Farm Killings in South Africa

By Nechama Brodie

Dr Nechama Brodie challenges many of the myths used to narrate farm killings. She includes nearly a century of news reports, statistical data, legal cases and expert research on violence on farms, including violence experienced by farm labourers and in black communities surrounding mostly white-owned farmlands. 

Farm Killings in South Africa provides a compelling and heart-breaking record of the reality of violence in South Africa. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Sep 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9780795709111

Nechama Brodie

DR NECHAMA BRODIE is a journalist, author and academic. She has worked as an editor, publisher of magazines, a radio talk show host, a TV writer, director, and has written for many newspapers. She is a lecturer at Wits Centre for Journalism and is acting coordinator of Wits Justice Project. She is the author of nine books and lives in Johannesburg.

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FARM KILLINGS

IN SOUTH AFRICA

Nechama Brodie

KWELA BOOKS

Writers work over a long period and do extensive research to create a book which is eventually published. The ebook version of such a title is, like the printed edition, not free of charge. You may therefore not distribute the ebook for free, but have to purchase it from an authorised ebook merchant. Should you distribute the ebook for free, you violate the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 and render yourself liable to prosecution.

This book is dedicated to the memories of

Henry Nxumalo and Ruth First.

We stand upon the shoulders of giants.

April and October in the garden of Eden

A little after 6.30 pm on the evening of Thursday 1 October 2020, 21-year-old farm manager Brendin Horner said good night to his boss Gilly Scheepers, owner of Bloukruin Farm in Paul Roux in the eastern Free State.

Horner headed for his father’s house, on a neighbouring farm down the road, to help jumpstart a dead car battery. At around 7 pm he called his girlfriend to say he would be home soon and that she should warm up their dinner. Horner had one last job to do: to switch off an irrigation system about a kilometre from his house.

He was most likely attacked as he stopped to open the gate leading into the property. The assault may even have started while he was still in his bakkie. Horner appeared to have been stabbed through an open window on the driver’s side.

At some point Horner got out the vehicle, or he was taken out. A trail of blood led from the main road into a side road, and then into an open field. This was probably where he was strangled to death, with a length of black nylon rope. After he died he was dragged to a perimeter fence and the end of the rope was tied to a metal pole. Horner’s body was discovered there early the next morning. His car was found, abandoned, less than ten kilometres away. It wasn’t clear whether anything else had been taken. Media reports speculated that Horner had been killed because he’d interrupted a group of stock thieves.

The following morning, Saturday 3 October, two men were arrested for the crime. The men were suspected stock thieves, each with a long criminal history, and a witness claimed to have seen them coming from the direction of Bloukruin the previous morning. News reports alleged that the men were wearing bloodstained clothing. Another witness claimed to have overheard them boasting at a local tavern the day before, giving details of how they’d assaulted a white farmer.

The accused made their first appearance at the magistrate’s court in Senekal on Tuesday 6 October. That morning a crowd of protestors – white, Afrikaans-speaking – gathered, congregating a couple of hundred metres away from the court building. There were reported to be as many as 1 000, maybe even 1 500, people. Towards the end of the planned speeches and prayer service, one participant, a local businessman, stood up and said to the remaining crowd that they should go and fetch the accused from the holding cells.

About a hundred people broke away and headed off towards the courts, with a slightly smaller number eventually storming the building. In the skirmish, a police vehicle was tipped over and set alight. Two gunshots were fired inside the buildings. There were reports that the farmers had managed to get through to the holding cells and had assaulted the men accused of Horner’s murder with a flat iron. The incursion was eventually contained, and two men were arrested.

The murder-accused bail hearing was rescheduled for 16 October. This time, a large contingent of red-clad supporters from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) were also in attendance. A few days earlier, EFF leader Julius Malema had issued a call to the party’s ‘ground forces’ to ‘protect state property and democracy’. Malema emphasised that his party wasn’t coming to show support of the men accused of the killing, and that criminals should ‘rot in jail’.¹

That same morning, white farmers and supporters gathered at a restaurant at the edge of town. They prayed, and sang Die Stem, the apartheid-era national anthem.

The EFF supporters congregated around the court. Many of them reportedly sang the chant ‘Kill the boer, kill the farmer’. The right-wing Freedom Front Plus party subsequently lodged a complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission about this.²

Inside the court, in addition to Malema, Police Minister Bheki Cele and State Security Minister Ayanda Dlodlo were in attendance. Outside, a large police presence remained in place, a barricade of razor wire and security forces separating the EFF from the farmers. Mercifully, the line held.

