As a south African living on a smallholding (small farm) I’d like to give you my opinions and thoughts around it, so you can know what the motivations behind these attacks are. Hopefully, together we can stop them.
First off, Farm Attacks do happen. There can be no doubt about it, we have hordes of pictures of chopped up farmers from years of regular attacks. It is extremely offensive to suggest that this is not happening to those who have to face this reality in their families and communities.
The reason why people deny it in the media and even here in south Africa is because of the high crime rate in general and the competition around who is the biggest victim.
People are suffering and dying just because of the general out of control crime situation in the country and since the majority of people are black, anyone can see and it should be rather obvious that the black community suffers more under crime.
This is due in part to the governments failure to uplift the people since 1994. Anyway, before I go too off topic, black people find it offensive since they consider the farm attacks to be simple crime and everyone is affected by it. They refuse to see it as a separate crime.
So, getting to the motivations. Firstly, these attacks are not new. Their the reason Afrikaners moved out of the British colony in the first place. The British could not keep their borders secure and farms were being attacked.
The current government cannot keep the borders secure and this contributes a lot to crime in general and more specifically on farms because many are near the border in remote areas.
Another obvious motivation for a criminal is that farms are a relatively easy target, since their isolated and easily outgunned and outnumbered.
Perhaps more importantly though, there exist a serious misconception that farmers are rich and have stacks of money in a safe somewhere. Perhaps this is because there aren’t as many black farmers and therefore they do not understand the small margins farmers operate on.
What also cannot be ignored is racism. Some of these farmers are in fact racist and treat their workers extremely badly. This does not justify this level of barbaric violence, but it does contribute. As a worker, you can choose to leave and a farmer can literally not farm without workers.
There’s also racism coming from the black community, revenge over apartheid, frustration around the slow land reform process and a political situation where for years the government has blamed white people and the legacy of apartheid for their own incompetence.
This leads to movements like the BLF and EFF that promise to uplift the people at the expense of the white people who had wronged them. Except, those white people are dead and now their children suffer.
Due to the history of apartheid and the communists that supported the freedom fighters (terrorists) , Marxist and socialist ideas are commonplace and the same anti-white songs and slogans from Apartheid days are still used in public to blame whites for ANC failures and to whip people into a frenzy so that they do not think about the ridiculous communist ideas these parties support.
Lastly, I would like to mention the last point of denial of farm attacks. Apart from people struggling to believe that the attacks are racially motivated, they feel insulted at the allegation that a white genocide is taking place because there are still whites, like myself everywhere, even on farms and it’s not like their slaughtering us in the streets.
Not yet at least, to paraphrase Malema, the leader of the EFF. Make no mistake however, this is a genocide. It’s just a slow moving one. It’s also planned and organized and it must be stopped.
There are not just criminals involved, there are foreign military units with signal blocking technology that are well armed that are involved in some of these attacks.
Why should a black south african care? Because we don’t all hate you, because we feed you and have done so for years. If that means nothing to you, it’s also a risk to your own survival.
With land reform happening too slowly, farm attacks are literally taking the food out your mouth, gradually reducing the food supply and increasing costs. I believe that in time this will cause famine like we see in the rest of africa. Especially combined with the communist marxist ideas that will finally ruin this country.