In a controversial turn during a diplomatic meeting at the White House on Wednesday, former U.S. President Donald Trump presented what he claimed was evidence of a “White genocide” in South Africa — only to have it quickly debunked as footage from a humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Trump, speaking to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, held up a printed screenshot from a Reuters video and claimed it showed White South African farmers being buried after mass killings. “These are all white farmers that are being buried,” Trump stated, pointing to the image during the televised meeting.
However, the image — originally filmed by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty — was taken in Goma, DRC, and showed humanitarian workers conducting a mass burial following an M23 rebel attack. The footage had nothing to do with South Africa. Reuters confirmed the image’s origin, and Katanty expressed shock at the misrepresentation, saying, “President Trump used what I filmed in DRC to try to convince President Ramaphosa that in his country, white people are being killed by Black people.”
The photo appeared in a blog post published by the conservative outlet American Thinker, which made general references to unrest in South Africa and the Congo but did not claim the image was from South Africa. The post’s author, Andrea Widburg, later admitted Trump had “misidentified the image” but defended the article’s broader message about what she described as pressures on South Africa’s White minority.
During the meeting, Trump also played a video montage of South African politicians chanting inflammatory slogans, including “kill the farmer,” a clip that has circulated in far-right online communities for years. When Ramaphosa clarified that the speakers were from a fringe party and not representative of government policy, Trump continued to assert a conspiracy, displaying more printouts and citing “death, death, death, horrible death.”
One of the visuals Trump used — a field of white crosses — was identified by the BBC as a memorial installation for a couple murdered in 2020, not a graveyard for over a thousand White farmers as Trump alleged.
South African officials have repeatedly denied accusations of racially motivated attacks against White farmers, and police statistics show that of the more than 26,000 murders in South Africa in 2024, only eight involved farmers, with no racial breakdown provided. Moreover, both Black and White South Africans work in farming.
Ramaphosa’s visit was intended to mend strained ties with the U.S., which had deteriorated under Trump’s administration due to disagreements over South Africa’s land reform, foreign policy, and treatment of minority groups. The Oval Office episode, however, seemed to deepen tensions rather than resolve them.
“This kind of misinformation damages international relations and fuels dangerous conspiracy theories,” said a senior South African diplomat following the meeting.
