Life After death
October 22, 2025
Truth bout South Africa’s ‘genocide’
White Genocide
Is a crime against humanity at risk of unfolding in South Africa? Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born billionaire who owns X (Twitter) and Tesla, fears that there might be. Earlier this year, he wrote that he’d heard of calls for ‘a genocide of white people’ in his former homeland.
Musk isn’t alone in his concerns. Steve Hofmeyr, a South African singer with a cult following, thinks that the ‘g-word’ is an appropriate way to describe what is unfolding: ‘If you think that the slaughter of South African farmers is not genocide enough, ask them about their land, language, religion, education, universities, heritage, monuments, safety, dignity and the race-based regulations imposed upon them and their children’
Donald Trump voiced a similar concern when he was in the White House. In a tweet that caused a diplomatic bust-up between South Africa and the United States in 2018, Trump referred to the ‘large-scale killing of farmers. The government in Pretoria labelled his claim ridiculous, but was Trump right about what is unfolding?
In South Africa, it’s a delicate topic. What is beyond doubt is that white farmers, who often live on large properties far from their neighbours or the nearest town, are seen by some as easy targets. The number of killings is worrying. Last year, there were more than 300 farm attacks and 50 murders.
A particularly horrific incident in Mpumalanga, in the east of the country, happened in July: 79-year-old farmer Theo Bekker was bludgeoned over the head with an iron bar. His throat was slit and he bled to death. Bekker’s wife, Marlinda, was tied up and had a bag pulled over her head.
Even when victims survive – as Marlinda did – the level of violence in these attacks can be ferocious. Torture and rape are common. Afrikaans Bibles have been left open on dismembered bodies
Ground
‘We have studied this for many years,’ Stanton said, ‘and I’ve done research on the ground in South Africa. The numbers show us that white people, urban or rural, are much safer than their black counterparts, and less likely to end up on a slab at the coroner’s office.’ Farmers he said, ‘are often vulnerable, isolated and easy targets, but that doesn’t make it genocide’.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) is the official opposition with the second-most seats in parliament after the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
DA shadow minister for Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, Phineas Masipa, agrees with Dr Stanton’s findings, but says there needs to be an investigation into all rural deaths, including farmers and the black workers and security guards often attacked by the same gangs.
‘No matter how we label this, a perception that farmers and their staff are not safe could deter the next generation of growers,’ he said. ‘This raises a concern around food security on a continent vulnerable to hunger.
White farmers in South Africa can hardly be blamed for feeling unsafe, but there’s scant evidence of murder and robbery being necessarily linked to skin colour. In an already violent country, the cost of living is soaring, and tensions have been worsened by an influx of migrants from the rest of Africa, millions of whom have moved to Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and even the remotest hamlet in search of work.
A hillside of white
crosses
MOKOPANE, South Africa (AP) — The white crosses are staked in the ground on an otherwise barren hillside on the edge of a farm, each one standing as a reminder of a terrible story of a person being killed.
But the crosses, nearly 3,000 of them, do not tell the full story of South Africa’s farm killings.
The Wit Kruis Monument — which means White Cross Monument in the language spoken by South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority — is a memorial only to white people who were killed on farms over the last three decades. It’s a visceral snapshot seized on by some South Africans to drive a discredited narrative that white farmers in the majority Black country are being targeted in a widespread, race-based system of persecution.
The false narrative has also been spread by conservative commentators in the United States and elsewhere — and amplified by South African-born Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump. Last month, Trump escalated the rhetoric, using the term “genocide” to describe violence against white farmers.
The South African government and experts who have studied farm killings have publicly denounced the misinformation spread by Trump and others. Even the caretaker of Wit Kruis says the monument — which makes no reference to the hundreds of Black South African farmers and farmworkers who have been killed — does not tell the complete story.
The killings of farmers and farmworkers, regardless of race, are a tiny percentage of the country’s high level of crime, and they typically occur during armed robberies, according to available statistics and two studies carried out over the last 25 years.
Yet because wealthier white people own 72% of South Africa’s privately owned farms, according to census data, they are disproportionately affected by these often-brutal crimes. Black people own just 4% of the country’s privately owned farmland, and the rest is owned by people who are mixed race or of Indian heritage.
Misinformation about farm killings has been fuelled by right-wing political groups in South Africa and others outside the country, said Gareth Newman, a crime expert at the Institute for Security Studies think tank in Pretoria.
Black farmworkers
The monument includes memorabilia bearing the flags of conservative Afrikaner movements, symbols that are generally frowned upon because Afrikaners were at the heart of the apartheid government.
From April 2023 through March 2024, there were 49 farm killings recorded by AfriForum, a white Afrikaner lobby group. That’s about 0.2% of overall murders tallied by the government over the same period. The group recorded 296 farm robberies in that timeframe, or about 0.7% of all robberies.
AfriForum’s numbers don’t include killings of Black farmers and workers, and the country’s official crime statistics are not broken down by race.
Black people make up more than 80% of South Africa’s population of 62 million, and most victims of violent crime across South Africa are Black. But there is no public relations campaign to raise awareness about the killing of Black farmers.
Across racial lines, most public outcry about crime in South Africa is over the high rates of rape and murder of women and children, which mostly takes place in cities and townships.
To tamp down misinformation, South African police last month took the unprecedented step of providing a racial breakdown of farm killings during the first three months of the year. Between January and March, there were six murders on farms, down from 12 during the same period last year. One of the victims was white, the rest were Black.
“What Donald Trump is saying about whites being targeted does not exist,” said Mentula Buthelezi, who lives on a farm in Normandie, a rural area in KwaZulu-Natal province.
Black farmworkers also feel vulnerable, Buthelezi said. “We don’t even have small firearms. Our weapons are just a spear and a shield and sticks we get from the woods.”
