Trump confronts South African leader with baseless claims about white farmers
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
apnews.com /article/trump-ramaphosa-south-africa-9ce43dd5a9cd58e912653c99a8ab1944
Trump confronts South African leader with baseless claims about white farmers | AP News
Gerald Imray, Aamer Madhani 9-12 minutes 5/21/2025
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump used a White House meeting to forcefully confront South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, accusing the country of failing to address Trump’s baseless claim of the systematic killing of white farmers.
Trump even dimmed the lights of the Oval Office to play a video of a far-left politician chanting a song that includes the lyrics “kill the farmer.” He also leafed through news articles to underscore his point, saying the country’s white farmers have faced “death, death, death, horrible death.”
Trump had already cut all U.S. assistance to South Africa and welcomed several dozen white South African farmers to the U.S. as refugees as he pressed the case that a “genocide” is underway in the country .
The U.S. president has launched a series of accusations at South Africa’s Black-led government, claiming it is seizing land from white farmers, enforcing antiwhite policies and pursuing an anti-American foreign policy .
Experts in South Africa say there is no evidence of whites being targeted for their race, although farmers of all races are victims of violent home invasions in a country with a high crime rate.
“People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety,” Trump said. “Their land is being confiscated and in many cases they’re being killed.”
Ramaphosa pushed back against Trump’s accusation. The South African leader had sought to use the meeting to set the record straight and salvage his country’s relationship with the United States. The bilateral relationship is at its lowest point since South Africa enforced its apartheid system of racial segregation, which ended in 1994.
“We are completely opposed to that,” Ramaphosa said of the behavior alleged by Trump in their exchange. He added, “that is not government policy” and “our government policy is completely, completely against what he was saying.”
Trump was unmoved.
“When they take the land, they kill the white farmer,” he said.
Trump appeared prepared to confront Ramaphosa at the start of the meeting while journalists were present. Videos were cued up on a large TV set to show a clip of an opposition party leader, Julius Malema, leading an old anti-apartheid song.
The song has been contentious for years in the country because of its central lyrics “kill the Boer” and “shoot the Boer” — with Boer a word that refers to a white farmer. Malema, featured in the video, is not part of the country’s governing coalition.
Another clip played showed white crosses on the side of a road, described as a memorial for white farmers who were killed. Ramaphosa seemed baffled. “I’d like to know where that is, because this I’ve never seen.”
Trump kicked off the meeting by describing the South African president as a “truly respected man in many, many circles.” He added: “And in some circles he’s considered a little controversial.”
Ramaphosa chimed in, playfully jabbing back at a U.S. president who is no stranger to controversy. “We’re all like that,” Ramaphosa said.
Trump issued an executive order in February cutting all funding to South Africa over some of its domestic and foreign policies. The order criticized the South African government on multiple fronts, saying it is pursuing antiwhite policies at home and supporting “bad actors” in the world like the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran.
Trump has falsely accused the South African government of rights violations against white Afrikaner farmers by seizing their land through a new expropriation law. No land has been seized and the South African government has pushed back, saying U.S. criticism is driven by misinformation.
The Trump administration’s references to the Afrikaner people — who are descendants of Dutch and other European settlers — have also elevated previous claims made by Trump’s South African-born adviser Elon Musk and some conservative U.S. commentators that the South African government is allowing attacks on white farmers in what amounts to a genocide.
The administration’s concerns about South African policies cut even deeper than the concerns about white farmers.
South Africa has also angered the Trump White House over its move to bring charges at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Ramaphosa has also faced scrutiny in Washington for his past connections to MTN Group, Iran’s second-largest telecom provider. It owns nearly half of Irancell, a joint venture linked with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Ramaphosa served as board chair of MTN from 2002 to 2013.
“When one country is consistently unaligned with the United States on issue after issue after issue after issue, now you become -- you have to make conclusions about it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a Senate hearing this week.
Ramaphosa came into the meeting looking to avoid the sort of contentious engagement that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy experienced during his February Oval Office visit, when the Ukrainian leader found himself being berated by Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That disastrous meeting ended with White House officials asking Zelenskyy and his delegation to leave the White House grounds.
The South African president’s delegation included golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, a gesture to the golf-obsessed U.S. president. Ramaphosa brought Trump a massive book about South Africa’s golf courses. He even told Trump that he’s been working on his golf game, seeming to angle for an invitation to the links with the president.
