Farm Murders in South Africa
24 June 2005
By:Ali Ismail
This young woman may have taken a gunshot directly to her temple
An immaculate farmhouse in stellenbosch, South Africa which manages vineyards
Mobile telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
SOUTH AFRICA HAS THE WORLD’S HIGHEST MURDER RATE
Europeans may think that ‘non-whites’ should never have power over them
It frequently happens when one is in conflict with a ‘racially aware’ right-wing individual of European stock that he or she says something to the effect that we ‘non-whites’ were better off under foreign supervision in our homelands. Some pupils at my boarding school said that to me in the 1960s and it is a recurring theme in non-reported communications today all over the United Kingdom among a certain large minority of the population.
Conversations with some of my older relatives and friends indicate that, whatever else may have been the case, crime levels in India (including what is now Bangladesh) seem to have been lower during the British Raj. Corruption was stamped on viciously and effectively and there was more social order than apparently is the case now.
However, the humiliation of living under the heels of a violent foreign overlord left scars, which are still there now. There was unofficial apartheid and an inculcation of racial inferiority that persists to this day. Some analysts have described the British Raj as a ‘women’s production’ insofar that it may have been a partnership between the colonial power and the Indian women against the Indian men. At any rate, there were no noteworthy female Swaraj activists during the tumultuous years leading up to 1947. The struggle was carried on by men with relatively little support from their womenfolk and may never have borne fruit were it not for the behemoth presence of the Soviet Union so close to India.
One feature of those years is that although there were riots against foreign rule, that was all they were – riots. Very rarely was actual violence used against the persons of British people, military or civilian. Property damage was indeed vast but few Europeans were injured, let alone killed. Our men decided to draw the line at physically attacking the ‘Sahib’ and the ‘Memsahib’.
Now, for whatever reason, that is definitely not the case for the former African colonies. It is not for me to give an opinion concerning whether or not the anti-European personal violence of the black African is genetic.
All the countries, bar a few such as Barbados, where black African genes are the majority component of the populations’ genotypes, are places where it is physically dangerous to be a light skinned European. Black-on-white murders, rapes and robberies are normal and commonplace.
A (European) woman who worked alongside me at my previous job told me that her brother’s family in South Africa were the only people in their road whose household had not been robbed and/or raped by blacks. She attributed that to his security precautions.
At any rate, the Republic of South Africa has the unenviable record of having the highest murder rate in the world. In the most egregious danger spots it is estimated to be in the order of 600 per 100,000 annually. Not even Detroit can rival that.
Since the African National Congress came to power with Nelson Mandela as the first black state president 1994, 1600 farmers have been murdered in over 8000 farm attacks. A farmer has been murdered, on average, once every second day for ten years. There has been an average of 77 farm attacks every month. The murder rate of South African commercial farmers is the highest for any specific occupational sector in the world: 313 per 100,000. The murder rate amongst the general population is officially 55 per 100,000. In Europe the murder rate is 2 per 100,000.Two of the hallmarks of farm murders in South Africa during the last ten years have been the horrible and possibly sadistic torture perpetrated on so many of the victims and the sadistic cruelty to their working animals, which is reminiscent of the Mau Mau terrorist campaign in Kenya in the 1950's. The sheer savagery of the extremely brutal attacks include: an elderly farmer whose head was cut open by an axe, a lady of 84 who was repeatedly raped, a year old baby set alight, farmers strangled, garrotted, mutilated, dumped into boiling water, suffocated, slashed with pangas, repeatedly stabbed and tortured with a heated iron; the list goes on.In farm murders extreme violence is widespread and is the norm. If women are present, they are generally raped. Torture is now fairly routine – cruelty to animals is pervasive. The question about farm murders is ‘why?’ The government's standard approach is to declare that most farm murders and attacks are simply criminal. But Professor Moolman, a South African domestic affairs expert, has asked the following questions: •Why are the attacks and murders on farms so premeditated, while statistics indicate that the overwhelming majority of murders in South Africa are related to alcohol, drug abuse, and interpersonal and domestic conflict? •Why are farm attacks so extremely brutal, which is not the case with the majority of murders in South Africa? •Why are farm attacks and murders mostly black on white, while this is not necessarily the case in the rest of South Africa? If theft is the most important motive, why are thousands of black shop owners not brutalised remotely as much during attacks by gangs as is the ‘white’ farming community?