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US President Donald Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during a meeting at the White House in Washington, DC on Wednesday when he claimed that a “genocide” against white Afrikaners is taking place in South Africa. This claim has been widely discredited.

Here are some of the key moments from the meeting.

Ramaphosa came bearing golfers and a book

The South African leader appeared to have arrived at the Oval Office with hopes of mending a tricky relationship between the United States and South Africa.

Trump started the meeting by referring to Ramaphosa as a man who is, “in some circles, really respected, other circles, a little bit less respected, like all of us in all fairness”.

Trump’s love for golf is no secret and, perhaps in the hope of defusing tension, Ramaphosa brought along two of South Africa’s top golfers, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, both of whom are white. “These two guys are unbelievable,” Trump said.

Ramaphosa also presented Trump with a repository of South Africa’s golf courses, compiled in a book weighing 14kg (31 pounds) and featuring writing by Els. White businessman Johann Rupert — South Africa’s richest man — was also part of Ramaphosa’s delegation.

Trump accused South Africa of ‘white genocide’

During the meeting, Trump repeatedly claimed that genocide against white farmers is taking place in South Africa, an allegation denied by Ramaphosa.

Earlier this month, 59 white “refugees” were flown from South Africa to the US as part of a relocation plan for white South Africans devised by the Trump administration.

Trump told Ramaphosa that these were white farmers fleeing violence directed at them in South Africa. “We have many people that feel they’re being persecuted, and they’re coming to the United States,” said Trump. “People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety. Their land is being confiscated, and in many cases, they’re being killed.”

But Ramaphosa denied allegations of a “white genocide” in South Africa. “If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you, these three gentlemen would not be here,” the South African president said, referring to Els, Goosen and Rupert.

While murder is an issue in South Africa, a majority of victims are Black and are targeted by thieves, experts say, not for political reasons.

“There is no merit to Trump’s fantasy claims of white genocide,” South African historian Saul Dubow, professor of Commonwealth history at the University of Cambridge, told Al Jazeera. “South Africa is a violent country and, in economic terms, one of the most unequal societies in the world. The violence is criminal rather than political, though racial injustice inevitably forms part of the context.”

Dubow suggested that Trump may be more angry about South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, filed in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023 in relation to the war on Gaza.

While the Trump administration is welcoming “refugees” from South Africa, it is simultaneously removing protections for those from other countries. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has revoked protection from deportation previously granted to more than 800,000 people who escaped conflict zones or danger in Venezuela, Haiti, Afghanistan and Cameroon.

‘Turn the lights down’: Trump displayed a video showing attacks

Trump claimed he had video and photo evidence to back up his “white genocide” allegations.

At one point during the meeting, the US president flipped through a stack of printed news clippings. “Death, death, death,” he said, showing the cameras one news article after another.

He held up one particular article from a publication called American Thinker, titled “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you”. While the article mentions South Africa, Trump said that the thumbnail image showed white farmers being buried. However, the thumbnail proved to be a screengrab from a news clip about violence against women in Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Goma.

Trump then asked for the lights in the Oval Office to be dimmed and a five-minute video montage was displayed on a screen. The videos included one of a South African opposition figure, Julius Malema, the leader of the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, singing the anti-apartheid song Dubul’ ibhunu (“Kill the Boer”) at a rally. The title of the song is often also translated as “kill the white farmer”.

Dubow said some populists do promote “inflammatory songs” such as “Kill the Boers” in South Africa. “This may or may not be meant literally,” he told Al Jazeera. “President Ramaphosa and the ANC [Ramaphosa’s party, African National Congress] do not support such rhetoric.”

Next, Trump went on the attack again. “You do allow them to take land,” Trump told Ramaphosa.

“Nobody can take land,” Ramaphosa said.

“When they take the land, they kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them,” Trump replied.

“There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately through criminal activity, are not only white people, majority of them are Black people,” Ramaphosa said. Trump cut him off, saying “the farmers are not Black”.

Talking about South Africa’s land reform law

In January, Ramaphosa signed a new land expropriation law aimed at righting apartheid-era wrongs in South Africa.

Under the new law, the government has the power to seize privately owned land from people of any race for public purposes and public interests. While the law provides for compensation payments, it also allows for seizure without compensation in certain instances. This law replaced a 1975 law which was criticised for lacking clear compensation plans and being legally ambiguous.

White South Africans are mostly either Afrikaans-speaking descendants of Dutch settlers or English-speaking descendants of British colonialists.

Until the 1990s, white Afrikaners controlled the country under the system of apartheid, a system which excluded the Black majority in South Africa.

