Last night, a peaceful couple was executed in cold blood on their farm near Newcastle KZN, with no apparent motive other than some form of sick terrorism. Criminologically, this can't be likened to (also horrendous) township violence. Different problem.
southafricatoday.net/south-africa-n…
southafricatoday.net/south-africa-n…
My work on this problem so far leads me to the tentative conclusion that on avg male farmers are murdered at a similar rate to the avg SAfrican male. This is often taken to mean that farm murders are not a uniquely bad problem, but I think it supports the opposite conclusion.
Firstly, male commercial farmers are not the average SAfrican male. They are middle-to-high income earners, living in extremely low-density, formal & secure houses. They are also considerably older than the avg male, roughly twice the age. Any criminologist would tell you that...
...the avg farmer would have extremely low murder odds. Murder is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of poor, high-density, informal urban/inner-city environs, and of young men killing other young men due to drunken brawls, gang warfare, lover quarrels, property disputes, violent theft.
Commercial farmers are almost a pole apart in terms of susceptibility to this type of risk. A far more useful comparison group would be middle-to-upper income middle aged suburban males, who face a murder risk far below the SA male avg. On these comparisons, the risks faced by...
...farmers seem to be shockingly high. The murder risk of an upper-middle income farmer compared to his suburban upper-middle income brother seems to be about an order of magnitude higher, based on my estimates (I hope to publish these data with AfriForum in due course).
As @ErnstRoets' book, Kill the Boer, showed, this phenomenon still hasn't been well-studied. The previous attempt in the early 2000s was long ago and riddled with weaknesses. Lumping it in with "general high crime rates" seems deeply inadequate. Such brutal murders/attacks for...
...often quite petty theft or no real theft at all must strike one as profoundly troubling. There *are* of course urban counterparts to this type of violence, but they seem to be a small minority of urban murders, well below the per capita incidence of such attacks on farmers.
There are several complexities that must be acknowledged. Some farming districts are safer than others. Age of victim, security budgets, proximity to violent townships, local land politics, all likely play a role. Isolation of farms and the preponderance of psychopaths walking...
...free in SA likely also plays a role. Whatever the many complex causes, this seems to be a very different problem from the 'social fabric' violence experienced in townships. What does seem clear also is that the problem isn't going away. Being older and/or unable to expend...
...considerable resources on farm and district security makes the farmer extremely vulnerable -many would say such an existence is untenable. Local farming towns are disintegrating, weakening security/support infrastructure further. Based on resource & political considerations...
...I don't regard this as realistically soluble. The modern farmer is aging, isolated, under financial strain, facing toxic land politics, and is losing his local town infrastructure/support. The only way this goes is for farms in unsafe districts to be sold to large...
...farming conglomerates, where farm managers either live in-situ with high security budgets or live in safer large urban areas and commute. These trends are all well under way already, of course. Rural South Africa will be a blend of corporately run farming units with...
...highly mechanised farming and high-tech farm security, failed and decrepit local towns with bare-minimum activity, an impoverished rural underclass, and a general disintegration of rural public infrastructure. Sad but currently unavoidable. Food output may not suffer much...
...but it will be increasingly corporatised and centralised, and therefore susceptible to political control. There is no doubt the ANC will seek to dominate this supply chain and use its control of food and water as tools of political power.
Conclusion: Farm(er) murders/attacks are one significant force driving profound changes in rural SA - changes that, to put it mildly, will ultimately be brutally harsh for the impoverished rural underclass. Those who downplay farm murders don't seem to understand this.
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