FARMS OF FEAR!

It’s not the Somme, it’s South Africa — and a memorial to nearly 2,000 white farmers murdered in the last 10 years. The motive? Not theft, nor land grab, as in Zimbabwe — but revenge, fuelled by racism and envy. And as the killing goes on, the police do nothing. Brian Moynahan reports
The N1 is South Africa’s grand trunk road. It runs north from Cape Town and the Paarl vineyards, clean across the country, past the flyovers and interchanges of Johannesburg and Pretoria, until it ends at Beitbridge, the border crossing on the Limpopo.
Here, a darker Africa begins: Robert Mugabe’s ruined Zimbabwe, the towns squalid and shattered, the countryside desolate and overgrown. Many of its famished and tattered blacks seek to escape at Beitbridge, swimming the river, or paying the waiting omalume, “uncles”, the people traffickers, to smuggle them past the border patrols to a new life in South Africa.
For almost all of its 1,200 miles of polished tarmac and plump service stations, the N1 offers evidence that post-apartheid South Africa has avoided the bloodshed and collapse that have haunted its neighbours. In a continent awash with troubles, its prosperity and stability draw not just illegals from across the Limpopo, but even French-speakers from Niger and the distant Sahara.
A tiny half-mile section of the N1, though, past Mokopane in Limpopo Province, chills the heart. It is overlooked by a large white cross that lies on a green hillside. Look closer, and the cross is seen to be made up of scores of small white crosses planted in neat lines. And then the eye is drawn to what seem to be bursts of snowdrops on the kopjes, the two small hills that lie on each side of the cross. These, too, are little white crosses, swirling on the slope.
The Afrikaners, the native whites of South Africa, have a flair for setting monuments to their rugged history in such sweeps of landscape. The crosses are their handiwork – or, more specifically, that of the “Boers”, or “farmers”. They seem to commemorate some distant epic, a trek with ox wagons, a battle with Zulus or the British.
But Mokopane is not to do with the past. The word “Plaasmoorde” is hand-lettered on the slope. It means “farm murders”. Over 1,700 of South Africa’s commercial farmers and their families, mostly white and Afrikaans, but including a substantial number of English speakers, have been killed since the end of apartheid in 1994.
The ages of the victims vary – from infants to people in their eighties. The attackers usually operate in gangs of three to eight. Extreme violence, including rape, torture and physical mutilation, is often involved. Sometimes nothing is stolen, leading to claims that the attackers are motivated by racism and a desire for revenge.
Mokopane, then, deals with the present, and, in the most brutal way, with a future in which the rural Boers, for more than 300 years the white tribe of Africa, fear they face extinction.
The world has more than an inkling of what has happened in Zimbabwe. Over the past six years, to the accompaniment of farm invasions, beatings, livestock maiming and now mass hunger, Mugabe has seized more than nine-tenths of his country’s white-owned commercial farms. He is about to complete the ethnic cleansing of rural Zimbabwe.
What is happening in South Africa is less known and is, in most respects, different. In Zimbabwe it is government policy, instigated by the president, and seen through by party thugs. South Africa, in which the bulk of commercial farmland remains in white hands, has model policies of land restitution and reform – validation by land claims courts, compensation at market value, incentives for black empowerment and land ownership – whose principles are accepted by most landowners.
The process of restitution is intended to be scrupulously fair, untouched by the rancour that built up over the long years of baaskap, white supremacy. Whites moved from areas designated as black “homelands” by the apartheid regime are entitled to claim on the same basis as displaced blacks, though the latter- are far more numerous. Valuations are by independent assessors. Progress has been slow, though the white farmers have little reason to complain. A decade after apartheid, less than 5% of commercial farmland is in black hands, though the government has set a target of redistributing 30% of white-owned land to blacks by 2014.
For all the legislation and goodwill, there is horror. Zimbabwe’s white farmers were expelled, and uncompensated. Very few were murdered.It is true, sadly, that South Africa suffers from a general epidemic of violence, and farmers cannot expect to be immune in a country where 18,793 people were murdered in the year to March 2005, the great majority of them urban blacks.
But the farmers’ numbers are small, and their vulnerability high: 10 times higher than for the population at large, or so it is claimed, making them the most at-risk profession in the non-military world. Go to the farmlands, and it shows.
The last town on the N1 before Musina and the Zimbabwe border is Makhado. It was named, until recently, after Louis Trichardt, the Boer Voortrekker, who reached the foot of the Soutpansberg mountains here in 1836, on his way north to escape the British at the Cape.Tollbooths mark the approach of the town. A gravel road leads from the tarmac. After some distance, a gate and a long rutted track mark the entrance to a farm set well back from the road.
It is owned by Ernest Breytenbach. He has 120 cattle on 5,700 acres, with a simple house built round an Aga brought in by wagon in the 1920s.His father, André, was killed when he got out of his “bakkie” (pick-up truck) at the gate in August 1998. It was a bad month on the farms: 66 people were murdered – four of them set on fire. In another attack, the farmer had been bound and beaten, but nothing was taken from the house and his firearm was still on the wardrobe.