Even though apartheid officially ended in 1994, several of the most successful business and farmland owners in South Africa are white and more than half of the country’s Black population is categorised as poor. White South Africans make up about 7 percent of the population but own more than 70 percent of the land.

“The long history of colonialism and land dispossession in South Africa has not been addressed. Historical racial injustice remains keenly felt. White farmers remain in possession of most of the productive land, 30 years after 1994,” Dubow said.

“White farmers, large producers in particular, have generally done well in the post-apartheid era. They are probably more vulnerable to American tariffs than physical attacks,” said Dubow.

In February, Trump froze aid to South Africa, saying the new land law permits the government to seize land from ethnic minority Afrikaners without compensation.

As of mid-May, however, no land had been forcibly taken by the South African government without compensation under the new law.

The Trump administration also extensively scaled back the operations of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), stripping aid organisations all over the world of foreign assistance. This put more than 8,000 workers in South Africa’s national HIV programme out of work.

“South Africans keenly feel the withdrawal of American support of HIV/AIDS programmes,” Dubow said. “A key question is the future of the AGOA [African Growth and Opportunity Act] agreement, signed in 2000, which allows tariff-free exports to the United States. South African manufactured motor cars and agricultural exports would be hit should AGOA not be renewed,” he added. As of 2024, 32 sub-Saharan countries are eligible for AGOA benefits.

“Another indicator will be whether Trump attends the upcoming G20 in South Africa.”

Angling for a trade deal

Ramaphosa had promised South Africans that he would present a trade deal to the US, so he talked about the history of economic cooperation between Washington and Pretoria, and dangled access to “rare earth minerals”.

“We’ve got critical minerals that you want to fuel the growth of your own economy and reindustrialise. So, we have that on offer, including rare earth minerals,” Ramaphosa told Trump.

South Africa holds large reserves of gold, platinum group metals, chrome ore, manganese ore, zirconium, vanadium and titanium.

Critical minerals are important for the manufacturing of clean energy and machinery and for the production of technology including mobile phones, solar panels and electric vehicles. In March, Trump invoked wartime powers to direct federal agencies to identify mines and government-owned land that could be exploited to boost the production of critical minerals.

South Africa is one of many countries eager to forge a new trade deal with the US in order to avoid Trump’s threat of punishing tariffs. On April 2, which Trump called “liberation day,” he slapped a 31 percent reciprocal tariff on South Africa, currently on a 90-day pause. The US’s universal 10 percent tariff on overseas goods remains in place, including for South Africa.

In 2023, 7 percent of South Africa’s exports went to the US and 6.4 percent of its imports came from the US, according to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC).

While the two countries did not confirm a trade agreement at Wednesday’s meeting, Ramaphosa told reporters afterwards that the discussion was “a great success”. He added that he presented a framework for a trade deal to Trump, and the two agreed to continue having discussions to figure out the specifics of this deal.

Not the first such ambush

This was not the first time a foreign leader has faced a hostile atmosphere in the Oval Office.

US President Donald Trump held a contentious meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday, when he repeated allegations that he and members of his administration have previously levelled, suggesting that white South African farmers are being systematically killed.

To prove his point, Trump showed the South African leader online videos, speeches and news articles.

“Generally, they’re white farmers and they’re fleeing South Africa, and …. it’s a very sad thing to see. But I hope we can have an explanation of that because I know you don’t want that,” the US president said, as the visiting delegation looked on in disbelief.

Tensions have been escalating between the United States and South Africa since Trump took office this year, with Washington cutting off aid to Africa’s largest economy and sending back its ambassador last month.

But how true were Trump’s claims during the meeting in the Oval Office? Here is a fact check:

Trump repeated claims that there’s a ‘white genocide’ in South Africa: Is there?

No, there is not. Suggestions by Trump that a white genocide may be taking place have been repeatedly debunked by South African officials and independent analysts — and by data.

“So we take [refugees] from many locations if we feel there’s persecution or genocide going on,” the US president said in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

“And we had a lot of people, I must tell you Mr. President [Ramaphosa], we have had a tremendous number of people, especially since they’ve seen this – generally they’re white farmers, and they’re fleeing South Africa.”

Earlier this month, 59 white South Africans arrived in the US as part of a refugee programme set up by Trump to offer sanctuary to them.

Trump’s claim echoes white nationalist beliefs that legislation in South Africa aimed at rectifying apartheid is now, in fact, discriminatory against the Afrikaner community.

Right-wing organisations, such as the Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum, have been championing a narrative that Afrikaners are under an existential threat.

The facts suggest otherwise.

“There is no credible evidence to support the claim that white farmers in South Africa are being systematically targeted as part of a campaign of genocide,” Anthony Kaziboni, a senior researcher at the University of Johannesburg, told Al Jazeera.