The situation defused fairly rapidly after that. The EFF moved on to another protest, at a high school in Brackenfell that had allegedly excluded black students from a matric celebration. President Cyril Ramaphosa, addressing the national assembly in November, commented on the ‘deeply disturbing’ racial polarisation that characterised the events in Senekal.

A little over a year later, in November 2021, the men accused of killing Brendin Horner were found not guilty on all charges. The judge said that none of the evidence provided by the state had linked either man to Horner’s death – the fingerprints in the bakkie weren’t theirs; the bloodstains on their clothing were from three other people and didn’t match with bloodstains of the deceased; their cellphone records showed they weren’t at the location of the murder at the time of the murder. The testimonies of the witnesses that claimed to have heard the accused confess were contradictory and hyperbolic.

In February 2022, Julius Malema appeared before the Johannesburg High Court on a civil charge of hate speech, connected to the chants and songs that had been sung at Senekal. The EFF leader told the court that the lyrics had been ‘kiss the boer’ rather than ‘kill the boer’.

To date, there have been no other arrests for the murder of Brendin Horner.

Between April 2020 and March 2021, the South African Police Service (SAPS) recorded 19 972 murders across the country. That means that on any given day in South Africa that year, an average of 55 people would have been murdered.

This begs the question, why write an entire book sparked by one death – because it was quite specifically the events that took place in Paul Roux and in Senekal in October 2020 that led to the decision to start this work, now – or, put another way: why write a book about a group of deaths that, in most years, make up less than half a per cent of the annual tally of murders recorded in South Africa? (To explain: In the year Brendin Horner was killed, the Transvaal Agricultural Union/Transvaalse Landbou-unie [TAU/TLU] recorded 71 farm murders and 397 farm attacks. Because there is so little agreement about what constitutes a ‘farm murder’, this book for the most part uses the figures provided by the TAU/TLU, which are also commonly used by other groups such as AfriForum).

The best answer I can give is that, even though farm murders (in the ‘conventional’ sense, i.e. the murders of white farmers) make up a remarkably small proportion of violent acts overall, they are events that, because of their unique prominence, are able to place an entire country on a knife’s edge. What happened in Senekal was more than just another example of politicians and lobby groups looking for a podium and an issue (although it became that, too, and media coverage of the politics and protests in Senekal vastly outstripped coverage of Horner’s death). It was a flashpoint, a flare that highlighted the deepest fissures carved out by rage and simmering anger, a conflict about who belonged, about who got to feel safe.

Another such incident was the death in 2017 of fifteen-year-old Matlhomola Mosweu, which happened near Coligny, another farming town, in North West. Mosweu died after being ‘arrested’ by two white farmers who caught him allegedly stealing around R60-worth of sunflowers on a farm called Rietvlei. On the way to hand him in at the police station, the farmers claimed, the teenager had jumped off the back of their moving bakkie. The fall broke his neck and he died.

But there was a witness who said events happened differently – that the boy had been pushed. During the subsequent court case it was alleged that the farmers had threatened Mosweu with a gun, then forced him to drink alcohol and then to run until he vomited.

News of the boy’s death (he was originally reported to have been twelve years old) sparked a wave of protests in the town. Shops on the main road were looted, and tyres were burned on the street. When the two farmers accused of the killing were granted bail, houses were set on fire.

In October 2018 the two accused farmers were convicted of murder and, early the following year, each given lengthy jail sentences. The writer Rian Malan visited Coligny for a day and wrote a lengthy and floridly righteous piece on the town, the incident, and race in South Africa, concluding that nothing would appease ‘the mob’ other than ‘white flesh’.³ In November 2020, the farmers’ convictions were overturned on appeal, with the judges all stating that the police had botched the investigation, and that the evidence of the eyewitness had been unreliable and contradictory.

Two young men, two lives, two deaths, so unalike in so many ways; but also two faces of the same coin. For every Brendin Horner, there’s a Matlhomola Mosweu. Everything about their deaths was senseless, but nobody was guilty.

South Africa is ‘blessed’ with an abundance of small farming towns where the name of the town has become a byword for hate, for violence inflicted on and by farmers, on and by farm workers, on and by passers-by, children, family members, visitors, teachers, students, old people, young people, babies, mothers.

