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Nothing seems to have irritated so many people more than the claim by US President Donald Trump that white commercial farmers are being targeted with violence and murderous intent in South Africa, tantamount to genocide. The term “genocide” has been used to describe the situation in South Africa vis a vis the ruling African National Congress’ treatment of, particularly, white Afrikaner farmers. However there was an immediate chorus of nay sayers who have been quick to berate the description  genocide as being “far-fetched”.

But genocide does not necessarily mean thousands of corpses littering the ground. Genocide was recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 96/1). It was codified as an “independent crime” in 1948. Article 1 states that the crime genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation.

Article 2 contains five definitions of the crime of genocide which include, inter alia,
a) a mental element – the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group “ and
b) a physical element which includes, inter alia, killing members of the group, causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction, in whole or in part.

A pattern is clear here  – the above three conditions in the physical element exist in plain sight in South Africa. These are three out of the five conditions laid down in the physical element – thus 60% of the UN’s five conditions for full genocide. Targeted farm murders are an incremental means to eliminate farmers of a particular group (Afrikaners), a well-documented fact of life in South Africa. In addition, a politician’s public call to “kill the boer, kill the farmer” cannot be more explicit. The ANC government’s inaction in failing to arrest this particular political rabble rouser indicates the government’s complicity in this infraction of a United Nations codification.

Making life impossible to endure plays out daily in SA farm life by way of the continual theft of stock, harvests, farm equipment, cash on the farm premises and the onerous legislation introduced by the ANC to make living as difficult and as stressful as possible, including the pernicious “expropriation of land” laws which hang over the heads of farmers like a sword of Damocles. The complete absence of law and order in rural areas exacerbates the hardships of the farming community.

FLURRY OF ANTAGONISM

This flurry of antagonism towards the highlighting of SA farm murders and the fact that farmland was being taken was the result of the US president’s citizenship offer to SA farmers and their families. In an initial report in March of this year, South African tv station ENCA reported that the FW de Klerk

Foundation accused President Trump of “cheap politics”. At the same time, president Trump’s assertion that land continues to be confiscated in South Africa ”is without any credible evidence”. Land is decidedly being illegally confiscated (or grabbed to use the SA term) every day by thousands who support the ANC government. The South African president has done little to stem this illegal occupation of land by those who have no claim to it and which, in many instances, belongs to someone else.

Concerned South African organisations and prominent citizens of the country have reported to the US president the situation on land ownership and land theft since the ANC came to power in 1994, as has the violent targeting of commercial farmers in the form of murders and armed assaults. Been reported. In many cases nothing was taken during these assaults. In other cases, the attackers have waited for hours until the farmer comes home. (During those hours, the criminals could have stolen the whole household’s contents.) What is even more astounding is that an executive member of the FW de Klerk Foundation “slammed lobby groups for approaching the US on matters concerning South Africa”. He says this is a “setback for South Africa” and accused the groups of “spreading disinformation”.

These accusers are themselves “spreading disinformation”. Where have they been living these last thirty years? TLU SA has most meticulously collected information on farm murders and attacks since 1990. Since that year to the first quarter of 2025, 2312 farmers, direct family members, farm workers and farm visitors have been murdered on SA farms.  This gives us 1.4 murders per week for 34 years. (These figures will be sent to the Trump administration.)

The SA government of course has its own figures, which are incorrect. That any figures put out by the SA government could be correct would be something of a miracle, as attention to detail is not one of the ANC’s claims to excellence. On 28 August of this year, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) declared that for the first quarter of 2025, 2 farmers and 1 farm dweller were murdered. In fact, during this period, 8 farmers were murdered, plus six members of a family and 3 farmworkers.

THEY WERE ON A FARM

Those who egregiously argue that crime is rampant in South Africa and that farm murders should not be singled out as any different from what occurs daily in this country, miss the point. The farmer, his family and workers, are targeted, hence the wait until he comes home. The torture and cruelty that accompanies the robbery (if there is a robbery) is planned and viciously executed. It is gratuitous. Why not steal the cash and the weapons and leave? Usually torture does not accompany violent crime in SA, unless there is a specific, usually personal, reason. With the farmer it is different. He is a target.

TLU SA’s figures also include black farmers, 88 of whom were killed during the period stated above. Recently a black farmer from the Eastern Cape, Stephanus Samson, received a sentence of six years for killing an intruder, one of five men who broke into his home. He claimed he acted in self-defence: he had been a victim of break-ins so often that he bought a gun for himself because the police “failed to respond to break ins on his property on numerous occasions”. This is an occupational hazard in rural South Africa – farmers are used to it, but it doesn’t assuage the fear of attacks existing within every farm household.

