By Sharl Short

For any Kiwi, seeing the sight of fields full of white crosses, thoughts immediately go to valiant ANZAC lives lost.

Yet 12,000km westwards, there is a field of crosses representing scenes of horror. 

Each one of the crosses represents one farmer murdered in the past 2 years on remote farms throughout South Africa. We call this: “South Africa’s hidden genocide”. Few Kiwis will be aware of this.

Another 49 farmers were slaughtered last year: four every month, while reliable reports tell us that another 26 farmers and farmworkers have been murdered in the first half of this year during some 141 attacks. Farmers, farmworkers, their families and visitors are at enormous threat. In the last 10 years, 612 of them have been murdered, and there have been nearly 3000 violent attacks on farms. Many have been maimed, crippled, blinded.

While the South African Police Service (SAPS) have created numerous plans, farmers, their wives, children and parents are today twice as likely to be murdered than a police officer and four times more likely to be murdered than the average South African.

These attacks seem to take place in the most isolated of our rural areas, where attackers have the time to hone their craft, heat both oil and irons, and sharpen their machetes. These killings are nearly fictional in both brutality and gruesome with torture prior to killing being part and parcel of this genocide.

Anyone who gives these brutal attacks any thought at all realises that the main difference between killing someone in town, or someone on a farm is the isolation. The attackers have far more time, taking hours or even days, to torture the farm owners or workers, sometimes in the belief that there is a safe, or second safe filled with firearms and jewels. Other times they kill the family and then take nothing at all like they did last month in the Northern Cape. The Brand family were murdered for nothing at all.

Volunteer farmers with a zero budget work all day and patrol all night and report back to the police from areas they do not have the manpower or vehicles to patrol. Shockingly, the Minister of Police saw fit to shut them down, and unsurprisingly the murders and rapes increased with an escalation in the looting of entire crops. 

These hard-working farmers are living on a knife’s edge.

If you would like to show your support, feel free to sign the petition below.

https://www.stopfarmattacks.co.za/ 

Image: Ysterberg just outside Polokwane