Trump's “grave” claim by the son of the South African agriculture of the victims: NPR

Johannesburg – President Trump claims that in South Africa a “genocide” of white people, especially African farmers, experiences a “genocide”.

When he scored the president of the country, Cyril Ramaphosa, on Wednesday in the Oval Office, Trump played a video for him – previously divided on social media at least twice His consultant Elon Musk – That was proof of this.

“Now that's very bad, these are exactly graves there. Funeral sites. Over a thousand. From white farmers,” said Trump, “I've never seen anything like this before.”

The video showed a street that was lined with numerous white crosses on both sides and a procession of cars with mourners.

A frightened ramaphosa asked Trump where the place was and said he had never seen the video. South Africa replied Trump.

It was indeed a video that was recorded in South Africa in the province of Kwazulu-Natal.

But it was not a grave.

“My parents Glen and Vida Rafferty were murdered or shot down by six men on their farm in 2020, so that these crosses were built as a monument on the day of their funeral,” Nathan Rafferty told NPR.

Rafferty, a white South African who now lives in Brisbane, Australia, explained the “local community, which she used as a means of protest and tribute”.

In contrast to Trump's claims, corpses were never buried on this street and the white crosses do not mark graves.

The Press spokeswoman of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, asked on Thursday whether the president misunderstood it.

“What is unfounded about the video? The video shows crosses that represent the corpses of people who have been racistically persecuted by their government,” she said.

The crosses did not represent a certain number of murder victims of the farm's order, they were a symbolic tribute to the murdered couple.

During the meeting, Trump also stopped an expression of a blog post that shows a photo of Reuters from the Democratic Republic of Congo and incorrectly claimed that it was taken in South Africa.

Rafferty said he was shocked when he saw the video in the Oval Office meeting.

“The last thing you expect is some of the most traumatic parts of your life on international television. So it was completely unexpected,” he said.

“Obviously it has opened several new wounds.”

According to news reports, the attackers had planned to rob his parents at that time. Although in the end they aimed to get into the safe, they only stolen a car and a few objects with little value.

While many murders in South Africa remain unsolved, three of the murderers of the Rafferty were brought to trial and two of them sentenced to life imprisonment.

NPR asked Rafferty what he thought about the white “genocide”.

“Do I think there is a targeted genocide program?” he said. “No, I don't.”

However, Rafferty said that he thinks a lot more has to be done to prevent and condemn, which is sometimes brutal attacks.

“I never went agriculture because I was afraid of the TinderBox it is, even though I had four generations of farmers in my family,” he added.

The South African government does not deny that the country will suffer some of the world's highest crime rates. Members of the Ramaphosa delegation to Washington were honest that this was a big problem.

South Africa released its quarterly crime statistics on Friday. These are usually not broken down by breed, but in view of Trump's attacks, the police said they made an exception.

From January to March 2025, six people were killed on farms in South Africa, the police said.

Of these six one was white.

“The history of agricultural murders in the country has always been distorted and reported in an unbalanced manner. The truth is that the country's murders have always taken up African people in more numbers,” said police minister Senzo Mchunu in relation to the black African.

Mchunu also spoke about the Rafferty case, in which the couple “unfortunately was murdered by criminals in their house”.

“The incident triggered a very strong protest from the farm community in the area. The crosses symbolized the murders on farms for years, they are not graves,” said Mchunu.

“And it was regrettable that these facts were twisted to fit the wrong story about the crime in South Africa.”