The man who organised a display of white crosses in South Africa, an image of which was shown by Donald Trump on Wednesday, has said that the US president was wrong when he described it as a “burial site”.

Rob Hoatson said the crosses were put up on the roadside in KwaZulu-Natal province as a memorial to a couple who were killed on their farm in 2020.

During a sometimes-tense meeting at the White House, Trump showed his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, a video of the crosses to bolster his argument that white farmers were being targeted.

While acknowledging there was violence in his country, Ramaphosa rejected the idea that the Afrikaner minority were being systematically killed.

“These are burial sites… over 1,000 of white farmers and… those cars aren’t driving, they’re stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed,” Trump said as the video was playing in the Oval Office.

Mr Hoatson, a 46-year-old farmer, said that while he had no issue with the video being used without his knowledge, Trump was known to “exaggerate” and he was happy to set the record straight about the striking image.

“It’s not a burial site, but it was a memorial. It was not a permanent memorial that was erected. It was a temporary memorial,” he said.

The crosses were set up to mark the deaths of Glen and Vida Rafferty, 63 and 60, who were Mr Hoatson’s neighbours and were killed on their farm in August 2020.

Two men were convicted of their murder in 2022.

The memorial consisted of more than 2,500 white crosses that stretched along both sides of a road near the couple’s farm. It has since been taken down.

“But the big issue here is not really whether it’s a burial site or whether it’s a memorial,” Mr Hoatson told the BBC and went on to talk about the murders of white farmers calling them “unacceptable” and “unnecessary”.

When asked how he thought President Trump behaved in the meeting, he said: “I think Trump placed the facts… at the foot of Ramaphosa and asked him to respond to them.

“And I thought the response was somewhat pitiful. There wasn’t a response.

“So when President Ramaphosa said (last night) he’d never heard of it, he’d never seen it, you know, it was addressed specifically to him. I don’t buy that. I don’t believe that.”

In the Oval Office, Ramaphosa did say there was “criminality in our country” adding that “people who do get killed through criminal activity are not only white people, the majority of them are black people”.

South Africa does not release race-based crime figures, but the latest numbers show that nearly 10,000 people were murdered in the country between October and December 2024. Of these, a dozen were killed in farm attacks and of the 12, one was a farmer, while five were farm dwellers and four were employees, who are likely to have been black.

Some Afrikaner activists have celebrated Trump’s comments to Ramaphosa saying it put “the farm murder crisis on the international agenda”.

But leading Afrikaner political columnist Pieter du Toit, said what happened was the result of “months and years of exaggeration, hyperbole and misinformation fed into the American right-wing ecosystem by a range of South African activists”.