During a recent meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump displayed a video he claimed depicted mass graves of white farmers, alleging evidence of racial persecution in South Africa.
However, an investigation by The New York Times has revealed that the footage was misrepresented.
In a dramatic moment at the meeting, Trump dimmed the lights to present the video. “These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over a thousand white farmers,” he stated, referring to rows of white crosses along a rural road, accompanied by numerous parked vehicles.
But the video in question was not of burial sites, nor did it show graves. The footage was actually from a September 5, 2020, memorial procession for a white farming couple murdered in late August that year near Newcastle, South Africa. A local news outlet had reported on the event with the headline “Procession to Normandien stretches across many kilometres.”
According to The New York Times, the crosses were placed temporarily for the procession and later removed. These symbolic markers were set up ahead of the memorial event and were not actual grave markers. This was further confirmed by Google Street View images from 2023, which show no crosses at the site. Social media videos from the day of the procession also show people installing the crosses.
Despite this, a White House official told The New York Times that “each cross represented one white slain farmer,” though the official did not clarify why Trump referred to the site as a burial ground. Tech billionaire Elon Musk also shared the same video twice on X (formerly Twitter), lending further visibility to the mischaracterised footage.
The crosses, while not graves, have often been used as symbols in protests highlighting the killings of white farmers in South Africa. Protesters at the 2020 event displayed flags, drove tractors, and carried a banner reading, “President Ramaphosa, how many more must die???”
While South Africa does have a high crime rate, police data does not support the claim that white farmers are disproportionately targeted. Moreover, the United Nations definition of genocide requires “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” No such pattern has been proven in South Africa. The country’s current agriculture minister is also white, further complicating the narrative.