On Wednesday in the Oval Office, U.S. President Donald Trump received South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa. Their initially friendly banter quickly gave way as Trump levied false claims over a genocide of white South Africans, and in particular white farmers. He even cued a misleading video alleging to back up his claim and charged Ramaphosa and his team to watch it.
It was an embarrassing episode of disrespect to a foreign leader, perhaps second only to Trump and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s fight in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And it occurred shortly after the Trump administration welcomed its first batch of global refugees: white South Africans. While Trump has shut the door to refugees as part of an across-the-board immigration crackdown, he has cynically and painfully made an exception for white Afrikaners, the group that ruled during South Africa’s apartheid era.
Relations between the United States and South Africa have been deteriorating since the moment Trump returned to the White House. The ostensible reason is an unfolding “white genocide” in South Africa, a false claim pushed by Trump and Elon Musk, who was born in the country. The narrative revolves around white farmers, whom Trump and Musk claim have been systematically targeted for murder and land expropriation because of their race. The claims concerning murder are simply false, with little factual basis at all. The allegations about land appropriation are also wrong, but for more complicated reasons.
At the end of apartheid and decades of forced removals of Blacks from their lands, whites made up only 11 percent of the country’s population but held 86 percent of its farmland. After 30 years of efforts to return land to dispossessed Blacks, that picture has only changed marginally. Notwithstanding some notable successes in land restitution, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has been struggling to broadly open economic opportunity for Blacks on the land. Today, whites comprise around 7 percent of the population and own about 72 percent of farmland.
That glaring disparity has fueled vocal calls for the ANC to move faster on land returns. After years of debate, in January of this year Ramaphosa signed into law a new bill allowing the government to expropriate land without compensation for the purposes of ongoing land restitution to Blacks. Trump hit back with an executive order that cut off foreign aid to South Africa and that opened up a pathway for white Afrikaners to claim refugee status in the United States.
That law has yet to be exercised, and in practice its scope is quite circumscribed. Expropriations are also subject to judicial review, which is quite strong in South Africa.
Some groups and leaders within the country support a more radical approach to transferring land back to Blacks. Most notable is the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema, who advocates for the large-scale occupation of white-owned land.
Malema featured in the video Trump aired in the Oval Office purporting to show the persecution of Afrikaners. There, Malema was singing “Kill the Boer,” a controversial anti-apartheid song. Ramaphosa pointed out that the South African government does not endorse Malema and that South African citizens enjoy freedom of speech. That song in particular has been examined in the courts for whether it constitutes hate speech, but recent rulings indicate that it is protected speech that, due to its heritage in association with the anti-apartheid liberation movement, should not be taken literally. Trump charged Ramaphosa to arrest Malema during their meeting.
The rest of Trump’s video was a mish-mash of different clips, including an alleged large-scale burial site of murdered white farmers that turned out to be a memorial for a single instance. Trump also had a disorganized stack of loose-leaf paper printouts of alleged targets of violence that turned out to include at least one photo taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
What was obviously absent was any concrete evidence of whites being systematically targeted with violence for their land ownership or race. That’s not to say that white farmers haven’t been killed in the country—some, lamentably, have been. But homicide rates in South Africa are generally high across the board. Compared to the U.S., where the homicide rate is around six per 100,000 people, the homicide rate in South Africa is 45 per 100,000.
Police statistics indicate that white South Africans are not killed at any higher rate than other South Africans. To the contrary, whites are less subject to violence, comprising less than 2 percent of murder victims. Of 26,232 murders recorded by police in the country in 2024, eight of the victims were farmers.
There are also no instances of uncompensated land seizures in South Africa, which Trump has talked up as a bogeyman, but which are intended to be used quite sparingly, and are subject to judicial review in a country with a strong rule of law. I have spent time in South Africa with land restitution communities and have talked with government officials and close observers. One of the chief complaints of the ANC’s record on land reform is that it has not done enough and not done reform well—rather than that it’s had some sort of scorched-earth policy of land seizures.
The ANC has not been a radical party as some feared during the transition from apartheid. Instead, it has hewn to Nelson Mandela’s legacy of moderation. For decades it has been criticized from both the right and left. It lost its majority for the first time in last year’s elections, and rather than ally itself with radical fringe parties, it reached across the aisle to connect with the party most closely associated with white South Africans and business: the Democratic Alliance.
The broadside against Ramaphosa in the Oval Office mainly served as a performative play to Trump’s base. It also signals to other foreign leaders that Trump will behave as he wants, and that truth is irrelevant. That will only serve to push countries that pride themselves on their independence further away from links to the United States.
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