There are many violent crimes in South Africa. This is not a genocide against white farmers.
Genocide allegations may sometimes be difficult to judge. This statement is easy. The facts show that the genocide that Donald Trump suggests that it may be happening is not happening, and that the crime against white farmers in South Africa represents a small fraction of the country’s total crime.
South Africa’s latest official data show that the country had 19,696 murders from April 2024 to December 2024, and that the victim in only 36 of these murders, about 0.2%, was linked to fifths or smaller agricultural explorations.
In addition, only seven of the 36 victims were farmers. (South Africa also has black farmers; official data is not disaggregated by race). The other 29 victims included agricultural employees, which tend to be black.
Data from groups representing South African farmers also show that the murders in agricultural explorations are tens per year, a tiny percentage of the country’s total.
South Africa does not satisfy the definition of “genocide”
According to the United Nations definition, genocide requires acts, such as homicide and serious bodily or mental injuries, “committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” There is no evidence that South Africa, whose minister of agriculture is white, has or supervised any effort in this regard.
The allegation of a genocide against South African white farmers has been promoted for years by white nationalist groups. Trump, who accelerated the processing of white South Africans such as refugees, even though he suspended all refugees in the US, raised the notion of a genocide last week and repeated it during a controversial meeting on Wednesday with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, in front of the white house.
Trump said at one point: “We accepted (refugees) of many places if we feel that there is persecution or genocide to happen. And we had many people, I must tell you, Mr. President. We had a tremendous number of people, especially since they saw this, are usually white farmers, and are fleeing from South Africa.”
During the meeting, Trump exhibited impressions of what they said were reports about the death of white South Africans, and caused Ramaphosa to watch a video montage that included a clip of a manifestation with white crosses that symbolized South African farmers who were killed.
Trump wrongly identified them as “burial places,” evoking the image of a common ditch instead of symbols. And although Trump told a reporter that I “did not make a decision” about whether genocide is occurring, it did not explain that white farmers’ homicides are a tiny percentage of total homicides in South Africa.
Thefts are seen as the reason for many attacks on farmers
From 1948 to 1994, South Africa was governed under the segregationist system of Apartheid, which subjugated the black majority (which constituted about 81% of the population of 2022) and privileged the white minority (which constituted about 7% of the population of 2022). In the democratic elections of 1994 onwards, the country elected the African National Congress, led by blacks and currently chaired by Ramaphosa.
Even when white farmers were killed in South Africa, it was often unclear that the crime was motivated by the breed. In 2003, a South African government commission concluded that the main reason underlying most attacks on agricultural explorations was theft. This year, the South African experts came to similar conclusions.
“The isolation of agricultural explorations makes farmers particularly vulnerable to crime, but this is a function of geography and socioeconomic conditions and not political or racial intentions,” said Anthony Kaziboni, a political and critical sociologist at the Center for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg, to Factcheck.org in an article published last week.
“Given the UN definition, describing the deaths in agricultural explorations like genocide is a rude deraterization,” said Kaziboni. “This does not diminish the severity of these crimes, nor the need for specific rural security interventions. But it is essential to address these topics clearly and carefully, based on reliable evidence and contexts.”
Some white farmers said this year that farmers are often victimized because they are vulnerable targets and that what is happening is not “genocide.” And Trump’s first government itself highlighted doubts about the narrative of “genocide.”
In 2020, at the end of Trump’s first term, the State Department released a report on human rights in South Africa, which said: “Some defense groups stated that white farmers were racially aimed at theft, home invasions and murders, while many observers attributed to the country’s high and growing crime rate.” The State Department continued to make arguments against the notion of attacks on fifths motivated by racial reasons. “According to the Institute of Security Studies,” Thursday attacks and murders have increased in recent years, in line with the general tendency for the growth of serious and violent crimes in South Africa. “
The State Department then noted that, according to South African official statistics for the period 2018-2019, “the murders on farms represented only 0.2% of all murders in the country (47 of 21,022)”-the same percentage as data from the last three years.
Trump on the new South African expropriation law
During Wednesday’s meeting, Trump tried to reinforce his case by making an apparent reference to a law of expropriation that Ramaphosa signed this year, in part to help remedy racial inequality on Earth property that still plagues South Africa three decades after the end of apartheid. (A 2017 report concluded that whites held 72% of the country’s farms and farms by individual owners). The new law was attacked by Trump ally, Elon Musk, who is South African.
The law requires the government to provide “fair and equitable” compensation, in most cases, to an owner whose land is expropriated. But it also allows seizures without compensation in certain cases – owners of any race – when the seizure is considered “public interest” and certain conditions are met, as the land is abandoned, the land is not used because the owner’s main objective is to benefit from its appreciation, or the land has a market value equal to or less than government investments or subsidies.
“You allow them to take land. And then, when they take the land, they kill the white farmer,” Trump stressed to Ramaphosa.
The US President was counting fiction once again. In mid -May, Bloomberg reported that no land had been confiscated under the new expropriation law, and Trump did not provide evidence of his widespread statement that white farmers are murdered after their land was confiscated.
In February, after the Trump administration cited the expropriation law in an executive order that froze the aid to South Africa, the executive director of a South African trade association stated in a statement: “To be clear, there was no seizures or private property confiscations. No land was not exposed. The statement states that while the law allows expropriation without compensation, “this does not mean that expropriation without compensation is inevitable. The principle of fair and equitable compensation remains intact, requiring careful evaluation of all relevant factors”.
*Larry Madowo contributed to this article
