60 Minutes has finally screened Anderson Cooper’s delayed segment on “white genocide” in South Africa, days after he quit the program.
The episode, which aired on the flagship current affairs show on Sunday evening, had been delayed due to an “abnormal” editing process, according to CBS.
In the report, Cooper examined the theory espoused by President Donald Trump, that white farmers are being killed as part of a “genocide” in the African country.
“It‘s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” Trump said in May 2025. “It’s a terrible thing that’s taking place and farmers are being killed. They happen to be white.”
In the segment, Cooper interviewed Rene Nel, whose husband, Tollie, was murdered on his farm. Cooper asked if she believed a genocide had occurred.
“Not what I know as a genocide,” she said. “Not what I’ve heard of what a genocide is. I see our attack as an opportunistic attack. They knew there was money. They knew there were firearms.”
Johann Kotzé, who heads South Africa’s largest agricultural organization, also debunked Trump’s claim.
“It’s actually not about white genocide,” Kotzé said. “It’s about criminality in South Africa. It’s crime. The fact that it happened on a farm doesn’t make me special as a farmer. It’s horrendous. Any murder is horrendous.”
Kotzé also discussed his trip to Washington in February last year to talk with members of the Trump administration about South Africa’s economic problems, where 44 percent of the black population live in poverty, compared to only 1 percent of the white population.
He said the officials were less concerned with the economic issues.
“They asked us about the white genocide, and the first thing I said is, ‘I’m as Afrikaans as what you can get. I grew up Afrikaans. And I never witnessed that.’”
The 60 Minutes report quoted police statistics that over 25,000 people were murdered in South Africa in 2024, with an estimated 37 of the deaths occurring on a farm.
Cooper also visited the site where Trump said there were “burial sites, over a thousand, of White farmers.”
During a visit to the Oval Office last May, Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa by playing him a video showing the alleged burial grounds of dead white farmers he claimed were killed by Black South Africans trying to take their land.
When Trump was asked what it would take to convince him that there was no genocide, Ramaphosa answered on his behalf.
“It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends,” he said.
Nearby resident Darrel Brown–who told 60 Minutes that he erected and then dismantled the crosses as part of a temporary tribute–dismissed Trump’s claims.
“It definitely wasn’t a burial site, I mean, those crosses were there for less than 48 hours,” Brown told Cooper, later showing the crosses he keeps in a shed. “It was purely an avenue of crosses that we planted there in honor of commercial farmers in South Africa that had lost their lives.”
Journalist and former newspaper editor Max du Preez also dismissed Trump’s claims of “large scale killings of farmers” and that the South African government is seizing land from white farmers.
“It is not happening,” he said. “Donald Trump was fed this information, this link: farm murders, genocide. There is no such a thing.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
CBS’s interference in the story is believed to be partially responsible for Cooper’s decision to leave his role as a 60 Minutes correspondent after nearly 20 years. He retains his role on CNN.
Cooper had reportedly been “uncomfortable” with the “rightward direction” of CBS under Bari Weiss and billionaire David Ellison, CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount.
