US President Donald Trump, proper, and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, second proper, as a video performs throughout a gathering within the Oval Workplace of the White Home in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Might 21, 2025.
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JOHANNESBURG — President Trump claims a “genocide” of white folks, significantly Afrikaner farmers, is going down in South Africa.
When he met the nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, within the Oval Workplace on Wednesday, Trump performed him a video — beforehand shared not less than twice on social media by his advisor Elon Musk — that he stated was proof of this.
“Now this is very bad, those are burial sites right there. Burial sites. Over a thousand. Of white farmers,” Trump stated, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The video confirmed a street lined on both facet with scores of white crosses and a procession of vehicles carrying mourners paying their respects.
A startled Ramaphosa requested Trump the place the placement was, saying he’d by no means seen the video earlier than. South Africa, replied Trump.
It was certainly a video taken in South Africa, in KwaZulu-Natal province.
However, it was not a burial website.
“My mother and father Glen and Vida Rafferty had been murdered, or gunned down, by six males on their farm in 2020, so these crosses had been erected as a memorial on the day of their funeral,” Nathan Rafferty informed NPR.
Rafferty, a white South African who now lives in Brisbane, Australia, defined the “local community used it as a means of protest and to pay tribute.”
Opposite to Trump’s claims, no our bodies had been ever buried alongside that street and the white crosses do not mark graves.
Requested on Thursday if the president received it fallacious, White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave this clarification.
“What’s unsubstantiated about the video? The video shows crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government,” she stated.
The crosses did not characterize a selected variety of farm homicide victims, they had been a symbolic tribute to the murdered couple.
Throughout the assembly, Trump additionally held up a printout of a weblog submit exhibiting a photograph taken by Reuters , from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mistakenly claiming it was taken in South Africa.
Rafferty stated he was shocked when he noticed the video proven within the Oval Workplace assembly.
“The last thing you expect to see are some of the most traumatic parts of your life shown on international TV. So it was totally unexpected,” he stated.
“It obviously opened several new wounds.”
The assailants had been planning to rob his mother and father, in accordance with information reviews on the time. Although they’d aimed to get into the protected, in the long run, they solely stole a automobile and some objects of little worth.
Whereas many murders in South Africa stay unsolved, three of the Rafferty’s murderers had been tried and two of them had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
NPR requested Rafferty what he thought concerning the white “genocide” suggestion from the Trump administration.
“Do I think that there’s a targeted genocide program of some sort?” he stated. “No I don’t.”
Nevertheless, Rafferty stated he thinks rather more must be carried out to stop and condemn what are generally brutal assaults.
“I never went farming because I was fearful of the tinderbox that it is, despite having four generations of farmers in my family,” he added.
South Africa’s authorities does not deny the nation suffers a few of the highest crime charges on the planet. Members of Ramaphosa’s delegation to Washington had been frank about this being an enormous drawback.
On Friday, South Africa launched its quarterly crime statistics. These aren’t normally damaged down by race, however given Trump’s assaults, police stated they had been making an exception.
From January to March 2025, six folks had been killed on farms in South Africa, police stated.
Out of these six, one was white.
“The history of farm murders in the country has always been distorted and reported in an unbalanced way; the truth is that farm murders have always included African people in more numbers,” stated Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, referring to Black Africans.
Mchunu additionally spoke concerning the Rafferty case, throughout which the couple “were sadly murdered by criminals in their home.”
“The incident sparked a very strong protest by the farming community in the area. The crosses symbolized killings on farms over years, they are not graves,” Mchunu stated.
“And it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa.”
