A Glimmer of Truth About South Africa

Here's something you won't find every day - a British national, daily newspaper reporting something approaching the reality on the ground in the new South Africa.

White farmers fearing for their lives, teaching their wives and children how to handle guns.

Unqualified black workers 'reclaiming' land and farms 'stolen' from them, putting the economy and food production in danger.

A soaring crime rate, unimaginable, brutal violence - often meted out for no reason at all.

There is a distinct and undeniable pattern to these attacks, and the racial element cannot be ignored forever.

The reporter doesn't seem overly sympathetic to the plight of white South Africans, noting:

Whites give no credit to the black populace, refusing stubbornly to acknowledge that they themselves are physical reminders of a brutal colonial past.

Nonsense such as this aside, it is remarkable that the story was published at all - normally this problem is ignored altogether.

Here are some extracts from the article:

Bella wakes. She hears a strangled, gurgling sound. It’s the dog, she thinks.

‘Peter, there’s something wrong,’ she says to her husband. Noises emerge from the room of her mother-in-law, who’s 98 and confined to a wheelchair.

It’s 1am. Bella gets up and walks out of the bedroom. In the hall she sees a young man who at first she thinks is her son. Except he’s black, wears a balaclava and is pointing a gun at her.

‘He comes for me,’ says Bella, her hand before her tear-stained face.

‘He’s going to shoot me! I trip as I run back to the bedroom. Peter comes to the door but he has nothing in his hand, no pistol. I hear a gun go off. I hear my mother-in-law screaming. I lock the door and telephone my son. I tell him: “I think they shot Pa!”’

Two men are outside the bedroom window with a rifle. She loads the pistol Peter keeps by the bed.

‘I take the gun and say, “Come on! I’ll shoot you!”’

Back in the hall she finds Peter dead, a trail of blood across the kitchen floor. Her mother-in-law Gerda is bruised and beaten.

‘I can’t tell you how hopeless I felt,’ Bella says. ‘I will see it in front of me for weeks, months, years.’

Days after Peter is cremated, the attackers return. The survivors are sleeping elsewhere by now, so the gang finds only the dogs in the house. They torture the animals with boiling water before soaking them in petrol and setting them on fire.

I ask Bella for a motive and she says a group of black South Africans who are squatting on their farmland have repeatedly threatened them.

After the family find the dogs, Bella’s son Piet calls the police. Weeks later the attackers are still at large; police arrested one man in connection with the killing but he was later released.

I am in her home. The bullet holes are still clearly visible. I ask her what she is going to do.

‘If we stay here they will kill us. You can’t say this was a dream, or rewind what happened. They want our land.’

This is Bella’s account of an attack that happened last month in South Africa, in the north-east of the country. Her home is a long way from the vineyards and beaches of Cape Town, but South Africa is to host the 2010 World Cup and five of the centres for players and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who will come with them are here in the north.

Preparations are in hand but this is against the backdrop of a country gripped by ultra-violence. Officially there are about 50 murders a day, and three times that number of rapes. Most victims are poor blacks in South Africa’s cities: reported deaths last year totalled more than 18,000.

But among the casualties of the violence are white farmers, whose counterparts in Zimbabwe are singled out for international press coverage; here in the ‘rainbow nation’ their murders, remarkable for their particular savagery, go largely unreported.

There are no official figures but, since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, farmers’ organisations say 3,000 whites in rural areas have been killed. The independent South African Human Rights Commission, set up by Mandela’s government, says the number is 2,500.

Its commission’s report into the killings does not break down their figures by colour; but it says the majority of attacks in general - ie where no one necessarily dies - are against white people and that 'there was a considerably higher risk of a white victim of farm attacks being killed or injured than a black victim.'

It states that since 2006, farmer murders have jumped by 25 per cent and adds: 'The lack of prosecutions indicates the criminal justice system is not operating effectively to protect victims in farming communities and to ensure the rule of law is upheld.'

What is certain is this: since the mid-Nineties, 900,000 mainly white South Africans have emigrated from South Africa - about 20 per cent of the white population - most of them due to soaring crime rates. In an eerie parallel with Zimbabwe, farms have been reclaimed by unqualified workers.

Commercial agricultural production has taken a massive hit where land reform has occurred. And as the attacks on white farmers continue, the police seem increasingly powerless and ineffective, and farmers are turning to vigilante behaviour as their way of life comes under violent assault.

The ANC government's response to this has been largely defiant. As Charles Ngacula, Safety and Security Minister under the previous administration of Thabo Mbeki, said: 'They can continue to whinge until they're blue in the face, be as negative as they want to, or they can simply leave this country.'

Driving around Mpumalanga Province, east of Johannesburg, in what used to be the Transvaal, I found myself called by the farmers to a string of grisly murder scenes. In some the blood was still drying on the furniture or the street. In others, witnesses gave me accounts of killings involving rituals of extreme brutality: of victims boiled alive, forced to kneel and shot execution style and tortured in ways so unimaginable they are too horrendous to print. The same goes for the many pictures I have been shown of the barely identifiable corpses and horrific crime scenes.

Werner is adamant that only he can protect his family: 'The police say don't fight back. But you must fight back. It's the bullet or be slaughtered. If you're going to rape my wife and kill my children you must understand I have nothing to lose. But you can run away. And if I shoot back you will run away.'

