A misleading video shown by President Donald Trump during a meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office has reopened emotional wounds for the son of a murdered farming couple whose memorial was misrepresented in the footage.
"My parents Glen and Vida Rafferty were murdered, or gunned down, by six men on their farm in 2020, so those crosses were erected as a memorial on the day of their funeral," Nathan Rafferty told NPR in an interview. "The last thing you expect to see are some of the most traumatic parts of your life shown on international TV. It obviously opened several new wounds."
What Actually Happened
During the Wednesday meeting, Trump played a video showing a rural road lined with white crosses and a procession of cars, telling Ramaphosa: "Now this is very bad, those are burial sites right there. Burial sites. Over a thousand. Of white farmers. I've never seen anything like it."
A visibly surprised Ramaphosa asked Trump where the location was, saying he'd never seen the video before. Trump replied that it was from South Africa.
While the footage was indeed taken in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province, it did not show burial sites as Trump claimed. The white crosses along the road were placed as part of a memorial protest following the 2020 murders of the Raffertys at their farm in Normandien, near Newcastle. Local community members had erected approximately 500 wooden crosses as a symbolic tribute during a peaceful protest to raise awareness about farm attacks.
"The local community used it as a means of protest and to pay tribute," explained Nathan Rafferty, who now lives in Brisbane, Australia. No bodies were buried along the road, and the crosses did not mark actual graves.
Official Responses
When questioned about the president's characterization of the video, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump's interpretation, saying: "What's unsubstantiated about the video? The video shows crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government."
However, the crosses were specifically placed as a symbolic tribute to the murdered Rafferty couple, not representing a specific count of farm murder victims as implied by Trump's statement about "over a thousand" burial sites.
According to news reports at the time, the Raffertys were killed during a robbery. The assailants had planned to access the couple's safe but ultimately stole only a car and a few items of little value. Three of the murderers were later tried, with two receiving life imprisonment sentences.
When asked about Trump's suggestion of a white "genocide" in South Africa, Rafferty rejected the characterization. "Do I think that there's a targeted genocide program of some sort? No I don't," he told NPR, though he added that more needs to be done to prevent and condemn brutal attacks.
"I never went farming because I was fearful of the tinderbox that it is, despite having four generations of farmers in my family," he said.
Crime Statistics Tell a Different Story
While South Africa does suffer from high crime rates across demographic groups, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu released crime statistics on Friday showing that from January to March 2025, six people were killed on farms in South Africa. Of those six victims, only one was white.
"The history of farm murders in the country has always been distorted and reported in an unbalanced way; the truth is that farm murders have always included African people in more numbers," Mchunu said, referring to Black Africans.
Addressing the Rafferty case specifically, Mchunu added: "The incident sparked a very strong protest by the farming community in the area. The crosses symbolized killings on farms over years, they are not graves. And it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa."
During the Oval Office meeting, Trump also displayed a printout of a blog post showing a Reuters photo that was actually taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, incorrectly claiming it was from South Africa.
The meeting between the two presidents had been intended to reset strained relations between the countries following recent tensions, including the U.S. granting refugee status to some white South Africans, specifically Afrikaners, amid claims of persecution—claims that South African officials strongly dispute.
