South Africa Farm Violence, Enough Is Enough (7 May 2004)

THE EDITOR of NEW AFRICA

Dear Editor

New African

Dear Sir

I am a regular reader of the New African magazine and I thoroughly appreciate it. However, as a missionary in South Africa I think that your article “South Africa Farm Violence, Enough Is Enough” needs some balance. The feature uses the zoom lens to focus in on the few isolated cases of violence perpetrated by white farmers, but fails to use the wide-angle lens of the vast amount of vicious violence perpetrated against the farmers. There have been over seven thousand acts of violence against farmers reported. This is including approximately one thousand white South African farmers murdered in the last ten years. And these have hardly been people killed by accident in the course of some robbery by common criminals. The vicious tortures inflicted upon many of these farmers, many of them old and retired people, almost defies description. Rape, torture, dismemberment, mutilation, staking down farmers and burning their limbs off while alive, hideous atrocities.

And when some of these so called “common criminals” have been killed in self defence by some of the farmers, or captured, it has frequently turned out that they are connected with the old liberation movements MK and APLA. Some have actually been serving members of the South African National Defence Force. There is far more to the plague of farm murders in South Africa than your article has dealt with. We cannot speak of non racialism and appose racism, lawlessness and violence while excusing the systematic targeting, torturing and murder of so many productive farmers, who provide much needed employment and food that benefit all of us.

Enough is enough.

Dr Peter Hammond