Trump Ambushed South Africa’s Ramaphosa With Video. It Had Many Falsehoods

US President Donald Trump ambushed his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa at talks Wednesday with a video meant to help unfounded claims of the “persecution” of white farmers.

Trump supposed the 4:30-minute video performed at their assembly within the White House, and which has been broadly shared on social media in latest weeks, to be proof of a marketing campaign to kill white farmers in what he says quantities to a “genocide”.

But the video contained many falsehoods.

Trump demande des comptes au président de l’Afrique du Sud Cyril Ramaphosa au sujet de tous ces fermiers blancs massacrés par milliers dans son pays depuis des décennies. Il lui montre la vidéo dans laquelle Julius Malema exhorte ses militants à tuer les Blancs : “kill the Boer”. pic.twitter.com/xeToU6XX4A

— Hervé Ryssen (@insoumix2) May 22, 2025

The crosses will not be gravesites 

One clip reveals white crosses erected alongside a winding highway the place dozens of vehicles and vans are lined up.

“These are burial websites,” Trump mentioned. “Those vehicles are… stopped to pay respect to their members of the family who have been killed.”

The footage is from a 2020 protest the place crosses have been positioned alongside a rural highway following the homicide of a pair on their farm in Normandien, based on movies and press articles from the time.

They don’t mark the websites of graves.

The murderers have been convicted to life imprisonment in 2022.

The politician featured will not be in authorities 

Another scene performs into Trump’s claims that the federal government is expropriating white farms and reveals a politician saying: “South Africans occupy land, that is who we’re.”

“These are folks which might be officers,” Trump claimed.

But the speaker will not be in authorities. He is the chief of the unconventional left opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) celebration, Julius Malema.

The EFF got here fourth in final 12 months’s elections with solely 9.5 % of the vote. It has by no means been in authorities.

‘Kill the Boer’ is an anti-apartheid chant 

Malema is proven within the video chanting an notorious struggle-era track, “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer”.

Trump prompt this was an actual name to kill “boers”, who’re farmers from the Afrikaans minority that led the earlier apartheid authorities.

The extremely controversial chant is a long time previous and was a rallying cry in the course of the battle towards white-minority rule, which resulted in 1994.

There have been a number of requires it to be banned however the courts have dominated that it must be thought-about in its historic context.

An picture from the Democratic Republic of Congo

After exhibiting the video, Trump held up a stack of printed articles he claimed documented farm murders in South Africa.

Among them was a weblog publish about tribalism in Africa from a little-known web site known as “American Thinker”, with a photograph exhibiting members of the Red Cross in white hazmat fits dealing with physique baggage.

“Here’s burial websites in all places, these are white farmers who’re being buried,” Trump mentioned.

But the picture is a screengrab from a February YouTube video of Red Cross staff responding after ladies have been raped and burned alive throughout a mass jailbreak within the Democratic Republic of Congo metropolis of Goma, based on its caption.

The seize was from a weblog publish revealed by Indian information outlet WION that used footage equipped by Reuters.

White farmers will not be ‘killed in massive numbers’

“These persons are being killed in massive numbers,” Trump claimed, exhibiting the articles that he claimed reported on the murders of “hundreds” of white farmers.

While farmers have been killed, their numbers are small within the bigger context of crime in South Africa, which has one of many highest homicide charges on the earth.

Afrikaner foyer group AfriForum, which has lengthy pushed a marketing campaign to make clear farm murders, counted 49 such killings in 2023.

In comparability, police recorded a complete of 27,621 murders between April 2023 and March 2024 — about 75 folks killed day-after-day. Most of the victims are younger black males in city areas.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)