Luxury goods tycoon and Afrikaner Johann Rupert was also in the delegation to help ease Trump’s concerns that land was being seized from white farmers.
At one point, Ramaphosa called on Zingiswa Losi, the president of a group of South African trade unions, who told Trump it is true that South Africa is a “violent nation for a number of reasons.” But she told him it was important to understand that Black men and women in rural areas were also being targeted in heinous crimes.
“The problem in South Africa, it is not necessarily about race, but it’s about crime,” Losi said. “We are here to say how do we, both nations, work together to reset, to really talk about investment but also help ... to really address the levels of crime we have in our country.”
Musk also attended Wednesday’s talks. He has been at the forefront of the criticism of his homeland, casting its affirmative action laws as racist against whites.
Musk has said on social media that his Starlink satellite internet service isn’t able to get a license to operate in South Africa because he is not Black.
South African authorities say Starlink hasn’t formally applied. It can, but it would be bound by affirmative action laws in the communications sector that require foreign companies to allow 30% of their South African subsidiaries to be owned by shareholders who are Black or from other racial groups disadvantaged under apartheid.
The South African government says its long-standing affirmative action laws are a cornerstone of its efforts to right the injustices of the white minority rule of apartheid, which denied opportunities to Blacks and other racial groups.
Following the contentious Oval Office exchange in front of the cameras, Trump hosted Ramaphosa for lunch.
Asked by a reporter as he left the White House if he thought Trump heard him out, the South African leader responded, “Yes, he did, and it went very well.”
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Imray reported from Johannesburg. AP writers Seung Min Kim, Chris Megerian, Darlene Superville, Sagar Meghani and Ali Swenson contributed reporting.
Zelensky In The Oval Office pt2
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Ramaphosa brought white pro golfers to contradict the narrative. Except, when asked, Ratief Goosen said "My dad was a property developer as well as a part-time farmer. And yeah, some of his buddy farmers got killed... it's a constant battle with — they're trying to burn the farms down to chase you away."
Bit of an own goal there.
This "piece" seems to miss the fact that Trump had him watch a video of what is going on early into the meeting. We shall see in the coming days what comes of this meet and greet
More expensive iron ore and platinum? We need them a heck of a lot more than they need us.
That was intentional. Anything to fit the narrative.
What a pathetic comment, I guess white supremist's killing African Americans isn't something we will never hear anything about from you moving forward because it is less than 1 percent of murders in the US, right John?
That's up to 270/yr. So it's probably fair to say that's not genocide.
However......to put this in perspective..... In the entire USA in 2021, we had 18 murders attributed to hate crimes.
So it's definitely an issue.
It's also pertinent that there are only approximately 50,000 white farmers in south Africa.
By comparison, between 1882 and 1968, 3,500 blacks were lynched out of over 10 million. Nobody says waives that away with an "only"
White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide. Experts said the deaths do not amount to genocide, and Trump misleads about land confiscation.
"The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false," said Gareth Newham, who heads a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.
"As an independent Institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity this, we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world."
There are about 2.7 million white Afrikaners, who are descendants of Dutch and French settlers, in South Africa. About 80% of the people living in South Africa are Black. From 1948 until the early 1990s, South Africa lived under apartheid rule , racial segregation that gave only white people power and forced Black South Africans to live separately from white people.
South Africa crime data and its limitations
In response to our email seeking evidence for Trump’s statements, the White House provided no data. A spokesperson said Afrikaners told U.S. officials about violent attacks, death threats, vandalism and racial slurs against farmers.
Newham said the primary motive for almost all farm attacks is robbery, which has long been documented .
"Attacks where there may be evidence of racial or political motives (i.e. slogans written on the wall at a scene of a crime, or words spoken by the attacker according to the victim), are exceedingly rare and make up only a few percent of the cases recorded," Newham said.
The majority of murder victims nationwide are poor, under- or unemployed young Black males, Newham said.
"Murder victimisation is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race," Newham said. About half of murders take place in about 12% of the precincts, "primarily townships or poor areas in metropolitan cities mostly populated by black African people."
The South African Police Service’s crime report for the period from April 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023, shows there were 51 murders on farms of a total of 27,494 murders nationwide. But the data has limitations.
The race of farm murder victims is not consistently recorded in official data, said Anthony Kaziboni, a senior researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa.
