Why Trump's claims about the killing of South African farmers are inaccurate

Donald Trump put his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa on the spot with a list of claims and video clips when the pair met in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

But multiple pieces of evidence that President Trump used to support his claims are inaccurate. One video the White House played showed lines of white crosses alongside a road.

Mr Trump told President Ramaphosa that the footage showed burial sites of more than 1,000 white farmers in South Africa. The clip appears to originate from a YouTube video from 2020 showing crosses lining the P39-1 road near Newcastle in the east of South Africa.

The caption of the video, which was filmed in KwaZulu-Natal province, explains that the crosses are a memorial for murdered farm workers after two farmers Glen and Vida Rafferty had been killed. There is no indication that the crosses mark where the deceased have been buried or that each cross represents a white farmer.

Satellite map imagery from 2023 shows the crosses are no longer there. Local reporting at the time quotes attendants of the memorial as saying the crosses are a show of support not specifically for white farmers but for people from all walks of life who were concerned about farm murders.

White crosses have been used as a symbol of commemoration for the murder of farmers in South Africa for years. The Witkruis Monument in the north of the country displays dozens of white crosses as a tribute to farmer workers who have been killed.

Read more from Data and Forensics:What aid has entered Gaza - and where is it going?NHS waiting list rises for first time in seven months Other parts of the evidence presented by Mr Trump were also incorrect. At one point, while talking about the deaths of white farmers in South Africa, Mr Trump held up a printed-out image of a blog called 'American Thinker'.

The blog picture is taken from a February 2025 YouTube video of Red Cross workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr Trump also played videos of people he said were officials promoting the killing of white farmers.

The videos were of rallies or speeches from opponents of Mr Ramaphosa's ANC party, which is currently in power. Many of these videos show Julius Malema, the leader of the black nationalist and communist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party.

The EFF are not a mainstream party and are not officials as Mr Trump claimed. Mr Ramaphosa responded to Mr Trump, saying: "Our government policy is completely against what he [Malema] was saying." He continued that "they [the EFF] are a small minority party, which is allowed to exist according to our constitution".

These claims were made as part of President Trump's allegation that white people in South Africa are facing a high level of race-based violence. "We have many people that feel they're being persecuted, and they're coming to the United States.

So we take from many... locations, if we feel there's persecution or genocide going on," the US president said, referring specifically to white farmers.

South Africa has rejected the allegation that white people are disproportionately targeted by crime. South African police data does not give race-based crime statistics.

Police data from April 2020 to March 2024 showed 225 people were killed on farms in South Africa. South Africa crime data suggests 98,115 murders between 2020 and 2024, of which killings on farms are a very small proportion, around 0.2%.

The accuracy of crime data in South Africa has been questioned by academic experts, as farm murders are not consistently recorded in official data. The White House did not respond to Sky News' request for comment.

Earlier this month, President Trump offered refuge to a small number of white South Africans. In March, the South African ambassador to the US Ebrahim Rasool was expelled after American secretary of state Marco Rubio him of being a "race-baiting politician" who hates President Trump.

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