On the South African road incorrectly identified as a 'burial site' by Trump

The P39-1 is an anonymous stretch of thinly-tarred provincial highway connecting the small towns of Newcastle and Normandein in South Africa, a four hour drive from Johannesburg.

This week the single carriageway road, which runs mainly along the edge of sprawling farms, nestled in the remote hills of the country's KwaZulu-Natal province, has found itself unexpectedly the subject of global attention.

On Wednesday many South Africans were among those watching live around the world as US President Donald Trump ambushed his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa with a video making the case that white people were being persecuted. He had previously said that a "genocide" was taking place.

The most striking scene in the video was an aerial shot of thousands of white crosses by the side of the road - a "burial site" President Trump repeatedly said, of more than a thousand Afrikaners murdered in recent years.

The president did not mention where the road was although the film was quickly linked to Normandein.

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But the people who live nearby know better than anyone that his claim is not true.

The BBC visited the area on Thursday, the day after the Oval Office showdown, to find the P39-1's crosses have long since disappeared.

There is no burial site, and the road looks like any other. A new grain mill has been built along one stretch where the crosses once, briefly, stood.

What we found was a community shocked to find itself under the spotlight, and a truth about the crosses that reveals much about the delicate balance of race relations in South Africa.

Roland Collyer is a man who understands both.

A farmer, from South Africa's Afrikaner community, it was the murder of his aunt and uncle Glen and Vida Rafferty, bludgeoned to death in their home five years ago, which led to the erection of the crosses.

Their deaths at their farm, by attackers who stole valuables from their home, led to a public outcry by the farming community, and the temporary planting of the crosses by fellow Afrikaners keen to highlight their murders among those of other farmers who have been killed across South Africa.

"So the video that you guys have been seeing," he tells me as we stand together by the roadside, "happened along this section of the road."

Pointing down the hill, towards a village where many black families live in mud huts, he explains: "There were crosses planted on both sides of the road, representing lives that have been taken on farms, farm murders. All the way from the bridge down below, up to where we're standing at the moment.

"The crosses were symbolic, to what was happening in the country."

One of the Raffertys' neighbours, businessman Rob Hoatson, told the BBC how he organised the crosses to capture public attention, such was the shock over the couple's deaths.

"It's not a burial site," he explained, saying Trump was prone to "exaggeration", adding though that he did not mind the image of the crosses being used. "It was a memorial. It was not a permanent memorial that was erected. It was a temporary memorial."

Mr Collyer continues to farm in the area but says the Raffertys' two sons left after their parents' murders. The younger, he explains, has moved to Australia, the elder has sold up and left farming to relocate to the city.

Many people remain scared for their future in South Africa, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

In 2022, two local men Doctor Fikane Ngwenya and Sibongiseni Madondo were convicted for the murders of the Raffertys, as well as robbery, and sentenced to life and 21 years' imprisonment respectively.

For many in the local community it was a rare act of justice, with thousands of murders remaining unsolved across a country which South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told President Trump has yet to get a grip of its soaring crime rate.

The Raffertys' murders sparked a period of heightened racial tension in the area.

South Africa's police minister was forced to visit to try to bring calm, with protests from Afrikaners mirrored by claims from some of the local black community of mistreatment by white farmers.

Amid it all, Mr Collyer tells me that despite the misleading use of the video of his family's memorial, he is pleased that President Trump is highlighting attacks on white farmers.

"The whole procession was to raise international media coverage of the whole thing," he reflects. "And for them to understand what we're actually going through and the lives that we have to live here at the moment in South Africa.

"A person has to go into a house before dark, you're living behind electric fences. That's the life we're living at the moment and you don't want to live a life like that."

His fears would chime with many, of all races, in a country which suffered more than 26,000 murders last year - the vast majority of victims, according to security experts, are black.

President Trump has made an offer of asylum for all Afrikaners, with a first group of 49 arriving in Washington earlier this month.

But Mr Collyer tells me he will stay in Normandein and has no intention of leaving South Africa.

"It's not easy just for me to leave what my father, what my grandfather, what my great grandfather worked for, and how hard they worked, to be able to gather what I can contribute to towards today," he says.

"That's the difficult thing, just packing up after many generations and trying to leave the country.

"Unfortunately white Afrikaners bear the brunt of being a 'boer' (farmer) in South Africa... but at this stage I definitely would not think of going, I still love this country too much."

And as we part ways, Mr Collyer offers a note of optimism about the future.

"I think if we can just hands, and I think there's more than enough people in this country - black and white - who are willing to hands and to try to make this country a success."

There are many others in the local community for whom farming goes back generations,

Along the road, towards Normandein town, we meet Bethuel Mabaso.

The 63-year-old grew up in the area and tells us he was surprised to learn that his community had made international news - even more so that it was being cited by the US president as "evidence" of the targeting of white farmers.

"Nothing like that is happening here," he says in his native Zulu. "We were shocked as a community when the murders happened and sad for that family.

"I've lived here since I was a little boy and this is a peaceful area. Nothing like that has happened here since."

In the years since the Raffertys died there have been reports of allegations from some black farm dwellers that local police had failed to attend to cases involving black people with the same urgency as they did the deaths of the couple.

I ask another local farm worker, Mbongiseni Shibe, 40, what relations were like now between farmers and their mostly black staff.

"We manage whatever issues come up through discussions, if that doesn't work we ask the police to step in," he says. "It's usually incidents like our livestock going into their fields and the police help us retrieve it and vice versa."

South Africa's violent past of racial segregation is not lost on Mr Shibe and how delicate racial matters can be here.

"We come from a difficult past in this country with white people, I those times of abuse even as a young boy especially on the farms here," he tells me.

"But we've let it go, we don't use that to punish anyone."

Additional reporting by Ed Habershon

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