‘We have cope with the previous,’ South African President Ramaphosa tells Trump on land seizures
In a tense Oval Workplace assembly on Wednesday, President Donald Trump immediately challenged South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on allegations of genocide and violence towards white farmers.
Initially framed as a bilateral summit on commerce and different issues, the assembly turned heated after a member of the White Home press pool requested Ramaphosa in regards to the president’s claims of genocide towards Afrikaners, who’re largely descendants of Dutch arrivals who started arriving on the Cape of Good Hope Colony in 1652.
A reporter requested, “Mr. President, what will it take for you to be convinced there’s no white genocide in South Africa?”
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“It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends, like those who are here,” responded Ramaphosa, who gestured towards South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who accompanied him to the White Home. “… It will take President Trump to listen to them. I will not be repeating what I’ve been saying.”
He continued, “I would say if there was Afrikan genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture. He would not be with me. So it will take him, President Trump, listening to their stories, to their perspective. That is the answer to your question.”
Trump then requested an aide to usher in printed-out articles documenting what the president referred to as “thousands of stories” about Afrikaners being killed and requested aides to dim the lights within the Oval Workplace as a video started to play exhibiting footage of South Africa’s Financial Freedom Fighters (EFF) social gathering singing the apartheid-era “Shoot the Boer” track — with lyrics which embody “kill the Boer, kill the white farmer” — in entrance of an enormous crowd.
Trump later remarked, “That man is traveling across South Africa, and it’s not a small party. It was a stadium holding one hundred thousand people with hardly an empty seat. That’s significant representation.”
???? JUST SHOWN IN THE OVAL OFFICE: Proof of Persecution in South Africa. pic.twitter.com/rER1l8sqAU
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 21, 2025
As the video played, Ramaphosa and two members of his delegation appeared disinterested and did not watch the footage. As Trump narrated a portion of the video showing a long row of crosses displayed alongside a road and cars stopped for passengers to exit to pay their respects to the dead, Ramaphosa and the delegation turned in the direction of the monitor.
“Those crosses represent dead white people, mostly white farmers,” Trump said, later adding, “Each white cross, approximately one thousand of them, represents a white farmer or their family member who was killed. The cars are stopped to honor them, and it’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it, with crosses lining both sides of the road for all those people who were killed.”
When an NBC Information reporter interjected with an off-topic query in regards to the Qatari jet gifted to the Trump administration this week, the president dismissed the query, calling the questioner a “terrible reporter.” Minutes later, Trump appeared extra conciliatory towards Ramaphosa.
“I don’t want you to look bad,” stated the president. “But we have hundreds of people, thousands of people trying to come into our country because they feel they’re going to be killed, and their land is going to be confiscated. And you do have laws that were passed that gives you the right to confiscate land for no payment. You can take away land for no payment.”
In response, Ramaphosa underscored his nation’s constitutional protections, but additionally referred to what he referred to as the necessity to “deal with the past.” “Our constitution guarantees and protects the sanctity of tenure of land ownership, and that constitution protects all South Africans with regard to land ownership,” he stated. “However, we do say, because we’ve got to deal with the past, the government, and as your government also has the right to expropriate land for public use … we’ve never really gotten underway with that, and we are going to be doing that.”
Trump then appeared to accuse Ramaphosa of confiscating land from farmers on the premise of their race. “You’re taking people’s land away … and those people, in many cases, are being executed,” he stated. “They’re being executed, and they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers, and that’s a tough situation.”
He additionally accused the media of ignoring the plight of Afrikaners, including, “We have a very corrupt media that won’t even report this. If this were the other way around, it would be the biggest story. Apartheid was terrible and reported all the time as the biggest threat. What’s happening now, sort of the opposite of apartheid, is never reported, and nobody knows about it.
“All we know is we’re being inundated with white farmers from South Africa, and it’s a big problem.”
Pressure between Trump and South African leaders isn’t completely new: throughout his first time period in 2018, Trump was criticized by the South African authorities after posting in regards to the “large scale killing of farmers” and requested then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” whether or not farmers’ land was being improperly seized following a Fox Information report.
In keeping with the BBC, 1000’s of white farmers have been pressured “often violently” from their land between 2000 and 2001 in a marketing campaign aimed toward righting what the outlet referred to as “colonial-era land grabs” by Dutch, British and German nationals. Beneath this system, about 4,000 white farmers had their land seized by the federal government and given to black Zimbabweans, the BBC reported.
Whereas crime information in South Africa is notoriously unreliable, information shops have estimated numbers within the dozens of white farmers killed over the past yr, with The Related Press reporting 12 farm murders, in contrast with a PBS report of roughly 50 farm murders yearly.
In February, the Trump administration labeled Afrikaners as refugees following an govt order and accused the South African authorities of passing a regulation permitting for the seizure of their agricultural properties with out correct compensation.
The announcement drew pushback from some Christian refugee advocates who’ve criticized the Trump administration for halting the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and leaving tens of 1000’s of refugees from different nations already accepted to resettle within the U.S. in limbo.
“Well bless their hearts.”
