South Africa has a high rate of violent crime; however, White farmers there are not the victims of genocide. It can occasionally be challenging to decide whether a claim of genocide is true. This assertion is simple. The data demonstrate that the genocide that President Donald Trump claims may be occurring is not occurring and that crimes against White farmers in South Africa account for a very small portion of total crimes committed in the nation.
What do the official crime statistics really show?
According to the most current official data, there were 19,696 murders in the nation between April 2024 and December 2024. Of these murders, only 36 (or around 0.2%) had a victim connected to a farm or other small agricultural enterprise. Furthermore, out of the 36 victims, just seven were farmers. Among the other 29 victims were farm workers, who are mostly Black.
Data from organisations representing South African farmers indicates that farm killings occur in the dozens annually, constituting a tiny fraction of the country’s total.
Acts like murder and severe physical or psychological injury must be “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such,” according to the UN definition of genocide. There is no proof that any such attempt has been undertaken or is being managed by South Africa, whose agricultural minister is White.
How are White nationalist groups fueling misinformation campaigns?
White nationalist organizations have been promoting the idea of genocide against white farmers in South Africa for many years. Trump brought up the idea of genocide last week and reiterated it during a heated meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday in front of cameras at the White House. Trump has accelerated the processing of white South Africans as refugees while suspending all other US refugee resettlement.
Trump displayed printouts of what he said were news of the murders of white South Africans during the meeting. Additionally, he made Ramaphosa watch a video montage that featured a videotape of a demonstration with white crosses representing the dead South African farmers.
Trump misidentified these as “burial sites” instead of symbols, conjuring up the idea of a mass grave. Additionally, Trump did not clarify that killings of White farmers make up a very small portion of total homicides in South Africa, even if he did tell a reporter that “I haven’t made up my mind” about whether genocide is happening.
Does the expropriation law target White landowners unfairly
Trump attempted to support his position at the meeting on Wednesday by seemingly mentioning an expropriation law that Ramaphosa passed this year, which was partially intended to address the racial disparity in property ownership that persists in South Africa thirty years after apartheid ended. (According to a 2017 survey, 72% of the nation’s farms and individual landowners’ agricultural holdings were owned by white people.) Elon Musk, a South African and Trump buddy, has criticized the new regulation.
According to the law, a landowner whose land is expropriated must typically receive “just and equitable” compensation from the government. However, it also permits seizures without payment in some circumstances, from owners of any race, provided that the seizure is judged to be “in the public interest” and that certain requirements are satisfied, such as the land being abandoned or unused because the owner’s primary goal is to profit from its appreciation, or having a market value equal to or less than government subsidies or investments in it.
Once again, Trump was distorting the truth. As Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, no land had been taken under the new expropriation law by mid-May, and Trump offered no proof for his sweeping claim that White farmers are killed after their land is confiscated.
