In the dead of night, while Robert and his wife Sue lay sleeping, a gang of three men
came through their bedroom window.
They shot Sue twice at point-blank range, but failed to kill her.
The men moved on to Robert, whom they tortured with a blowtorch, burning his arms, stomach
and legs until he revealed the code they could use to loot the couple's safe.
The gang threw Robert and Sue into the back of a getaway truck and dumped them on the
side of the road.
They rammed a plastic bag down Sue's throat and shot Robert in the neck.
Sue spent a week in a coma before she finally succumbed.
Against all the odds, Robert lived, but he was left with permanent disabilities.
The bullet he took is still lodged there today.
He says he's determined to survive until he gets justice for his wife Sue.
As a journalist, it's way too easy to isolate yourself from a story.
Media commentators shuffle into green rooms, prepping themselves by re-reading crumpled
notes or articles online, regurgitating someone else's opinions.
We sit in separate studios via satellite links and talk past each other.
Most will never have actually spoken to anyone connected to the news they're pretending
to cover.
South Africa deserves better than this lazy journalism from the mainstream.
The stories I read were so unspeakably awful, farming families tortured for hours before
being killed by stabbing or gunshot, often with no ulterior motive, that I knew I needed
to see this story up close.
Why the torture?
And given there had been a 200% increase in these attacks since 2012, why the sudden rise?
And these attacks became part of my life too, more and more South African farmers writing
to me to share their stories of family members beaten, of daughters raped, and of lives ended
without cause or explanation.
I needed to find out for myself who is behind these attacks.
And if you know you're being hunted, why stay?
I made a plan to travel to South Africa with a film crew and the sort of security that
would get me to the heart of the truth.
For as long as was feasible, I'd chase down the real story myself.
It was my first day in South Africa and I was talking to Ernst Roetz and a succession
of experts on farm murder statistics.
So in the last year, there were about roughly 84 farm murders.
And that's, so 84 farm murders in a one year period where either the farmer or a family
member has been murdered.
Yes, yes.
And then you can do the calculation, or at least a close estimate of a calculation.
Last year the estimate was 156 per 100,000 per year.
And police officers in South Africa is 55 per 100,000.
The macro picture of the farm attacks was certainly frightening.
Being a farmer in South Africa is extremely dangerous.
More dangerous than being a South African police officer.
Is being a farmer one of the most dangerous jobs?
Yes, it is clear.
And we are just talking about farmers murdered, not including those who survived the attacks
and the brutal tortures that some of them have experienced.
We are only looking at farmers murdered.
And we've seen how this has increased from 2011 until 2017.
I mean, I think it was 48 in 2011.
So we are moving very, very close to doubling the figure.
On the one hand, we must say that there is some correlation with the general increase
in our crime levels.
But you can clearly see that the tide started changing in 2011, 2012.
The black are all the incidents in 2016, the blue in 2017, and the red, we are busy putting
them on at the moment.
That's 2018 incidents.
If you take more than three years on a map like this, it becomes very busy.
Chris Van Sale, a researcher and retired general working for a large farmers union, had said
spent decades probing the farm attack issue.
All these incidents are violent crimes.
So we look at murder, attempted murder, rape, robbery, and arson.
That's what these are.
There's no stock theft involved.
There's no theft of normal property.
This is only violent crime.
At AfriForum, they're asking the same questions.
How can the police file these murders as theft or aggravated theft when so often nothing
is stolen?
One of the problems is what they tried to do was to reduce the motive for every incident
to a single motive.
So let me give you an example.
The murder of the Potritter family near Lindley is one of the well-known farm attacks.
It happened in 2010, if I recall.
So what happened briefly was the family, it was Ati and Vilna, their husband and wife,
and they had a two-year-old girl, Vilamin.
And they stopped at the farm.
As Ati got out of the vehicle, he was attacked by three or four people.
And eventually, Ati was killed.
But he was stabbed 151 times with a garden fork and a knife and a machete, or we call
it a panga in South Africa, in front of his wife and little daughter.
Then his little girl was killed.
They took 3,000 rand and they wrote on a placard, they wrote a sign that said, we murdered them
and we are coming back.
They were caught and they were trialled and during the proceedings they said, we went
there because we wanted to take their money.
So then it's accepted, okay, so their intention was to steal.
But the level of violence that was committed in comparison to what was stolen, there's
no possible way to explain that.
The stories behind these statistics are horrifying.
Regular people, like my mum or dad, calmly recounting their gruesome ordeals at the hands
of black gangs, a man and his wife branded with hot irons and left to die, a husband
killed in front of his wife and children, fingernails pulled, kneecaps drilled, an elderly
woman raped, another with half her face blown off from a shotgun, countless stories of rape,
torture and murder.