There is no government protection for farmers.

THE SAVAGERY AND BARBARISM OF FARM ATTACKS

As opposed to most Western and other civilized countries, crime in South Africa and indeed in most of Africa is accompanied by a complete lack of concern for human life. The Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan/Darfur are two countries that spring to mind, but there are others. Gratuitous killings are part of the fabric of society, and South Africa is no slouch in this regard, especially in Kwa Zulu/Natal and the Cape Flats. But these are usually gun battles or individual knife killings. Evidence of torture is rarely found at these crime scenes.

+ In a recent attack, boiling water was poured over the farmer’s wife before she was chained, gagged and left for dead. This behaviour ”lacks comprehension” as one SA politician described it, but it is not strange to Africa. The Kenyan Mau Mau revolutionaries used terror to frighten the white Kenyans off their farms. Impaling the mutilated body of a pet cat or a docile farm animal on the farm gate post did the trick: this is not seen in Europe or indeed in any civilized country, even in war. It is par for the course in Africa.

There is ample empirical evidence that many SA farm attacks are accompanied by barbarism. Books have been published in South Africa, graphically showing the fate of many farmers and their families at the hands of SA savages. These publications cannot be put on a public book shelf. They are privately purchased from the publisher. Does any farmer in the Western world experience the criminal cruelty and barbarism suffered by South Africa’s commercial farmers, 32 000 of whom put food on the table for 65 million people EVERY DAY?

+ July 2023: Before losing consciousness, the wife of a Grootvlei farmer was able to identify two of the four attackers who slit her husband’s throat after beating him with an iron bar. One or two of the attackers either worked on the farm or on the next-door farm.

+ June 2023: A business woman and her friend in their seventies were tortured and burnt to death on a Limpopo farm. On their arrival at the crime scene, police found two burnt bodies. Forensics later discovered signs of severe torture.

+ June 2023: Six armed attackers stabbed farmer Lukas van Biljon’s father to death, then cut Lukas’ ham strings so that he could not chase them. (Stock thieves often mete out this same cruel treatment to helpless farm animals to immobilise them). Lukas was treated the same way as the cattle on his Free State farm.

As far back as mid 2020, the brutality of SA farm attacks was being compared to reigns of terror in post colonial Africa. News 24 reported at the time that the one thing that differentiated farm murders and attacks from other crimes committed in South Africa  was the brutality with which they were executed. If the intention was to only steal, then this savagery did not make sense (to the normal mind).

“Why must a farmer, in this case a black man, be dragged by his feet with barbed wire if someone only wanted to steal jewelry”, said a Democratic Party spokesman. “Why  must people be tortured for three days? “. The answer could be because  farmers are isolated and attackers have more time to mete out their savagery to their victims than in the cities. Some farmers live in areas where it takes more than three hours for police to arrive at a crime scene. In many cases the police are short of vehicles and don’t arrive at all.

THE LONG TERM EFFECTS OF FARM ATTACKS

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is now well documented and can have serious psychological and physical effects that in some instances never leave a person. Anxiety and fear of further attacks remain a serious problem, particularly because farmers in most instances cannot remove themselves from the scene of the crime. In some cases, farmers simply abandoned their farms because their families, particularly their children, are scarred for life because of what they have witnessed. In most cases these farmers, the life blood of South Africa’s food security, feel abandoned by the government which in most cases is true.

There’s not a peep from the president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa. It is not recorded that he has paid anything like a compliment to SA’s farmers without whom Ramaphosa would not be sitting in a nice building in Pretoria, dressed in the best Western-style suits, driving Germany’s Mercede Benz’s and pocketing a fortune in salaries, perks and dollars stuffed into his living room couch (for which he has yet to be charged), while the well-run country he inherited collapses around him.  During his meeting at the White House earlier this year with the US president, the latter produced a video of EFF party leader Julius Malema shouting to a crowd of fifty thousand at a political rally in Johannesburg “Kill the boer, kill the farmer”. Shocked, Mr. Trump asked Ramaphosa why didn’t he arrest Malema? Mr. Ramaphosa winced and said nothing. In September 2018, the SA president declared that there were no farm murders in South Africa. He probably still believes that. Trump however took his measure: let the US president do what he desires to do with regard to SA’s farmers. They deserve a break.