Frank
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As she was suffocating from a plastic bag over her head, the getaway driver was getting anxious and sounding his horn. By then, the safe was off the wall and they saw it had no money. They left without finishing her off. One man stole her car, but the anti-theft mechanism kicked in and it was abandoned 300m up the road.
“It’s very difficult for me to say what I feel,” she says. “But with this hate speech going on (Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters party is urging the seizure of white-owned land), this is stirring up the masses who are without things and who are being promised things that are not forthcoming. It’s like: go and take what you want.
“The thought of leaving has crossed my mind, but where does one go? The killing of whites is everywhere — you’re not safe anywhere.”
On Friday, a white farmer from the Eastern Cape was raped in front of her three children. On Wednesday, in the northern Limpopo province, three white people working on a farm were shot, the foreman, fatally in the chest. His partner survived being shot twice in the arm and the farm owner’s son survived a shot to the groin.
The attackers have not been found and likely never will be. Nor have the three men who tortured Simpson been identified. It may not be possible to understand the cruelty but the source of the attacks is in plain view.
Berdus Henrico and Estelle Nieuwenhuys were attacked in February on a farm in the Limpopo province. Henrico fought with two men who attacked with a knife and screwdriver, after which a third man came into their remote farmhouse with a handgun and shot him three times. He is lucky to be alive. Berdus Henrico and Estelle Nieuwenhuys were attacked in February on a farm in the Limpopo province. Henrico fought with two men who attacked with a knife and screwdriver, after which a third man came into their remote farmhouse with a handgun and shot him three times. He is lucky to be alive. Driving through the heaving black township of Mamelodi, on the rural outskirts of Pretoria, reveals some surprises: it has law courts, a hospital, a university branch, a council, police stations and some decent homes. But probe deeper into the million-strong settlement and it becomes evident that these threads of a functional society are failing to hold together a mess.
On the edges, people live in shacks made from flattened 44-gallon drums or scavenged plywood. They are mostly illegal immigrants from places such as Zimbabwe, Malawi and Nigeria who swarmed down on the promise of Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation in the mid-1990s and instead found themselves in a new hell.
It is in such townships that much of South Africa’s crime is plotted: the constant carjacking; the boulders dropped on windscreens from overpasses after which hordes ransack stricken vehicles; the daily and daylight cash-in-transit robberies, where criminals slam armoured vans with automatic rifles and bombs. But such ventures are risky.
Eddie Mnguni, chairman of Mamelodi East community policing forum, says local criminals see attacking nearby farms as hassle-free.
“In the suburbs, you can’t rob easily with all the security,” says Mnguni. “But in the farms it is easy for criminals. Then came the EFF and the message they are putting forward has a negative impact.
In January, four black men attacked Piet Els, 86, on his Kimberley farm. They beat him with a metal bar and burned him with an iron. Under a rain of blows Els could not remember the code for the safe. He had no electric fences or guard dogs. A friend of Nelson Mandela, he thought his reputation would protect him. In January, four black men attacked Piet Els, 86, on his Kimberley farm. They beat him with a metal bar and burned him with an iron. Under a rain of blows Els could not remember the code for the safe. He had no electric fences or guard dogs. A friend of Nelson Mandela, he thought his reputation would protect him. “When people say, ‘Go and occupy land forcibly’, that’s carnage.”
Police are yet to provide answers to the family of Kyle Stols, 21, who was killed from shots to the head and heart on a game farm outside Bloemfontein on October 22 last year. Stols’s brother, Gabriel, 35, said the alarm had been tripping at the lodge for a week, without explanation. Kyle Stols wandered the 500m across from his house to turn off the alarm when he was ambushed.
“There was a struggle, some fighting going on,” Gabriel Stols says. “In that process, Kyle was shot. I am grateful that the fear he experienced was only for a few minutes — but others are being tortured.”
Nothing was stolen, not even Kyle Stols’s mobile phone. Asked why his brother was killed, Gabriel Stols says: “My personal opinion? It’s because he’s white, he lives on a farm and there’s still a lot of hatred. In the media, you see statements that there are only five million whites and 45 million blacks and how ‘we can kill them all in two weeks’.
“We have no help, we are sitting ducks. As soon as you kill someone on a farm, the family doesn’t have the courage to go back to the farm. I was a small child in apartheid. I can’t even remember it. My brother was born in the new South Africa and is killed because he’s white.”
White farmers face trouble on three fronts: the extreme generic crime that plagues the nation; so-called “land grabs” encouraged by the EFF under Malema, whose followers occupy land and refuse to move; and the land expropriation program of the new president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
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