“They were waiting for my dad to get back from dropping off his workers,” Breytenbach says. “He was shot in the stomach. They made off with his bakkie and dumped him. When we found him, they’d taken the spotlights off the bakkie. They put them by his face, like eyes, and they put the licence plates at his head and his feet. I don’t know why they did it. Maybe it was to say, ‘Look what we did,’ to get on the front page.”
Breytenbach blames the ruling ANC, President Thabo Mbeki’s African National Congress, for continuing incidents on the farm. “I see people hunting with dogs or collecting firewood on my land,” he says. “I ask my people if they know them. It’s always ‘No’ because they have to answer to them. I have a lot of game theft. They make snares from my fence wire. I think it’s ANC intimidation. They want us out.”
His father was the first to be murdered at Louis Trichardt. Many attacks have followed. Werner and Brigitte Wiedeck live close by, in a pin-neat house with garden gnomes in the conservatory and doilies on the armchairs. They have been robbed eight times in three years. Twice they were beaten. The worst was last April.
“They put a gun to my husband’s head and tied him up, and gagged me with a scarf,” says Brigitte. “Then they started beating me with a steel pole. They already had all our money, but they kept demanding more. I was choking on my own blood. I feigned dead and they went.
“I got free and I cut Werner loose. I was very lucky. The doctors were fighting for three days for my life. I had serious skull fractures. I needed nine steel plates. I lost my right eye.” The police, she says, took two hours to drive the few miles from town. “No one checked for bullets, for fingerprints, for tracks in the bush. They did more or less nothing.”
Dolores de Agrella runs Adam’s Apple, a roadside inn on the way into town. “There was a whole spate of attacks in June 2004,” she says. “We were robbed twice: videos, TVs, even a pot of oxtail I was making for Father’s Day lunch. We were cleaned out, so I thought we were safe. One evening, the dog barked, and a figure appeared in my room. He pulled my jaw down and put a gun in my mouth, and pulled the trigger. Without a word. Just like that. But it didn’t go off. Then he started trying to pull me down. I started kicking and screaming and grappling with him. He was a puny little thing. As fast as he’d arrived, he was gone. I’m only alive because he had the wrong calibre bullet in the gun.” The aftermath, she says, was terrible. “The pit of my stomach was churning and churning. My life-saver was a pepper spray. I’d sit clutching it the whole time like a TV remote.
“If we got a good offer, I’d be straight off. It’s harder for the Afrikaners, though. This is their heritage. Their fathers and grandfathers were born on their farms. It’s different for them.”
One of those is Celia Guillaume. She was the first woman in Africa to become a licensed big-game hunter. She has ranged across southern Africa in her bakkie, an independent and once fearless soul who grew up with the locals. She built a house on her father’s land, looking out across the Soutpansberg, green and alpine in the rain, with thatched rondavels (circular buildings) in a miniature village she built for conferences.
She grows flowers and nuts on her 500 acres, and has a seed export business. “I was 100% self-sufficient,” she says. “I grew maize and coffee, soya beans, chickens, butter, milk. I shot a bushbuck every month. I loved it. I didn’t mind being alone. Now, I won’t come here on my own. I don’t like being here at night, even if I have people staying.”
Her four attackers came one morning last year. “I’m sure it was an inside job,” she says. “I was packed to go to Zambia the next day, and I had a lot of foreign currency. They knew I was alone. They hit me with guns, and stripped me, and tied me up and gagged me. They had everything they wanted right away. Everything in my safe, my guns, everything with a plug on it – TV, stereo – all my CDs, the keys to my bakkie. But they stayed on for hours. I thought they were going to kill me. My father comes up to see me at 5pm every evening, and I thought, ‘Please, God, don’t let Daddy find me dead like this.’ Then they went off in the bakkie, and I managed to free myself. But it’s still there. They f*** up your future, and they also steal your yesterdays.”
She has no confidence in the police. “We can’t depend on them,” she says. “The farmers were here first. They washed my blood, they found my bakkie. When the police finally came, they fingerprinted everything, videoed it, took still pictures – and all of it has disappeared.
“We knew who’d done it soon enough. Local people know. They came from 40 kilometres away. They were caught with my personal possessions on them and in their homes. The dossier was opened for attempted murder and armed robbery. But because it all went missing, they were charged with possession of stolen property and got a slap on the wrist. They’re already out. If I did pursue it, they might kill me next time. They’ve rung me to say, ‘We know you haven’t got a gun now, we had six months inside because of you, we’re going to get you.’”
Mimie du Toit runs a game farm that caters for hunters, mainly Scandinavian and Spanish. Her husband was killed when the steering column on his vehicle broke on a hunting trip. Her father, Ben Keyter, farmed cattle 30 miles away. He was murdered in January 2005.
“They asked my mom for water,” she says. “She opened the door and they pushed in. Two of them pulled my dad outside. They made my mom watch while they killed him with a spade. They said, ‘Look, you can’t help him.’ Then they hit my mom very bad. She had blood all on one side, and they threw the deepfreeze on top of her and left her for dead. Then she got a stroke. Now she’s in Pretoria for speech therapy.” Her father was 79. He was killed for his cell phone and his 780 rand (£70) monthly pension. Three arrests were made. “It was the farmers who got them,” she says. “The police did nothing.”

THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE.