FARMS OF FEAR PART 2

FARMS OF FEAR !

Her father’s farm has to go. “I’m busy selling it,” she says. “I have to, to pay for my mom’s treatment. But I’m going to stay here. I don’t have an electric fence. I trust in the Lord. He will help me. “I was very bitter at first. That passed with losing my husband. I realised it doesn’t matter how you die. And I have my three children. “But I will say this: if I killed one of them, you’d hear it all over the world. But if they kill my dad, no one hears anything, not even here.”

There are other stories, one after another. Herman de Jager’s father, Pieter, was shot as years of work came to fruition. The family had cleared the bush from their land, by hand and tractor, and planted 7,800 macadamia nut trees – Pieter de Jager had hand-grafted each one himself. “That morning, we finished the drip irrigation system,” de Jager says. “We said, ‘Now we’re ready to farm.’ I was away from the house. My mother got me on the cell, she said it’s a farm attack. I found my father under a tree. He died in my arms.” Billy Meyer, a small-scale farmer, was shot dead through the head at 7.30pm on a Saturday as he sat in his house with his baby. Farmers tracked his killers for 60 kilometres towards the border with Zimbabwe but did not catch them.

His near neighbours Gillie and Sophia Fick have a prosperous spread of 17,000 acres. “It’s only God’s will that we’re still here,” they say. At 5.45am, Gillie got into his bakkie to drive out to the fields. There were four attackers. Two of them pointed guns at his head. They pulled him out of the truck and forced him to the ground. Then they started breaking in the windows and burglar bars with a pickaxe. “I heard the glass go,” says Sophia. “I took my pistol and fired three shots out through the curtains. I wasn’t worried for my husband. I thought he was already dead. Then I pushed the panic alarm. The siren went off. They fired some shots and drove off in our bakkie. They dumped it at the tarmac road, where they had cars waiting.” “The farmers put up a roadblock and caught some of them,” says Gillie. “We got a helicopter from friends and we spotted another in thick bush and caught him. The police were hopeless. They didn’t even take fingerprints from my bakkie, though the four of them were in it.” Their farmhouse, like others, is surrounded by a high electric fence. “But there’s no way you can stop them,” Gillie says. “They dug a hole under it. They use aerosol cooking oil or fly killer to deal with the dogs. They smash burglar bars. I’ve put concrete foundations round the fence. Next time, they’re going to have to dig a deeper hole.”

“Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer!” was a slogan of ANC guerrillas in apartheid days. A presidential commission into the attacks examined claims that the ANC remains involved, and that the assaults are part of a deliberate campaign. No evidence has been found. No pattern has emerged. Some attackers are locals. Some are Zimbabwean. Some drive 200 miles to the farms from the Jo’burg townships. Some are revenge attacks by disaffected employees. Some are motivated by money – attacks the night before payday, when there is cash in the farmhouse. In others, valuables are ignored and nothing is taken. The government is manifestly innocent - of inspiring the attacks, but ministers are more open to charges of neglect. South Africa is a mining and industrial giant. It is the wealthiest country in Africa. Agriculture accounts for only 3.4% of the economy, though it employs 30% of the labour force. That makes it easier to ignore.

The Cape winelands and golf courses, the Garden Route along the coast to Durban, the Kruger national park – the tourist gems that attract visitors by the thousands – are tucked away from the worst areas of violence. “Rural insecurity gets swept under the carpet,” says Chris van Zyl, who is responsible for security in the TAU (Transvaal Agriculture Union). “It’s stock theft and livestock maiming, too, and harvest theft, fields stripped of maize, orchards of fruit. As a career, farming is blighted. When a farmer dies, the chances are there’s no family member willing to take over the farm.” His colleague Gideon Meining, a farmer, is a case in point. His one son is a businessman. The other is in London, one of as many as 1.4m South Africans thought to be living in Britain. Black as well as white farmers are targeted. “We’ve black members who’ve lost so much cattle and sheep, they say they can’t continue with livestock,” says Kobus Visser, spokesman for another big farmers’ union. “But they have less chance of being murdered.”

The record of livestock thefts from April to September 2005 show that 30,000 cattle and 49,000 sheep were stolen. In the same period, the Krugersdorp rural area reported 29 farm attacks, eight murders, six farmers shot, 22 beaten and one raped, 45 break-ins and 12 armed robberies. “We recorded 97 farm attacks in this small area last year, with 14 murders,” says Trevor Roberts, who runs the private Conserv security services near Muldersdrift, just northwest of Jo’burg. “This year is worse. We’ve had 28 attacks in less than two months, with three murders. If it was all criminality, they’d do it when people are away,” Roberts says. “But they don’t. They wait for people to come home, and sometimes they torture them and kill them.” The attackers who shot Peter Binggeli, one of Roberts’s clients, on his farm, waited until the family was home at 11:30pm. Binggeli was shot three times and beaten with an iron bar. He owes his life to his wife. She ran into the bush. The attackers failed to find her and fled, fearing she had called for help. Eiderdowns stolen from a wendy house on the farm were found behind rocks. It was clear the attackers had lain there for days observing the Binggelis before they struck.

