President Donald Trump clashed with his South African counterpart during a contentious sit-down as the US leader maintained his claims that white Afrikaner farmers are being killed and persecuted.

Trump played a video during the Oval Office sit-down on Wednesday that he said is proof that Afrikaners are being targeted in South Africa. The video included footage of a road lined with white crosses that Trump said marked burial sites of Afrikaner farmers.

"This is very bad. These are burial sites right here, burial sites, over 1,000, of white farmers, and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning," he said as the more than four-minute video was played in the darkened Oval Office. "It's a terrible sight. I've never seen anything like it."

It is unclear what exactly the video depicted, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa questioned what it showed.

"Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?" Ramaphosa asked, largely maintaining his composure as the saga continued.

"No," Trump replied, prompting Ramaphosa to say, "I'd like to know where that is."

"I mean, it’s in South Africa," said Trump.

The allegations are at the centre of the Trump administration's decision to allow white Afrikaners to come to the US as refugees even as it cancels deportation protections for other groups fleeing persecution and instability, including most recently Afghans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Cameroonians. An initial group of 59 Afrikaners arrived in the US last week.

Trump told Ramaphosa that his government allows Afrikaner land to be taken "and then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer, and when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them."

Curtailing 'criminality'

Ramaphosa denied the allegations, but acknowledged South Africa's efforts to curtail "criminality" in the country.

"People who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity, are not only white people. The majority of them are Black people," Ramaphosa responded calmly.

Trump claimed the farmers who are being killed "are not Black."

Ramaphosa called on South Africa’s agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, who is white, to weigh in.

"It is something that I'm particularly exercised with, my colleagues in the police and my colleagues in the justice cluster to start making farm attacks and stock theft a priority crime, and it affects all farmers in South Africa, particularly stock theft has a disproportionate effect on small Black farmers," he said.