Rainbow Nation
“Killed because you’re white
Horror tales from South African farmers are harrowing and include torture, murder and rape among other things.
They came for Nicci Simpson at her farm west of Johannesburg at 10am, as she was preparing to go out. It was sudden, ferocious and planned. They seized her keys, panic button and bag, and kicked her in the knees, forcing her to drop.
Police have classified her attack by three men on March 10 last year as a “house robbery”, even though her two feet were drilled through with a power tool on the small holding where she grows cattle fodder. Simpson, who spent two months wheelchair-bound with steel pins in her knees, does not wish to give her age — not because of vanity but because she says older people are the preferred targets.
(...) “The thought of leaving has crossed my mind, but where does one go? The killing of whites is everywhere — you’re not safe anywhere.”
On Friday, a white farmer from the Eastern Cape was raped in front of her three children. On Wednesday, in the northern Limpopo province, three white people working on a farm were shot, the foreman, fatally in the chest. His partner survived being shot twice in the arm and the farm owner’s son survived a shot to the groin. The attackers have not been found and likely never will be. Nor have the three men who tortured Simpson been identified. It may not be possible to understand the cruelty but the source of the attacks is in plain view.
(...) On the edges, people live in shacks made from flattened 44-gallon drums or scavenged plywood. They are mostly illegal immigrants from places such as Zimbabwe, Malawi and Nigeria who swarmed down on the promise of Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation in the mid-1990s and instead found themselves in a new hell.
(...) Hannetjie Ludik and her husband Callie were attacked on their small holding outside Pretoria last December by three men with guns. The couple had lost their jobs and there wasnothing to steal. Callie was tied up and Hannetjie was offered a choice between rape and death by shooting. The three men took turns raping her.
(...) Mieke Heunis, 7, told the man who shot and killed her father Johann in front of her on the family's chicken holding outside Pretoria last year that he could take her piggy bank if he would stop hurting her father. Mieke is now being treated with antidepressants. The property was surrounded by electric fences and thought to be safe.
(...) “If I had to decide with my head,” says Gabriel Stols, “I would go to Australia for my children. But with my heart, I still want to stay. The reason is there is so much blood shed on this ground. My brother’s blood is on the ground. To leave, then his life will mean nothing.
“I want a future for my children. I’m scared for myself, my children and my wife. It is being said on national TV that they’re not calling for the slaughter of white people ‘yet’.”
(...) South Africa, says Kellermann, is teetering. “The courts are still functioning here, there is rule of law,” he says, citing the refusal of the judiciary to dismiss corruption charges against the previous president, Jacob Zuma. “But the rest of the organisations are in turmoil. If it wasn’t for the courts, we would be a pariah state.”
Kellermann, like most South Africans, plans his days around survival. It means changing the time he leaves home and work each day so observers don’t clock his patterns.“I’ve got eight-foot walls, electric fencing, dogs inside my home,” he says. “I’ve got cottage windows to make access difficult. Going upstairs to my bedroom, I have a built-in gate which I close myself in at night and, of course, alarms. Every day, without fail, I check the perimeter for what we call ‘battle signs’.””
And now, some inspiring quotes by Nelson Mandela: