'Death, death, death': How Trump embraced South Africa's 'white genocide' conspiracy theory

TWO MONTHS ON from his blow-up with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, US President Donald Trump has delivered another stinging rebuke to a world leader in the Oval Office – this time targeting South African president Cyril Ramaphosa.

In more extraordinary scenes in the White House, Trump ambushed Ramaphosa by challenging him about the apparent “genocide” of white farmers in South Africa.

The claim has no basis in facts, but it has nevertheless gained traction among the Trump administration as it has repeatedly clashed with South Africa’s government in recent months.

A series of diplomatic spats culminated in yesterday’s scenes in the White House, where Trump produced a string of articles and played a four-minute video which he claimed as proof that genocide is being committed against white people.

Although Ramaphosa avoided the drama of Zelenskyy’s argument with Trump, the episode still showed how Trump will resort to alternative facts on the world stage if he wants to embarrass another country’s leader.

The origin of the ‘white genocide’ claim

The claim that South Africa’s government is committing genocide against white South Africans and Afrikaners – South African descendants of Dutch and French colonisers – has circulated for decades.

White South Africans make up just a small percentage of the country’s population, but dominated its economy and government for years.

English and Afrikaner colonists ruled South Africa until 1994 under the system of apartheid, introduced in 1948, in which the black majority were deprived of political and economic rights.

Despite being a significant minority, white farmers also owned most of the farmland in the country.

After apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela’s party African National Congress (ANC) committed to redistributing 30% of the land owned by white farmers to black farmers (though most of this has still not happened).

In opposition to this, conservative Afrikaner groups have attempted to claim that white farmers are being targeted and killed by black South Africans, that their land has been seized by the government, and that they are being discriminated against.

White House claims

Claims of a genocide in South Africa began to make international news in February, when Elon Musk – a close aide of Trump who is originally from there – began to amplify conspiracy theories about genocide in the country of his birth.

Musk pointed to a law signed by the South African government the previous month that he claimed would enable the country’s government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

The claim spread to social media, where viral posts falsely claimed 60 white farmers were killed every day or that more than 4,000 had been murdered in the past six years.

It soon fed into a wider spat between the US and South Africa that has seen the White House criticise South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and the expulsion of Pretoria’s ambassador after he criticised the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement.

Trump accused South Africa of “being terrible” to long-time farmers in the country soon afterwards, issued an executive order offering to resettle white South Africans, and falsely accused Pretoria of expropriating white-owned farms.

Earlier this month, he granted refugee status to 54 white Afrikaners – despite halting the arrival of refugees from all other countries in one of the first acts of his second term as president.

Ramaphosa travelled to the White House to meet with Trump yesterday, and during a press conference afterwards (attended by Musk), the US president held up a series of printed-out news articles in an attempt to prove his claim.

“Death … death … death … horrible deaths,” he repeated, before handing the articles to Ramphosa.

“These people are being killed in large numbers,” the president said, saying that “thousands” of white farmers had been murdered.

He also and played a four-and-a-half minute montage of different videos to support his claim of a campaign to kill white farmers.

One clip showed white crosses erected along a winding road where dozens of cars and trucks are lined up.

“These are burial sites,” Trump said. “Those cars are… stopped to pay respect to their family members who were killed.”

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The facts

Genocide is not being committed in South Africa, and almost nobody outside the Trump administration, conspiracy theorists and fringe Afrikaner groups claim that it is.  

The apparent evidence that Trump showed Ramaphosa in the White House yesterday is also deeply flawed and does not support the claim.

One of the articles he held up turned out to be an old blog post that contained a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Meanwhile, the footage of crosses in the video clip was from a 2020 protest, where crosses were placed along a rural road following the murder of a couple on their farm in Normandien, according to videos and press articles from the time.

They did not mark the sites of graves.

According to the Genocide Convention of 1948, genocide means any of a number of specific acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.

Those acts include killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 

Intent to commit genocide is what distinguishes it from other crimes like war crimes and crimes against humanity, and makes it much harder to prove. 

There have also been very few cases in which international courts have reached a finding of genocide.

The claim that genocide is happening in South Africa has not even gained much traction there, including among white people. 

None of the country’s political parties – including those that represent Afrikaners – have said that it is happening, while in February, a South African court dismissed claims that genocide was taking place in the country as “clearly imagined” and “not real”.

Official statistics also fail to support the claim.

Although farmers have been killed, their numbers are small in the larger context of crime in South Africa, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum, which has long pushed a campaign to shed light on farm murders, counted 49 such killings in 2023.

In comparison, police recorded a total of 27,621 murders between April 2023 and March 2024 – about 75 people killed every day. Most of the victims are young black men in urban areas.

Figures from groups representing farmers and Afrikaner interests showed that around 50 people of all races are killed on farms every year.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on farms across the country in over 30 years to 2024 – about 100 people every year – according to the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa.

Even aside from killings, the land restitution laws – which Musk and Trump have cited to claim that genocide is happening – have also been mis-represented and do not back up the claim.

The law passed by the South African government in February only stipulates that the government may, in certain circumstances, offer “nil compensation” for property it decides to expropriate in the public interest.

South African officials and analysts say no land has been confiscated, and the act makes clear that the government is obliged to pay fair compensation for any expropriation of property.

The new law is simply intended to address historic inequalities in land ownership, with the minority white population still owning most farmland three decades after the end of apartheid.

Despite the ANC’s initial aim to return 30% of land to black farmers, land restitution has not made much headway since apartheid ended in 1994.

According to the most recent government figures, in 2017 white people – only 7.3% of the population – still held 72% of commercial farmland.

Last year, the country’s president Cyril Ramaphosa said that 25% of land previously owned by white farmers had been returned to black South Africans.

The new law still hasn’t been used to redistribute any land.

Contains reporting from © AFP 2025.

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