President Donald Trump laid into South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Tuesday, accusing the official of overseeing what Trump described as the mass slaughter of and land seizure from Dutch-descended white Afrikaner farmers.

South Africa’s government discriminates against the country’s white minority, Trump suggested from the Oval Office, where he played a video of clips he said proved South Africa’s racial persecution of whites. Trump also showed Ramaphosa a packet of printed articles that purportedly proved the same.

“Death, death, death,” Trump said as he flipped through the articles. “Dead white people, dead white farmers.”

A snippet of the video showed “burial sites of more than 1,000 white farmers” whose families lined up their cars along a road to visit their graves, Trump said.

“Now this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites — over a thousand — of white farmers. And those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there is approximately a thousand of them,” Trump narrated. “They’re all white farmers. The [families] of white farmers. And those cars aren’t driving, they are stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed. And it’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it. On both sides of the road, you have crosses. Those people are all killed.”

Looking uncomfortable, Ramaphosa said he had “never seen” the image, and asked Trump where the footage was taken.

“I mean, it’s in South Africa, that’s where,” Trump said.

South Africa recorded 19,696 murders from April 2024 through December 2024, the most recent time period for which data is available. Of those murders, just 36 were linked to farms or smaller agricultural holdings; seven of those victims were farmers and 29 were farm employees. The figures are not broken down by race.

Trump’s interest in South Africa has been amplified in the past weeks. The president signed an executive order in February titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa” in which his administration said that the South African government was responsible for violating its citizens’ domestic rights and threatening America’s national security.

The order was drafted partially in response to recent expropriation legislation signed in South Africa that gave the government power to seize property for less than market value. Many of the country’s estimated 40,000 commercial farms are managed by white Afrikaners.

Earlier in May, Trump accepted into America a plane of 59 white South African refugees, who he called victims of “racial discrimination.”

“Farmers are being killed, they happen to be white, but whether they’re white or black makes no difference to me,” the president said.

Ramaphosa denied that the individuals were refugees, as “a refugee is someone who has to leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution, or economic persecution and they don’t fit that bill,” but Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau countered that, “It is not surprising, unfortunately, that a country from which refugees come does not concede that they are refugees.”

Another clip shown in the Oval Office Wednesday portrayed a man dancing after he called for the death of white farmers, Trump said, to which Ramaphosa responded, “We are completely opposed to that.”

“We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” Ramaphosa added. “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”