‘We’ve got deal with the past,’ South African President Ramaphosa tells Trump on land seizures
In a tense Oval Office meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump directly challenged South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on allegations of genocide and violence against white farmers.
Originally framed as a bilateral summit on trade and other matters, the meeting became heated after a member of the White House press pool asked Ramaphosa about the president’s claims of genocide against Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch arrivals who began arriving at the Cape of Good Hope Colony in 1652.
A reporter asked, “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 toward South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who accompanied him to the White House. “… 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 asked an aide to bring in printed-out articles documenting what the president called “thousands of stories” about Afrikaners being killed and asked aides to dim the lights in the Oval Office as a video began to play showing footage of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party singing the apartheid-era “Shoot the Boer” song — with lyrics which include “kill the Boer, kill the white farmer” — in front of a massive 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 News reporter interjected with an off-topic question about the Qatari jet gifted to the Trump administration this week, the president dismissed the question, calling the questioner a “terrible reporter.” Minutes later, Trump appeared more conciliatory toward Ramaphosa.
“I don’t want you to look bad,” said 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 country’s constitutional protections, but also referred to what he called the need 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 said. “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 basis of their race. “You’re taking people’s land away … and those people, in many cases, are being executed,” he said. “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 also accused the media of ignoring the plight of Afrikaners, adding, “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.”
Tension between Trump and South African leaders isn’t entirely new: during his first term in 2018, Trump was criticized by the South African government after posting about the “large scale killing of farmers” and asked then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” whether farmers’ land was being improperly seized following a Fox News report.
According to the BBC, thousands of white farmers were forced “often violently” from their land between 2000 and 2001 in a campaign aimed at righting what the outlet called “colonial-era land grabs” by Dutch, British and German nationals. Under the program, about 4,000 white farmers had their land seized by the government and given to black Zimbabweans, the BBC reported.
While crime data in South Africa is notoriously unreliable, news outlets have estimated numbers in the dozens of white farmers killed over the last year, with The Associated Press reporting 12 farm murders, compared with a PBS report of approximately 50 farm murders every year.
In February, the Trump administration labeled Afrikaners as refugees following an executive order and accused the South African government of passing a law allowing for the seizure of their agricultural properties without proper compensation.
The announcement drew pushback from some Christian refugee advocates who have criticized the Trump administration for halting the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and leaving tens of thousands of refugees from other countries already approved to resettle in the U.S. in limbo.