While South Africa does not break down crime statistics by race, according to the most recent data from April to December 2024 provided by the government, there were 19,696 murders during this period.

Only 36 of those murders were connected to farms, and only seven of the victims were farmers. The number of white victims is unclear. The remaining 29 victims were farm workers, who are predominantly Black in South Africa.

The scale of farm murders captured by the South African government’s data broadly matches the data of even AfriForum. The group says that 50 and 49 farm murders took place in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

“Genocide is a grave term, legally defined by the UN as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. That threshold is not met in the case of South Africa’s farm attacks,” Kaziboni said.

White South Africans constitute 7 percent of the nation’s population but own more than 70 percent of its land. They also have about 20 times more wealth than Blacks on average. In corporate South Africa, white individuals occupy 62 percent of top management positions, while 17 percent of leadership roles are held by Black managers.

Are there white ‘burial sites’ on the side of a South African highway?

The White House staff played a video clip at the Oval Office that Trump insisted showed “burial sites of thousands of white farmers” with white crucifixes lined up along a local highway.

When Ramaphosa asked him where the footage was from, saying, “This, I’ve never seen”, Trump claimed it was in South Africa.

Trump was right — the visuals were from South Africa. But he was also wrong — they weren’t images of burial sites.

The images had been shared by Tesla CEO Elon Musk earlier this year, too, as evidence that a white genocide was taking place.

However, local records and a report at the time from the South African Institute of Race Relations confirmed that crosses were symbolically planted on the side of the road during a 2020 protest related to the killings of white South African couple Glenn and Vida Rafferty on a farm.

They were not gravestones, as Trump falsely asserted.

According to South Africa’s Transvaal Agricultural Union — a group sympathetic to Afrikaner farmers — the total number of farm murders in South Africa between 1990 and 2024 stood at 2,229, which included 1,363 white farmers, 529 relatives of white farmers, 38 white workers, 30 white visitors, 88 Black farmers, 61 relatives of Black farmers, 188 Black workers, and seven Black visitors.

On average, 56 white South Africans were killed on farms per year during the 35-year period, according to this data.

“These crimes are brutal and concerning, but they stem from high levels of violent crime and poor rural policing, not from a state-sponsored or group-led intent to annihilate a racial group,” Kaziboni said.

Trump claims no justice for killers of white farmers

“You do allow them to take the land. And when they take the land, they kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them,” Trump complained to Ramaphosa.

A major topic of contention between the two countries is the recent passing of a land expropriation law by South Africa, which Trump has denounced as “persecution” of the country’s rich white minority.

The law allows the government to seize land from any private owner, white or otherwise, for public purposes and public interests. While the law spells out fair compensation, it also allows for seizure without compensation in certain instances.

However, unlike what Trump claimed, the law makes it clear that only the government – not vigilantes – can take land from farmers.

And Trump is inaccurate in his claims that “nothing happens” to those who carry out farm murders. In November 2022, two men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Glenn and Vida Rafferty, the couple whose death sparked the 2020 protest that Trump falsely claimed showed a line of gravesites by the highway.

What about South African politicians chanting ‘Kill the Boer’?

Trump’s team also showed a video of Julius Malema, an opposition figure and leader of the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, singing the anti-apartheid song Dubul’ ibhunu (“Kill the Boer”) at a rally.

“Boer” is the Afrikaans word for farmer, and on one level, it simply means farmer, of any race.

However, the title is indeed often taken to mean “Kill the Afrikaner”. The song emerged during the 1980s, as opposition to more than three decades of apartheid rule spilled onto the streets of South Africa’s townships. The title of the song is often also translated as “Kill the white farmer”.

Ramaphosa told Trump that he has repeatedly condemned Malema and his statements, which do not reflect the official government position.

Meanwhile, Malema has repeatedly stated – both in court and in interviews – that “we are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now”.

Anti-apartheid veterans argue that the lyrics are not an incitement to violence against white people, explaining that Boer symbolises the broader concept of an oppressor.

Courts in South Africa have also ruled that the song does not constitute hate speech.

Kaziboni said that these rulings “have been controversial”.

“Some fear they may leave vulnerable groups without sufficient recourse when threatened,” he said.

However, the University of Johannesburg researcher said, the courts and the South African government appear to be trying to find a balance between “freedom of expression, historical redress, and social cohesion”.

“The courts [have] emphasised the need to understand the song within its historical and political context, not as a literal incitement to violence, but as a symbolic act of resistance embedded in the country’s liberation struggle,” Kaziboni said.