It’s been close to a decade since I started working on what has become a broader homicide research project – beginning with an article for fact-checking organisation Africa Check, which debunked growing claims that were being circulated online about an alleged ‘white genocide’ in South Africa. The claims were not true and were fairly easily disproven, but the myths around violence (and who was at risk of becoming a victim of violence) were stubbornly persistent.

Out of a desire to learn more about why people thought the way they did about crime, I started to build a database of media coverage of murders. Initially this focused on femicide, which became the subject of my doctoral thesis (and my first book about fatal violence, Femicide in South Africa, published by Kwela in 2020). Gradually, this study expanded to include research on other murders because it was increasingly evident that looking at only one part of a much larger picture would skew how I saw and understood things myself. These were the same criticisms I often levelled at other people, in particular the groups of people who were obsessed with white deaths, and whose fixation had ultimately stopped them from being able to see any other people’s pain. I grew frustrated with pundits who made black deaths invisible while complaining that nobody paid their cause any attention.

Even from the start of this work, I never denied that farm attacks and farm murders were real, or that they were terrible. But in my strong wish to enforce context and remind people – people who were possibly quite traumatised (the fact that many of them were openly racist doesn’t mean that they deserved trauma) – that their fears were a drop in the ocean, that other people had it much worse, more often … In a rush to put these beliefs in what I saw as their appropriate place, I lost the very empathy I was insisting they learned to develop.

The murder of Brendin Horner occurred while I was in the middle of starting a new homicide database project (the Homicide Media Tracker), logging media coverage of murder in South African press archives. The fallout in Senekal following the killing, the arrests and the subsequent volatile protests, made me realise that while in my own mind I had prioritised several other, larger homicide categories, this was perhaps the one that might matter right now to South Africa’s rather messed up ‘democracy’ group project. (There are many other things that matter, and probably matter more; but this is the work I do. There are other good people doing work in education, healthcare and so on.)

At the same time, I was exceptionally fortunate that the Henry Nxumalo Foundation agreed that this was important work, and they provided me with funding to embark on a data journalism project that would involve building a catalogue of media coverage of what I’d termed ‘farm killings’: so not just the deaths of white farmers, but also the deaths of other victims like Matlhomola Mosweu. People who had been killed or who had died unnatural deaths on farms where the manner of death was not clear, and where violence or negligence was suspected (my work does not rely on a formal legal finding of murder or culpable homicide to include a death). The database remains a work in progress but the contents will be shared with other journalists and other researchers in the future in the hope that, somehow, if we build better information, we can eventually enable better decisions. Or maybe just hate each other less.

This book is not based on interviews or fieldwork, but uses a large archive of media reports and research studies to document and explore a number of interrelated issues about fatal violence on farms. The decision not to engage with individuals is a deliberate one, because this book attempts to avoid the quicksand of rhetoric and sentiment that, understandably, characterises so much of the available record about this subject.

I did not expect the work for this project to be particularly agreeable, but the research undertaken for this book has been without question the most unpleasant and distressing content I’ve ever read en masse. I’m not sure if a ‘book of violence’ will do the trick in convincing antagonists to have empathy for each other, but it has surely challenged me to find more empathy in my own approaches – empathy for the victims, families and communities across South Africa, that is.

For politicians and pundits, for the lobby groups who use fear to remain relevant, to gain prominence, for the people who spread false information and rhetoric to drive clicks and profits, I have nothing but disdain. This book is probably not for those people, because it has long been apparent that it is in their interests to sustain the narrative of conflict and fear and pain that lies at the heart of farm attacks and farm killings; and this also, in part, explains the absence of meaningful solutions. Because this is a conflict that suits many.

This book is also not here to provide solutions. Rather, it discusses ways of how we see this violence and how we see each other in the context of this landscape, and it imagines what we might learn if we took off the blinkers of our own prejudices and expectations and tried to understand these crimes as they are, not as politicians or social media accounts proclaim them to be.

To do this, the book looks at farm killings over an extended period of time – going back over a hundred years – and tries to explore and interrogate important themes that emerge from readings of thousands of media articles, dating back to the early 1900s until the present day. The book also includes a slightly older history lesson: a view of the violence that was inherent in the very creation of modern farms in this country. From there, it looks at the complex contemporary question of who and what is counted (and who and what is not) in our measure of farm attacks and farm killings; it discusses how farm attacks and farm murders are and have been defined by the state, and by society; and it explains what the problems and limitations in these definitions, and their associated counts, mean for the way we understand what the problem is and who it most affects.