These attacks seem to share a common thread, revenge.
That was when my father was already declared dead and I saw the blood, he came loose somewhere.
On Sunday after church, Bernard Botha came home to start a braai, a South African barbecue.
What he didn't know, couldn't know, is that a group of men had come to his house to kill
his family.
They threw me between these two cars.
So there's two cars and they just...
They threw me here and before I hit the ground they started hitting me and said, today we're
going to kill you, you fucking white bastard.
So they threw me there, I fell in my father's blood, I just saw my father's blood and ammunition
of the guns that they took out of the safe.
You were lying in your father's blood?
Yeah.
You knew?
They did something to my father, I thought he was already dead.
Bernard then had a horrible realisation.
He could hear the car with his wife and children pulling into the drive.
So my oldest son, they always have a game to check who's first at the front door.
So he got out and he ran to the front door to be there first.
My wife opened the garage door and they grabbed her.
And when they grabbed her, he was running that way and one of them got out and took
a shot into the wall there.
They just shot at him?
Yeah.
When the attackers had left, leaving in a rush and sparing Bernard, his wife and their
children after being spooked by shouting from the neighbours, Bernard went to aid his father.
I found my father's blood, yeah.
In here?
Yeah, they threw him down, yeah.
I think they didn't.
Just here?
Yeah, just here.
I think they didn't tie him up properly because they thought he's already dead.
They put him there so nobody could see him because it was a lot of blood for the wound
on the head.
He came loose somehow.
He went to the kitchen and got a cloth to try to stop the bleeding.
Then from there he was out to get us loose and it was about ten minutes after he loosened
us that he said no, that he went and lied down.
And they actually died here but they say he died in town but he was already, they struggled
with him to get his heart going again for a long time.
And I am heartbroken here next to him on the stoop, selfishly wondering if I'm really going
to be brave enough to listen to the dozens of other victims of farm attacks, some like
Marie-Andra recounting a deep personal tragedy.
Our husband was shot and killed on their farm in front of their children.
And when I saw the one shot my husband took I saw the blood and he grabbed and he literally
rolled off the couch and that's when I realised this is real, this just got real without knowing
that they've already shot him five times.
And that's when my husband got up for the last time and it sounded like he was crying
when he said please and the one guy said oh just kill him and they shot him in the
head in front of us and he fell at my feet.
Or Marietta who had her jaw blown off by a shotgun blast from a farm attacker and had
her face partially reconstructed with flesh from her calf.
I was attacked in October, 26 October 2002.
And when they shot you, not wishing to, they shot into your face here and just took away
your face, the bottom of your face.
Yeah, yeah.
So they put the gun here and at the same time I went like this and that's when he shot me.
Given the ideals of Mandela's rainbow nation, why are whites now the target and why are
farm attacks increasing so sharply, so out of step with other crimes?
All good questions, but ones the South African media refused to ask.
They are famously uninterested in farm murders.
Their weird disinterest makes me want to grab them and shake them by their polite clothes
in their manicured offices for being so self-serving.
The editor of one of the biggest online news outlets admitted to me that she isn't interested
in South African farm murders because they just don't do that well for the paper.
No click-throughs, no real interest, she said.
Farm attacks where people are attacked and tied up and things are taken and they leave,
we usually don't cover because it's just not newsworthy, no one's going to read it.
Maybe if someone's hurt a bit, we would maybe cover it if it's easy enough to get it, but
maybe not.
From a ranking point of view, there was this one incident where perhaps a white farmer
shot a black, that will get front page, that will be front page and will those stories
statistically do better as well from a ranking click, they will.
Yes, unfortunately yes.
Stories of attacks on black people are far more popular and gain far more traction.
It's curious.
It's almost as if white South Africans have completely lost their voice in the country
they called home.
We have no alternative media in South Africa.
I'm an Afrikaans-speaking person for my language, which is the third, fourth most largest language
in the country.
We have one national newspaper, which is far left.
We have one national radio station, which is far left.
We have three or four channels, which are all very liberal.
So I can't rely on that.
What do I have to do?
Pack my bags, go on tour, go meet the people in person and that's what I've been doing
for 30 years for shows a week and I get a different story out there.
They don't like violence much and they are being murdered at these unprecedented rates
and when somebody says it, of course you are counter to the narrative.
We're struggling more than you have out there.
You can rely on a Katie out there.
We have none of that, you know, and those who do speak up, they don't have much power.
We have to create our ultimate media here if we want to get anywhere and it's ignored.
It's as if the mainstream media have lost all journalistic integrity in pursuit of clicks
and likes online.
Fuelled by anger, I recommitted to take greater risks to bring this story home.
A crime syndicate boss agrees to let me speak with one of his farm attackers and as much
as I want to throttle him, I also want him to tell me what he knows.