‘Death, death, horrible death’: Trump presents sheaf of articles

Sitting next to Ramaphosa, Trump rifled through a series of articles that he said showed further proof of white farmers’ persecution.

“Death of people, death, death, death, horrible death, death,” Trump said as he showcased the news stories in front of reporters.

However, in the stack of papers was a blog post with an image from the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo showing Red Cross workers in protective gear handling body bags.

Kaziboni said that during a time of “rising global misinformation”, Trump’s framing of South Africa “misrepresents both the facts and the deeper history”.

On May 21, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa stunned the world by announcing that his government had officially granted refugee status to 48 million African Americans. The decision, made through an executive order titled “Addressing the Egregious Actions and Extensive Failures of the US Government”, was unveiled at a news conference held in the tranquil gardens of the Union Buildings in Pretoria.

Poised and deliberate, Ramaphosa framed the announcement as a necessary and humane response to what he called “the absolute mayhem” engulfing the United States. Flanked by Maya Johnson, president of the African American Civil Liberties Association, and her deputy Patrick Miller, Ramaphosa declared that South Africa could no longer ignore the plight of a people “systematically impoverished, criminalised, and decimated by successive US governments”.

Citing a dramatic deterioration in civil liberties under President Donald Trump’s second term, Ramaphosa specifically pointed to the administration’s barrage of executive orders dismantling affirmative action, gutting DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiatives, and permitting federal contractors to discriminate freely. These measures, he said, are calculated to “strip African Americans of dignity, rights, and livelihood – and to make America white again”.

“This is not policy,” Ramaphosa said, “this is persecution.”

President Trump’s 2024 campaign was unabashed in its calls to “defend the homeland” from what it framed as internal threats – a barely veiled dog whistle for the reassertion of white political dominance. True to his word, Trump has unleashed what critics are calling a rollback not just of civil rights, but of civilisation itself.

Ramaphosa noted that under the guise of restoring law and order, the federal government has instituted what amounts to an authoritarian crackdown on Black political dissent. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, he said, hundreds of African American activists have been detained by security forces – often on dubious charges – and interrogated under inhumane conditions.

While Ramaphosa focused on systemic oppression, Johnson sounded the alarm on what she bluntly described as “genocide”.

“Black Americans are being hunted,” she told reporters. “Night after night, day after day, African Americans across the country are being attacked by white Americans. These criminals claim they are ‘reclaiming’ America. Police departments, far from intervening, are actively supporting these mobs – providing logistical aid, shielding them from prosecution, and joining in the carnage.”

The African American Civil Liberties Association estimates that in the past six weeks alone, thousands of African Americans have been threatened, assaulted, disappeared, or killed, she said.

The crisis has not gone unnoticed by the remainder of the continent. Last week, the African Union convened an emergency summit to address the deteriorating situation in the US. In a rare unified statement, AU leaders condemned the US government’s actions and tasked President Ramaphosa with raising the issue before the United Nations.

Their mandate? Repatriate African Americans and offer refuge.

Ramaphosa confirmed that the first charter flights carrying refugees will arrive on African soil on May 25 – Africa Day.

“As the sun sets on this dark chapter of American history,” Ramaphosa said, “a new dawn is rising over Africa. We will not remain passive while a genocide unfolds in the United States.”

***

Of course, none of this has happened.

There was no statement on “Egregious Actions and Extensive Failures of the US Government” from South Africa. There was no news conference where an African leader highlighted the plight of his African brothers and sisters in the United States and offered them options.

There will be no refuge flights from Detroit to Pretoria.

Instead, after the US cut off aid to South Africa, repeated false accusations that a “white genocide” is taking place there and began welcoming Afrikaners as refugees, a pragmatic Ramaphosa paid a respectful visit to the White House on May 21.

During his visit, watched closely by the world media, he did not even mention the millions of African Americans facing discrimination, police violence and abuse under a president who is clearly determined to “Make America White Again” – let alone offer them refuge in Africa. Even when Trump insisted, without any basis in reality, that a genocide is being perpetrated against white people in his country, Ramaphosa did not bring up Washington’s long list of – very real, systemic, and seemingly accelerating – crimes against Black Americans.

He tried to remain polite and diplomatic, focusing not on the racist hostility of the American administration but on the important ties between the two nations.

Perhaps, in the real world, it is too much to ask an African leader to risk diplomatic fallout by defending Black lives abroad.

Perhaps it is easier to shake hands with a man who calls imaginary white suffering a “genocide” rather than to call out a real one unfolding on his watch.

In another world, Ramaphosa stood tall in Pretoria and told Trump`: “We will not accept your lies about our country – and we will not stay silent as you brutalise our kin in yours.”

In this one, he stood quietly in Washington – and did.

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