At a farmers' day, or Boerdag, in a marquee tent surrounded by maize harvesting machinery, I meet a string of farmers with attack stories. One elderly man too scared to be identified tells me how a gang broke in at five in the morning, tied him and his wife up, then got an angle grinder from the workshop and sawed into the flesh of his legs with the blade, demanding, 'I want money! You must talk!'

One of the gang picked up the couple's mobile phone and inadvertently called their daughter, who then had to endure hearing the robbery unfold in screams and shouts.

The more brutal and incredible the stories, the more doubt creeps in: are they over-egging this for political impact? Are they perhaps deeply racist at heart? But then I remind myself: I have seen the pictures and read the local newspaper reports. I've been to the funerals.

It is said that the signs always lead down a road to the farmstead: bunches of long grass knotted like corn dolls, the strands of wire fences twisted into cat's cradle configurations, and stones, tin cans and plastic bags stacked in circle and arrow patterns.

These 'attack signs', which can supposedly warn if trouble is coming to your farm, are a macabre coded language. Farmers widely believe in their existence; they have been decoded by Special Forces veterans.

At first I wondered if the 'attack signs' story was a result of mass hysteria. But the hairs on the back of my neck stood rigid when I began to see what appeared to be sets of signs outside farms near where attacks had already occurred.

Each sign is said to mean something: a forked stick signifies a woman in the house, the corn dolls map out the farm buildings and signs dubbed 'triggers' are set to either 'off' or 'on' - meaning 'attack'.

White farmers read these runes and arm themselves because they have nothing else. New police units promised to substitute the old Commando system have yet to be formed. And people isolated on remote properties are worried by the fact that licenses for their firearms are not being renewed.

Widow Tracey Pemberton is 41 but looks 20 years older and appears to be malnourished. She dreams of emigrating to the UK but her British husband died five years ago and she lives on a 200-hectare farm in a ramshackle cottage. The area, set among huge forests of planted pine, is so dangerous that on the main road outside Tracey's gate there are big signs that warn CRIME ALERT - NO STOPPING!

'I'm stupid to stay but I don't know where to go,' she says. 'It's awful to have to say "Who's that over there? What's that noise?" I definitely want to go. Because you're a woman and alone they take advantage of you. My husband had a British passport when he passed away. He'd had enough of struggling and failing in this country...'

By the eve of the elections that brought Zuma to power earlier this year the family had already been robbed six times over the years. Then one night Tracey was woken by noises from her mother Yvonne's room. She found a man sitting on top of the 65-year-old woman. 'I can't get that picture out of my mind.'

The attacker stabbed her mother 17 times, but miraculously she survived. Sonette Selzer rushed to the scene to help save her. But, insists Tracey, the harrassment continues. 'They switch on all the taps outside in the middle of the night to try to persuade you to go outside.' And she thinks they climb about on the roof, although it could be the branches from the oak tree brushing against the tiles.

As a South African Police Service (SAPS) officer, Derek Jonker investigated 52 separate farm attacks and he says, 'There has been a decline in the abilities of the police. There is a power struggle in the police and investigators are not qualified.

'Crime prevention has collapsed totally,' he adds. 'And cops tracking cases lack experience and resources to gather evidence and arrest oenders. Dockets vanish and criminals get let out of jail.'

In the provincial town of Ermelo, I meet a policeman who's tired and angry. He says SAPS can't be bothered to fight crime any more. Only four out of 16 police vehicles at the station are still in working order. I ask what happens with the vehicles that are in working order. He shrugs and points across the street to Ermelo's main supermarket. And there they are: four police prowlers parked in a row. The police are inside doing their shopping while at a street corner crime scene that we've just come from, the blood still glistens wetly in the sunshine.

In some ways it is disgusting that the reporter believed these people might be overplaying their ordeals because they are so racist - not to mention incredible.

But it is heartening to see that a few days on the ground made him see otherwise.

The article goes on to describe how the ANC wish to improve the situation - by, er, disarming the white farmers and disbanding their vigilante organisations, set up because the police are so incompetent or the areas they live in are so very remote.

An improvement if you wish to destroy their communities, drive them out and see those who remain killed, certainly.

All too predictably, here are the thoughts of Danzel Van Zyl, a senior researcher at the Human Rights Commission:

'There is a feeling among black people that many white people have not come to the party yet. Reconciliation has only come from one side, and this is felt especially with regard to the farming communities. They are perceived to be conservative, with a block of them voting right-wing and for parties like (the ultra-right wing) Freedom Front Plus.

'Old ways still play out in a lot of rural South Africa, where you will see farmers keeping the seat next to them in their truck for their dog, while workers sit in the back. A lot of farmers were killed by disgruntled farm workers who had been maltreated by them.'

So there you have it. He almost goes so far as to defend these murders. People in normal countries have run ins with their boss every day - it doesn't end like this. Could the farmers not be putting their workers in the back because it's harder for them to slit their throats from there?

He also seems to suggest that whites are not allowed to have a group identity, or vote as a block, or, God forbid, vote 'conservatively'.

They must come to the party, as Van Zyl puts it - which seems to mean dismantling the country they and their ancestors built, giving up everything they own, and lying down to die upon request without even thinking about self defence.