One of the types of violence that has traditionally been excluded from the popular narrative of ‘farm murders’ is that experienced by black and coloured farm labourers. Although this has been extensively documented over decades by independent labour and social-justice investigations, it has often been dismissed by many working in commercial agriculture as something that is uncommon (this is disputed, but even if it is less common since 1994, the response to the murders of white farmers should demonstrate that even rare events can have large consequences). Starting from the investigative work of Henry Nxumalo and the writings of Ruth First in the 1950s, this book tracks an incredibly dark side of agriculture and labour in South Africa. It then moves on to another rather tragic history – the issue of tenant farmers and forced removals in colonial and apartheid-era Natal. This introduces a major thread of this book, which is the exploration of what I call ‘contiguous violence’ and ‘geographies of violence’, and which are often overlooked when news reports and politicians focus all their attention on a single, immediate location of an incident, rather than understanding that perhaps the broader ‘countryside’ is indeed the scene of the crime.

Following this, the book spends some time exploring widely shared claims by farmers’ lobbies and right-wing parties that the struggle song ‘Kill the boer’ is responsible for inciting deaths, and that farm murders of white farmers are either politically or racially motivated, or constitute what many have alleged are hate crimes and even attempts at so-called ‘white genocide’.

In the final chapters, the related question of alleged torture or extreme violence is explored (the discussion is rather chilling), and this is followed by an examination of the particular role that firearms play in farm killings (as a heads-up, the mere presence of a firearm, whether it is the victim’s or the perpetrator’s, increases the risk of a fatal outcome).

This book also integrates more than thirty years of other research and writing on violence on farms in South Africa, from security experts, violence researchers, agricultural organisations, and government departments. What is particularly sobering about this body of work is that, on review, it often feels like a large part of what I’m trying to do or say today is simply rephrasing and repeating the sound advice and considered findings of others in the past. I might be doing this in a slightly new way, or with different dots being connected, but the advice and findings should have gained proper attention a long time ago.

The final chapter of this book discusses what we should consider doing next, and I hope that if you’re reading this part, now, you’ll stick around and read to the end.

This land is our land

If you read books like Jared Diamond’s best-selling work Guns, Germs, and Steel you might imagine that it was smallpox and gunpowder that helped to colonise what became South Africa. Indeed, in 1713 a VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie – the Dutch East India Company) fleet returning from India managed to import the highly contagious variola virus to the Cape of Good Hope, transporting it ashore in the ship’s linens, which were sent to be washed at the Slave Lodge.

It was the washerwomen who first got sick. Over the next few weeks, hundreds of slaves and colonists and thousands of indigenous Khoena (Khoekhoen) succumbed to the disease, the latter in particular having had no previous exposure to the virus and therefore no immunity.

A little over a century later a prominent local historian and newspaperman named George McCall Theal, who for a time ran some of the earliest black newspapers at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape, determined that smallpox had been singularly responsible for wiping out most of the ‘Hottentot’ (Khoekhoen) population of the region, clearing the land, he claimed, of almost all of its indigenous inhabitants except for a handful of Bushmen – who had escaped the pox by virtue of their remoteness – right up until the point where the expanding British settlement made contact with Bantu people on the colony’s eastern frontier (initially in the region of the Great Fish River).

Theal’s histories were regularly quoted and even translated into Afrikaans, and continued to make their appearance well into the twentieth century. They are a largely unchallenged narrative of an open and empty land into which British and Boer could legitimately, and rather conveniently, wander and stake their claim.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that contemporary historians like Robert Ross and Shula Marks began to produce research that challenged these assumptions, arguing that the distributed nature of human settlements at the time would have prevented the disease from reaching the majority of the Khoena population (although Ross uses the now-outdated term ‘Khoikhoi’). Ross’s research suggested that while the initial loss of life among Khoena had been high – as much as thirty per cent of the Cape population perishing from smallpox – this was something that the groups could have recovered from within a generation or so.¹

Except the Cape Khoena did not recover. Their social status deteriorated rapidly, from independent pastoralists to ill-treated farm labourers. This, Ross suggested, was due to other factors, specifically the loss of Khoena grazing land. More than guns or germs, it was a combination of agriculture and bureaucracy – coupled with official acts of violence committed almost unrelentingly against indigenous people and