On South Africa's farms, there's push back against claims of genocide

President Trump claims White farmers in South Africa are victims of a genocide. South Africans dispute his claim. 60 Minutes Overtime South Africans dispute Trump's claim of genocide as administration welcomes some to U.S. as refugees By Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 60 Minutes Correspondent Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006. His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television's preeminent newsmen. Read Full Bio Anderson Cooper, Michael H Gavshon, Aliza Chasan, Aliza Chasan Digital Content Producer Aliza Chasan is a Digital Content Producer for "60 Minutes" and CBSNews.com. She has previously written for outlets including PIX11 News, The New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo. Aliza covers trending news, often focusing on crime and politics. Read Full Bio Aliza Chasan, Nadim Roberts February 22, 2026 / 7:00 PM EST / CBS News Add CBS News on Google Darrel Brown's father was attacked by robbers 10 years ago. Since then, three of his friends — fellow South African farmers — were murdered on their farms nearby. But Brown has no intention of leaving his home country, even as the Trump administration welcomes White South Africans to the United States as refugees. "I'm an African, and I've been burned by the African sun, and I'm not going anywhere," he said.In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order cutting off all aid to South Africa and announcing the "resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government sponsored race-based discrimination." Mr. Trump has claimed that White South Africans – including Afrikaners, the 2.7 million descendants of Dutch settlers who arrived on the continent 400 years ago – are victims of a genocide and their land is being confiscated. But in South Africa, those claims are disputed. Max du Preez, an Afrikaans journalist and former newspaper editor, called his country's government "corrupt" but said he's never been discriminated against as a White South African. There are no large-scale killings of farmers and the government is not seizing their land, he said, as Mr. Trump has suggested."It is not happening," he said. "Donald Trump was fed this information, this link: farm murders, genocide. There is no such a thing. But it plays in Washington." How claims of genocide originated In 1913, millions of Black South Africans were forcibly evicted from their land and lost their rights to it by law. Then in 1948, Afrikaners instituted apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation and discrimination against the mostly Black population.Apartheid ended in 1994 when South Africans elected Nelson Mandela as president. In the years since, there's been a growing Black middle class and a reduction in poverty. But controversial government efforts to redress inequalities have been plagued by corruption and cronyism. Many Afrikaners believe that they are now the victims of discrimination in post-Apartheid South Africa, and point the blame at affirmative action policies meant to redress centuries of discrimination. White supremacists in the U.S. and elsewhere have long amplified those beliefs, and have for years made false claims of a genocide in South Africa. In 2018 then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson began alleging that Afrikaner farmers were being killed and having their land seized. That got the attention of Mr. Trump who, at the time, tweeted about large-scale killings of White farmers in South Africa and government seizure of their land. President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump exchange words during a May 2025 meeting at the White House. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images After Mr. Trump signed the executive order promoting "the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees," South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House to reset trade and economic relations. Mr. Trump showed several videos that the White House said were proof of violence targeting White farmers. "These are burial sites right here, burial sites, over a thousand, of White farmers," Mr. Trump said during the meeting.What Afrikaners say about genocide claims60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper traveled to the spot Mr. Trump was talking about: a lonely, pothole-filled road not far from Darrel Brown's farm in the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal province in the southeast of South Africa. Brown is the one who placed the crosses seen in the video shown by Mr. Trump on the road. He put them there on the day of his friends' Glen and Vida Rafferty's funeral, the couple who were murdered during a 2020 robbery."It definitely wasn't a burial site," Brown said. "Those crosses were there for less than 48 hours. It was purely an avenue of crosses that we planted there in honor of commercial farmers in South Africa that had lost their lives." Brown kept the crosses in his shed, then brought them out again in 2024 for the funeral of his best friend, Tollie Nel, who was murdered on his farm. Nel was killed in front of his wife, Rene, as he tried to fight of