Okay, what they do?
Yeah.
Firstly, they come to me who is working for the farm.
Yeah.
They say by the time I'm off at work, they come to me, they buy me nice things.
Yeah.
So that I eat and enjoy.
So you have like food, food, maybe drinks, even smoke, if I'm smoking, they buy you
something.
They buy me something good.
Yeah.
Then they ask me, how much are you getting there?
And I tell them, you see, like you can drive a car at any time.
Yeah.
You can feed your family, but with that money you are getting there, you know, it's very
lucky.
You cannot afford.
So they can give you some money?
Yes.
If you tell them what?
Yes.
So they tell me, how can they get in there?
Yeah.
How can they get in the farm?
My boss, who is a farmer.
This man is a recruiter.
He recruits farm workers into informants who tell the attackers where guns are kept or
where money is hidden, or if the farmer is sick, to help simplify a planned farm attack.
And how does he turn these men and women against their employers?
He sells them a dream.
They always tell you the bad things about your boss.
What do they say?
The bad thing about your life and your family.
The bad thing that your children won't go to school because of your boss.
He's wasting your time, he's making you stay there by his farm.
He's giving you peanuts and your children won't go to school.
What about in the long run?
What about in the future?
Your children, they won't manage to help you.
Yeah.
So if you do this like now, your life will be smooth.
You'll be better.
Your children will go to school.
And now you...
Your wife will have a business.
Yes.
So you'll have a living.
If you're new, you don't manage to work by the farm, you can stay home with your family,
you'll be having food on the table, everything.
Once the informant is hooked, he will expose the weaknesses of the farmer to the gang.
And the biggest weakness of any farmer is his wife and children.
If you don't do what we are telling you to do, you're going to kill your wife or you're
going to rape your wife in front of you and kill her.
And rape even your children, the small one.
Rape the small one?
Yeah.
And how small a child would they rape?
Definitely at the age of two years, very young, very young, so that you can feel the pain
and say, oh guys, let me give you the money, you go, I save my children, it's life.
How does the father stop them?
Because sometimes even though the farmer's saying, stop, stop, I'll give you everything,
I'll give you everything, even then they still rape the child.
Why would that be?
Is it that they don't want to stop them?
They just want to make him scared?
Yes, they don't want to extend.
You say, okay, stop, stop guys, I'll give you whatever you want now.
Yeah.
They just make one example, such as this guy, they can do it.
Maybe it'll take one child and hurt one child.
Yes.
Right in front of him.
You say, oh no guys, please, let me give you everything, whatever you want, so that you
will leave my children and go.
So often the gangs don't steal anything, leaving seemingly empty handed.
And I feel ill at the thought, after raping a man's two year old or his wife in front
of him, after you've taken his dignity and destroyed the things he loves the most.
What is there left to take?
It's barbarity beyond anything I imagined.
So too is their belief system, where success or failure of farm attacks rides on the ability
of a local witch doctor or sangorma, who they visit in the weeks before an attack to be
cut and filled with special potions to give them special powers to be strong in the attack.
I need to hurt the man.
If I come, can you tell me when I should attack?
You can tell me a good time when I will be strong.
If you follow me, I'll tell you that at least about four.
Yeah, I'll tell you that now it's fine.
It's now good.
I can phone you.
And how do I when I make my attack, I ring you.
You tell me it's a good time.
I can take the man.
I can take the things I need to take.
Yes.
How do I do I give some to you?
Do you have some can I do I pay you with that?
Yes.
You must come and give me.
I must come and give you.
Yes.
How much will I give you?
Roughly it's like if you got fifty thousand.
If I got fifty thousand round.
Can you give me twenty thousand?
I give you twenty thousand.
Yes.
That's your cut from my farm attack.
Yes.
But away from the Sangoma and the barbarism of these attackers,
there is discipline, training, funding and equipment
that can only be provided by people in power,
the politicians and the police.
I found evidence that both corrupt politicians
and some members of the South African police force
are complicit in these attacks.
The political group, the Economic Freedom Fighters,
uses South Africa's apartheid path to maximum effect.
Apartheid seems to sit underneath everything,
like a deep well of hatred drawn on by the EFF
and other black political movements
to mobilise support from the angry, the poor and the young,
easily drawn into black gangs attacking farmers.
Shoot to kill, kill on them.
Test the poor, the farmers.
Brrrr, paa, paa, brrrr, paa, paa.
The Economic Freedom Fighters sing this song
at their political rallies,
kill the poor, kill the white man
and make throat-slitting gestures
against their white opponents in Parliament.
Back on the ground, black gangs translate this rhetoric
into action, torturing and murdering whites
to cleanse them from the land.
