws.” (Ramaphosa offered Musk a Starlink contract ahead of the head of state’s meeting with Trump, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, in spite of the fact that Musk’s business doesn’t fit the parameters of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment laws.)
Even white South Africans have protested that claims of a “white genocide” in their country are false.
“There’s no sign of it, never has been. In fact, Whites are economically the strongest group” in the country, Piet Croucamp, an academic at North-West University in South Africa, told CBS News. “Sixty-four percent of all boardrooms in South Africa are still White. The average incomes of White South Africans are vastly higher than Black South Africans’.… They have better schools, they have better education, private health care. This is the land of milk and honey if you’re white.”
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