US President Donald Trump showed a screenshot of a Reuters video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of what he falsely presented in the Oval Office on Wednesday as evidence of mass killings of White South Africans.
“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by the picture during a contentious Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
In fact, the video published by Reuters on February 3 and subsequently verified by its fact check team showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from footage of a mass burial following an M23 rebel assault on Goma, filmed by video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty.
The blog post showed to Ramaphosa by Trump during the White House meeting was published by "American Thinker", a conservative online magazine, about conflict and racial tensions in South Africa and Congo.
The post did not caption the image but identified it as a “YouTube screen grab” with a link to a video news report about Congo on YouTube, which credited Reuters.
Andrea Widburg, managing editor at "American Thinker" and the author of the post in question, wrote in reply to a Reuters query that Trump had “misidentified the image”.
Trump shows photo from the DRC as proof of ‘White genocide’ in South Africa
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Widburg added, however, that the post, which referred to what it called Ramaphosa’s “dysfunctional, race-obsessed Marxist government”, had “pointed out the increasing pressure placed on white South Africans”.
Al Katanty said seeing Trump holding the article with the screengrab of his video came as a shock.
“In view of all the world, President Trump used my image, used what I filmed in DRC to try to convince President Ramaphosa that in his country, white people are being killed by Black people,” Al Katanty said.
Ramaphosa visited Washington this week to try to mend ties with the United States after persistent criticism from Trump in recent months over South Africa’s land laws, foreign policy, and alleged bad treatment of its White minority, which South Africa denies.
Not graves, but a memorial
Trump interrupted the televised meeting with Ramaphosa to play a video, which he said showed evidence of genocide of White farmers in South Africa. This conspiracy theory, which has circulated in far-right chat rooms for years, is based on false claims.
Ramaphosa's face was a picture of bemusement when Trump suddenly said to aides and said: “Turn the lights down, and just put this on.”
A video of South African politicians chanting “kill the farmer” began to play on a screen set up at the side of the room. A stunned Ramaphosa looked at the screen, then at Trump, and then back at the screen. The videos consisted mostly of years-old clips of inflammatory speeches by some South African politicians that have been circulating on social media.
Ramaphosa told Trump that the speakers were from "a small minority party", adding that "our government policy is completely against what he was saying".
Trump then proceeded to flip through printed copies of articles that he said detailed murders of white South Africans, saying “death, death, death, horrible death”.
Unfortunately, Trump's team had failed to vet the photos shown by the president, leading him show photographs of another country and another conflict to bolster his false claims.
Part of the footage played by Trump showed rows of white crosses, which Trump claimed were the "burial sites" of "over a thousand White farmers". But the crosses are part of a memorial to a couple who was killed in 2020 and do not mark graves, the BBC reported.
While South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, most of the victims are Black. And of the more than 26,000 murders committed in 2024, only eight of those were of farmers, according to South African Police Service (SAPS) figures.
South Africa also has Black farmers and the SAPS statistics are not broken down by race.
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters and AFP)
English (US) · 