•Why are farmers constantly accused of mistreating their workers, thus precipitating farm attacks, while the Helen Suzman Foundation (Helen Suzman was a liberal MP during the apartheid era) found that 93 percent of farm workers indicated that their relationships with their employers were good? • Why have bad socio-economic conditions become the reason for attacks, while it is acknowledged that bad socio-economic conditions existed before 1994 too in black communities.Professor Moolman details cases of ‘senseless killing’ where the criminals waited inside the farmhouse without taking anything in order to ambush, torture and kill the farmer and his wife on their return home. In other cases the farmer's family was held hostage until he returned. Some criminals have travelled long distances to attack people on farms. Racial slogans written at the crime scenes are commonplace. Clearly robbery is not the principal motivation for farm attacks. Many farmers conclude: “They want to drive us from our land.”The accompanying problems of intimidation, crop and stock theft, illegal squatting and expropriation legislation all would seem to confirm this conclusion.“When four members of your family have been murdered on your farm, it is not really an attractive proposition anymore. When you see what has happened to Zimbabwe's commercial farming community…when your grazing is burned out four times a year, when your crops and stock are stolen, when you can do little to stop squatter invasions on what is after all your private property, and when your chances of being slaughtered in your home are the greatest in the world, why bother!”With this background, it is understandable that many farmers are regarding the dismantling of the commando system, and the new Firearms Control Act as precursors to disarming the farmers and Zimbabwean style land invasions.
Exasperated by violent attacks and claims against their land, and feeling betrayed by the government for failing to protect them, some of South Africa's Afrikaans farmers have taken up arms to defend themselves against what they regard as a systematic campaign by black posses to drive them from their land.
A new rural defence strategy drafted by the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), a conservative ‘white’ commercial farmers' organisation, seeks to organise all ‘white’ farmers into support groups capable of rallying to each other's defence.
The farmers and their families gather once a month at a remote training ground near Alldays in Limpopo Province, close to the Botswana-Zimbabwe border, for a series of lectures and exercises that are presented as the 'farm attack survival course.' The purpose is to teach the members of the community how to protect themselves from what they call 'the second genocide'.
More than 700 people have attended the survival course since it was started a year ago. 'People must learn how to defend themselves, but they must do it within the law,' said Gideon Meiring, TAU's security adviser.
The course reflects concern among many ‘white’ farmers about what they regard as an ambivalent response from the South African government to the land crisis in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has forcibly acquired nearly all of that country's ‘white’-owned commercial farmland without compensation in the past four years.
What happened there, they say, is also already happening in South Africa, despite government assurances of physical protection and the legal sanctity of property rights. Many ‘white’ farmers face restitution claims against their properties by the descendants of black people who say they were forcibly removed from their lands during the colonial and apartheid eras.
What is significant about the above is that from a European viewpoint the black Africans are the ‘other room’ in relation to us; many of them lump both the black Africans and the Asians into the ‘non-European’ category.
In Africa, it seems that grievances are long and bitter. The descendants of the tribesmen who were dispossessed to make way for the large commercial farms, owned and managed by Dutch and British descended settlers, are coming back with a vengeance. I once saw a black nationalist film set in Zimbabwe in which the victorious freedom fighters chorused a catchy song about driving all settlers, wheresoever they came from, away from their country.
In Bangladesh, Europeans who care to keep up with the local news can see that there is a tremendous intolerance of out-groupers and dissenting opinions, highlighted by the 21 August 2004 grenade attack on the Awami League top brass.
A thoughtful Westerner might reflect that the aggression exemplified by the farm murders in South Africa and political violence in Bangladesh today just might be turned against North America and Europe – if we ever gained the power.
That might, just might, make some of the leaders of the Western World think that it would be in their side’s interests to remove all the remaining independence we possess and have us running to serve the lemonade when they clap their hands as in the days of the British Raj.
THE END
posted by Ali @ 12:44 PM
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