Britain is frozen by fear
All too often, the timing of these attacks is no accident. Gangs — some high on drugs and alcohol — have been known to turn up at remote farms, armed to the teeth, often late in the month when employers have wads of cash in their homes ready to pay workers. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the attack on Bekker’s farm took place on 30 July.
Farmers are understandably afraid, but does what is happening in South Africa amount to a genocide? South Africa has the third-highest murder rate in the world, well ahead of Colombia and Mexico. The UK, with a similar population, has around 700 homicides a year; South Africa can log 450 in a week.
Some of these victims are white farmers, but they are far from the only ones losing their lives at the hands of violent criminals. For every hundred murders, just 14 of the targets are women, 81 are men and five are children. Overwhelmingly, murder victims are young black men killed by other young, black men.
Whites make up around eight per cent of the population and are the victims in roughly two per cent of murders. Poverty, rapid urbanisation, and vast numbers out of work have created a toxic situation that has given rise to crime, but not genocide.
Based in Washington DC, Genocide Watch is the world’s early warning system. It was founded in 1999 by Dr Gregory Stanton, a professor of human-rights law, who says that ‘for all the tragedy of farm murders in South Africa, there is no evidence of a planned extermination’.
There are instead, ‘opportunistic crimes’, sometimes acts of revenge by workers who are owed wages or feel aggrieved with their employers. Or just attacks carried out by thugs out for money.
Mozambique
These newcomers are typically from neighbouring states, like Zimbabwe and Mozambique, but also from Zambia, Malawi, Nigeria and even Pakistan and Bangladesh. Their presence has pushed up rents in the crowded townships where seven or eight black youths, often unemployed, might share a shack the size of a bathroom. Foreigners, they say, make it even more difficult to find a job.
With an election due in May, and the ANC behind in the polls, police and immigration officials have started rounding up those without papers for deportation. It’s a popular move, but critics say they have seen the ruling party doing this before and that, when voting is over, the crackdowns will stop.
In the past year, there have been attacks on trucks taking freight to the port city of Durban with mobs torching vehicles they say are driven by foreigners. Drivers are beaten and chased away, and the highways are closed for hours while police clear the mess.
Dr Stanton says this is a smouldering fuse. ‘In any country, one death is too many and we must not ignore the plight of white farmers. But there are worrying reports about xenophobia against black migrants. The first step towards a genocide happens when people are labelled as “the other”: different, dangerous and alien. China is doing it now with the Uyghur Muslims.’
Stanton believes the problem has several causes. ‘Oppressive governments in other parts of Africa have forced many into exile. The South African authorities have done little to stem the inflow, and unemployment has resulted in a level of misery among the youth that is hard for people in Britain or America to comprehend. This, in turn, has unleashed the resentment against foreigners.’
He said it was a situation the United Nations and human-rights groups should be watching closely. But all too often, the response of such organisations is simply silence. Meanwhile, there’s no sign that the rate at which South Africans are being murdered — some white, but overwhelmingly black — will slow anytime soon
A monument to white victims
Some of the fringe South African groups, which hold no official power, boycotted the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, when South Africa’s apartheid system of white minority rule officially ended. They have espoused a debunked theory of persecution — in a country where whites make up about 7% of the population — ever since.
“They held on to these beliefs as a way of maintaining social cohesion in their groups, making sure that they can obtain funding and support,” Newman said. “And they were getting support from right-wing groups abroad because it fit their narrative.”
The Wit Kruis Monument was started in 2004 but recognizes victims going back to 1994.
Each year, more crosses are planted to memorialize white farmers and their family members who were killed, organizers say. Recently, they’ve planted around 50 crosses a year.
Kobus de Lange, a local Afrikaner farmer, has taken on the role of caretaker of Wit Kruis. He gave The Associated Press access to see the memorial, bringing along his wife and children to help tidy up the monument in the country’s north, near the town of Mokopane.
De Lange expressed the fear and frustration of a white farming community that feels authorities have not done enough to protect them. One of his sons wore a T-shirt with the slogan “enough is enough” — written in their Afrikaans language — in reference to the killings.
But de Lange acknowledged that the memorial does not capture the full scope of farm killings.
“It’s across the board, there are Black farmers who are also attacked,” de Lange said. He said in some farm attacks, Black farmworkers are tortured by criminals for information on how to break into the main farmhouse.
The Wit Kruis Monument would be willing to put up crosses to Black farmers and farmworkers who have been killed, but their relatives haven’t requested it, he said
Motive For The Killings.
Normandie is an area where the farming community planted white crosses to raise awareness about farm killings in 2020. During a White House visit last month by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump showed a video in which he incorrectly referred to the location as a “burial site” of slain white farmers.
Also, and without evidence, Trump has accused South Africa’s Black-led government of “fuelling” what he said was racially motivated violence against whites. In February, Trump issued an executive order punishing the country by banning all U.S. aid and assistance to South Africa.
The Trump administration has cited a chant used by a minority Black-led political party in South Africa that has the lyrics “shoot the farmer” as contributing to what it claims is the racially motivated killings of white farmers. Violent crimes against farmers were a problem for years before the apartheid-era chant was revived.
The South African government investigated farm killings in 2003. It interviewed dozens of police detectives and other experts and concluded that robbery was the most common motive for violent crimes, including murders, that occurred on farms. A study by the South African Human Rights Commission in 2015 reached a similar conclusion
“It is criminal individuals and groups that are targeting them because they are considered vulnerable,” said Newham, who has researched the subject for more than 15 years. “They have things like cars, guns and laptops.”
In some cases, perpetrators are former labourers who return to attack, kill and rob farm owners to settle disputes over money. In others, disgruntled former employees had returned simply for revenge, according to historical records of the National Prosecuting Authority.
