US President Donald Trump surprised his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa during a White House meeting Wednesday by playing him a video designed to back baseless claims of a white "genocide."
Trump asked staff members to play a video on a screen set up in the Oval Office showing Ramaphosa -- and the gathered global media -- what he said were clips of Black South Africans talking about the issue, including images of what the US president called "burial sites."
In the video, firebrand far-left opposition lawmaker Julius Malema was shown singing "Kill the Boer, kill the farmer" -- an infamous chant dating back to the apartheid-era fight against white-minority rule.
The chant is highly controversial in South Africa and was banned by a court in 2010.
However a court in 2022 said that it did not constitute hate speech and should be considered in its historical context.
In 2024 the Supreme Court of Appeal, seized by a right-wing Afrikaner lobby group, ruled that Malema should be allowed to continue to use the song.
"Mr Malema was not actually calling for farmers, or white South Africans of Afrikaans descent, to be shot," it said.
He "was using an historic struggle song as provocative means of advancing his party's political agenda," the ruling said.
Malema has been a loud and radical voice in South African politics for several years, but his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party came only fourth in last year's elections with less than 10 percent of the vote.
The 4:30-minute video aired in the White House showed clips of Malema telling dancing supporters that "we are cutting the throat of whiteness," and "to shoot to kill."
"We have not called for the killing of white people, at least for now," Malema said in one archival clip.
Another clip showed former South African president Jacob Zuma singing an anti-apartheid song that threatens white people with being shot by a machine gun.
The video finished with images of a 2020 protest in South Africa where white crosses were placed along a rural roadside to honor a couple who were murdered on their farm in the east of the country.
Viral social media posts, some included in the video, have falsely claimed that dozens of white farmers are killed every day.
But figures from groups representing farmers and Afrikaner interests show that around 50 people of all races are killed on farms every year.
Overall, about 75 people are murdered every single day in South Africa, most of whom are young black men in urban areas, according to police figures.