While anecdotal evidence suggests many victims are white, other victims are Black or nonwhite, Kaziboni said. "Media reports sometimes mention race, but these are sporadic and not methodologically robust enough to support claims of systemic racial targeting."
Nechama Brodie, a journalist who wrote a book on farm murders and has fact-checked the topic , told PolitiFact that the South African Police Services has not always been effective at creating a farm murder count. One challenge is deciding who is counted as a farmer because there are commercial farms and "smallholdings," which can simply be plots of land.
Brodie said AfriForum, a nongovernmental organization focused on Afrikaners, is one of the more reliable sources of information about killings of white Afrikaans-speaking farmers. AfriForum data, which is based on information from police, private security services, victims and media reports, showed about 50 farm murders a year.
Brodie said that a white farm owner’s death is more likely to be covered in the news than the killing of a rural smallholder. The majority of the country's smallholders and rural residents are Black.
"South African media coverage of murder victims is extremely selective, and creates a false depiction of who is most at risk," Brodie said.
No evidence that South Africa has sponsored or organized killings to destroy a group
We asked the State Department for evidence of a genocide of white farmers in South Africa, and a spokesperson said the department had nothing to announce regarding a genocide determination.
The official definition of genocide , written in 1948 following negotiations led by the United Nations, is killing, causing bodily harm, preventing births, or forcing the transferral of children "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
The definition includes no guidance on absolute numbers or percentages required to qualify as genocide.
There are many arguments about the definition of genocide, said Richard Breitman, an American University distinguished professor emeritus and author of books about the Holocaust.
"But many specialists regard the intent to destroy an entire ethnic, religious, or national group as essential," Breitman said. "It is not strictly a matter of numbers of victims, but of an organized effort, usually by a government or a political organization, to target a large percentage of a defined enemy group."
Experts rejected the "genocide" characterization of Afrikaners.
"There is no indication of a state-sponsored campaign or intent to eliminate a specific racial group," Kaziboni said. "The primary motive remains robbery, sometimes coupled with extreme violence, consistent with broader patterns of violent crime in South Africa."
The term genocide evokes the horrors of the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where 800,000 Tutsis were systematically killed, Kaziboni said.
"Against this backdrop and the UN’s legal definition, labelling farm killings as genocide is both inaccurate and misleading," Kaziboni said. "This does not diminish the severity of the violence or the need for enhanced rural safety, but it highlights the importance of responding with evidence, nuance, and context."
Jean-Yves Camus, co-director at the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, said the issue "needs to be seen in the broader context of a country plagued by crime and gang activity."
In most cases, new land law requires payment to owners
During apartheid, nonwhite families lost their homes and land. When apartheid ended in the mid-1990s, the government passed laws to help Black South Africans recover from decades of discrimination and abuse.
Ramaphosa signed a bill in January that spells out procedures for the government to take land for a public purpose. The bill calls for compensating landowners, with some exceptions such as if the land isn’t being used or the owner’s main purpose is not to develop the land.
The circumstances when payment isn’t required are "very limited," wrote Zsa-Zsa Temmers Boggenpoel, a Stellenbosch University professor who lectures about property law.
"In South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past, land distribution was grossly unequal on the basis of race," Boggenpoel wrote. "The country is still suffering the effects of this. So expropriation of property is a potential tool to reduce land inequality. This has become a matter of increasing urgency. South Africans have expressed impatience with the slow pace of land reform."
The main objective of the new law is to allow the government to legally take abandoned or underused land — such as hundreds of buildings in Johannesburg that have been abandoned by their owners and taken over by slumlords and people involved in organized crime, Newham said.
Experts told us that no land seizures have taken place yet.
"There is no evidence of systematic land confiscation targeting white farmers or anyone else," Kaziboni said.
Cool. I guess we can stop offering asylum to anyone who isn't the victim of an official genocide, which means no one gets asylum. Have to treat everyone the same.
Morning... embarrassing and interesting Ramaphosa has never seen the white crosses for farmers killed or knows where it is in SA..
We do and know of it...and no Australia has not been inundated with White South African farmers as Trump stated...
They do come here and many return as they don't like the life style and don't have a source of cheap labour to work the land..and their wife's can't cope without the maid service...
Pathetic. An embarrassment. A joke. A nightmare that's NEVER ending.