The elderly are often targeted. Nearby, Paul Hart grew up on the farm where his parents, John and Sylvia, lived for 43 years. It is called Swing-gate Farm after a lane in Berkhamsted. “Mum and Dad came out from Hertfordshire in 1949. Dad had £46. This place was bare veld.” The house they built is thatched, the gardens shaded by the trees they planted. A finely restored Jaguar XK140 and a yellow E-type in the garage hint at John Hart’s business. “Dad was a mechanical engineer,” says Hart. “Mum was the farmer – rabbits, asparagus, Jersey cattle, market gardening and dairy. We children would help pack the food to take off to market. They didn’t want to retire to the city. They wanted to stay here. Dad was 88 and Mum was 83. But they were still -fit. Dad swam every day. He restored his cars. He was a perfectionist. He played golf and classical guitar. He took precautions.” A high electric fence runs round the house and gardens. John Hart checked it every day at 5pm. The windows and doors are guarded by thick burglar bars. He had a .38 revolver.

At some time between 12.30 and 2.30pm on November 18 last year, he was outside the fence by the cattle sheds when he was battered to death. Sylvia was in the house. The gate in the fence was opened, and the attackers got into the house. They seem to have first beaten her for the key to the upstairs safe. Then, although by now they had John Hart’s .38, they beat her to death with one of her husband’s golf clubs. Africa had been kind to the Harts. “Not long before they died, Mum gave Dad a big kiss,” says Hart’s sister, Lesley. “And she said, ‘Thank you for bringing me to Africa. I’ve had a marvellous life.’” Her brother says he understands the motives for robbery. “When there’s no work, a man has to feed his family,” he says. “We’re soft targets. Close to town, near highways, nice open farmland, fairly well off. I can accept the crime. But not the violence that goes with it. They had the key to the safe. They had a revolver. Why bludgeon an 83-year-old lady to death? I don’t think robbery was the main motive. The gardener hasn’t been since before the murder. Something Dad said upset him. I think this was a revenge attack.”

The police, he says, are hopelessly under-resourced. “The local police station is only three kilometres away, but it’s two-thirds under strength in manpower. It has so few vehicles that sometimes policemen have to use their own.” He has put the farm on the market. He and his sister only visit now with their private security guard, Godknows Malulaka, and his shotgun. Though they are still British citizens, like other victims, the British government has shown little interest in their fate. President Mbeki has said that whites have a “psychosis” of “fear about their survival in a sea of black savages”. He has said, remarkably, that they are “addicted” to their fear. Farmers blame government indifference. “Protection isn’t improving,” says van Zyl. “It’s getting worse.” “We had our commandos, authorised volunteers who’d served in the army, in country districts,” says Meining. “They gave real security. But the government has disbanded most of them, so we try to look after ourselves with Farm Watch, our own self-defence groups.”

Police are short of manpower and training. Accusations of incompetence – failing to fingerprint, to take blood samples, basic police skills – are widespread. Kiewiet Ferreira, of the Agri SA farmers’ union, spoke last month of the “helplessness and frustration” among farmers, black and white, at the “apparent unwillingness and ignorance” of some police officers. “It’s common knowledge among prosecutors and the public that cases are not properly investigated,” says Reino Mostert, control prosecutor at Makhado. “Experts should be first at a murder scene. They’re not. The local uniformed men get there and wander round, and the evidence deteriorates. The unnecessary violence is what worries me. I’ve discussed this with fellow prosecutors, and I can tell you, there are no attacks like this on black farmers. I know these people who’ve been killed. Like Ben Keyter, a lovely old man, defenceless, killed like a dog.” It is, of course, to South Africa’s credit that it has become more difficult to get a conviction. In apartheid days, confessions were wrung from suspects easily enough.

But Mostert himself knows the near-collapse of law and order. “I was woken up by breaking glass at 4am,” he says. “I shouted, ‘Get me my pistol – I’m going to kill them.’ I hoped that would see them off. But it didn’t. They got in and they were taking the DVD and TV by the time I’d got a rifle. I had my wife and kids there. I swear I’d have shot them dead. But then they made off. I fired some shots after them.” The prosecutor, it should be added, lives across the street from the courthouse and police station. Makhado boasts a high-security prison too – the most modern in the country. It houses 3,800 hardened criminals. The prison choir performed with Jo’burg’s symphony orchestra in February. It says much for the new South Africa. So, alas, does what followed last month. The wardens went on strike. The inmates rioted and set one of the blocks on fire. No police or troops were at hand to secure the perimeter.

The prison authorities asked Farm Watch for help. As flames and smoke drifted across the night, every 20 yards a bakkie was drawn up at the wire, and a Boer, unmistakable in rugger shorts and a khaki shirt, stood guard until the army arrived. Zimbabwe’s cull of farmers can be repeated by default, as well as by design. There are signs of growing haste and impatience in land reform. New possibilities of legalised expropriation were opened on March 1. The deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, spoke at a recent conference in Pretoria. “We’ve got lessons to learn from Zimbabwe,” she said. “How to do it fast. We need a bit of oomph. So, we might want some skills exchange between us and Zimbabwe.” The remark was made with a smile, it was reported, and “to muted laughter”. The farmers in her audience might be forgiven for not getting the joke.

THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE


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