(Bloomberg) -- The fringe group that planted the seed for some of Donald Trump’s false claims that South Africa is persecuting White farmers saw years of lobbying US politicians pay off.

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At a meeting in the Oval Office, the US president lambasted his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, in what the foreign delegation called a “well-orchestrated, well-planned” ambush.

It all began with Trump asking for a video to be played that echoed the output of Afriforum, a White Afrikaner rights group that met with his allies during his first term.

“We’ve used a lot of that footage in some of our videos,” Kallie Kriel, Afriforum’s chief executive officer, said in a voice note to Bloomberg. “I think it’s the White House’s own compilation of video material that we’ve also used.”

While the group hasn’t claimed there’s a genocide against White people in South Africa — as Trump has — or endorsed his offer of asylum for White farmers, Kriel said it was important issues highlighted by Afriforum were aired in Washington.

“Serious problems like property rights and infringement of human rights through racial measures and also this ‘kill the boer’ question” are “now very clearly on the table,” he said.

The word boer is Afrikaans for farmer, and historically refers to “White man” in the context of the struggle against apartheid. More recently, the phrase Kriel cited has been chanted by leaders including Julius Malema, head of the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters party, at political rallies — excerpts of which Trump showed in the Oval Office.

Some of the video footage dates back at least seven years, such as the images depicting Malema stating at a political rally that his party is “cutting the throat of whiteness.”

A scene of white crosses along a road — which Trump alleged showed burial sites — captures a funeral procession for a farmer and his wife who were murdered in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province in 2020, the archives of Afrikaans news outlet Maroela Media show. The crosses were temporarily erected to protest farm murders, according to Hermann Pretorius, head of strategic communications at the Institute of Race Relations.

“It’s a valid symbol of farm violence and murders, but those were not graves,” Pretorius said by phone on Thursday. He couldn’t confirm whether each cross represented a person.

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Three decades after the end of White rule — during which Black people were subjugated and excluded from mainstream commercial and political life — the income of White families is on average almost five times higher than that of their Black counterparts, Statistics South Africa said in a January report. White people own more than 70% of rural land owned by individuals, a 2017 audit showed, even though they make up around 7% of the national population.

The killing of farmers has been declining over the past 20 years.

That’s even as more than 27,000 people are murdered annually in South Africa, with a disproportionate number of the victims being young men in low-income areas such as predominantly Black townships. No land has been seized by the state since apartheid ended.

Ramaphosa and the rest of his government “can either continue to deny South Africa’s pressing problems – which will have serious negative implications for the country – or they can try to lead the country out of this crisis by, among other things, acknowledging and helping to resolve the human rights violations to which Afrikaners and other minorities are subjected,” Kriel said in a statement on Thursday.

At a post-meeting media briefing, Ramaphosa tried to put a positive spin on the ordeal.

He said there’d been constructive talks about continuing to engage on trade and expressed confidence that he would see Trump at a Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg in November.

“Much as he flighted the video and all those press clippings — in the end I do believe that there is doubt and disbelief in his head about all this,” he said.

Tellingly, Trump didn’t commit to showing up at that summit.

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--With assistance from Mike Cohen.

(Updates with additional comment by Afriforum in 14th paragraph. An earlier version corrected the number of years in the eighth paragraph.)

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