I wonder about these farm attackers.
They say war makes men do cruel things,
but there is no war in South Africa.
There is a political climate supporting these attacks
and political backing for police prepared to help a brother out.
I receive a message from a policeman
currently in active service with the South African police force.
He has heard I'm in South Africa investigating the farm murders
and is prepared to talk if his identity is protected.
I ask him about the risks if he is caught.
I can lose my job.
I'm allowed to talk with any media without a police.
I escort a Furbian officer and a media officer.
The greater implications would be harassment of my family and myself
by either elements of the government or outside of the government.
Knowing all of that, knowing that it could be your family that's targeted,
knowing that you would lose your job, knowing that, you know...
And we've seen what harassment looks like over here.
Harassment doesn't just mean sending bits of paper.
Harassment can be serious, physically serious.
Why is it that you want to talk?
All my life, it has been about making a moral decision,
doing what's right, even when no one's been looking.
That's why I'm in the police to serve, to protect the people.
Government has failed to protect the people.
If you look at the terrorism act,
the Prevention of Terrorism and Terrorist-Related Activities Act,
these four have actually been classified a long time ago
as the first in the United States.
As terrorists, because that's what it is, as terrorists.
And government has done nothing.
At some point, things are going to reach a level
where no-one's going to be able to stop them.
Somebody needs to stand up and talk out
and take their greatness by doing this, but it's morally right.
I want to know how these gangs are so organised,
well-equipped and ruthless in their actions.
Farm attacks are too professional to be the work of chances from the settlements.
From what you know from the police perspective,
just how involved are the police in farm attacks?
Not just in farm attacks.
There are cases where we were arrested serving police members
in house robbers or home invasion robbers, as you guys will note.
So, serving members of the police have been arrested.
Police weapons have been used, not just personal weapons,
which were issued to the members,
but rifles which they have to put out by station or unit have been used.
Police ammunition has been used.
I would rather report the military.
They are all method of working.
That's not a syndicate, that's working.
That's not your average criminal.
These guys are too slick.
They know what they're doing.
They've had training of some sort.
It's not just your farm attacks.
If you look at your cash and transit attacks,
if you look at your house robbers, they've all got some form of training.
And that is the worrying part.
What are we as police officers coming up against?
And where's that training?
Who's running that training? Who's funding that training?
Who's behind military training of these coordinated attacks?
I can only speculate.
And if we speculate?
The government, or I'm not going to say the government,
but rather say the ruling party as a role to play in this.
The ANC, when they took charge of thoughts in Africa in 1994,
they never gave up the arms caches that they brought into this country.
Never.
So I don't know how many AK-47s are all around RPGs,
my stomach, my stomach.
I think back to all the victims I have met,
how they called the police after they had been attacked
in the hope that help might come,
when all along the police supposed to save them were part of the problem.
I feel like everything I trust is broken here,
and I feel forlorn.
As we talk, I see he is another one who will not leave this place.
It becomes like a tell in poker, in their faces and in their mannerisms.
Talking to me, taking this risk, it's all part of it.
Just like Bernard or Marie-Andra and the General,
here's another South African signalling he will be buried in his boots.
He will go down fighting because he has seen too much to walk away.
He will spill his blood for his land and for the sins of his colleagues.
You said earlier if they go to arrest someone,
or there's been an attack and they turn up on scene
and the guy's a brother, he'll be let go.
But then you said that white cops are bad, in fact worse.
What's this brother thing?
What dictates you as being part of a brother?
Political affiliation.
Not colour.
Political affiliation.
If you're part of the ruling party.
ANC.
Yeah.
The EFF.
What is the other party?
Yeah.
Those three.
The cops tend to treat you with cuteness.
If they find a membership card on you,
if I'm as a white police officer arrest a member of all of the ruling party,
whether he's influential or he's just some idiot that causes the vote,
they will not help me process it.
I have to do everything myself.
They actually walk away from me.
They won't touch him.
They won't.
So you are protected here in South Africa
if you even have a membership card for ANC, EFF, BLF.
Yes.
That's your way of being one of the brothers.
And that's not about colour, just for clarity.
That isn't being black.
No.
Also the other thing is the EFF is paying a lot of traction
in the South African Police Service.
Our idea is to make National Day on Earth to reach 55% of the total force.
I almost want to run away from all of this.
I feel kind of dirty having comforted women like Hanyet Tludik,
raped by multiple men, or Mariandra,
burying her husband to give birth to her son,
knowing the same police they called for help
may have been assisting the monsters in their midst.
I tracked down Dr Berger, an expert in this field
and senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies
to verify what I'm being told repeatedly that the police are complicit.
His offices feel strangely clinical and foreign
after so many weeks on the road amongst the grubbiness of it all.
In my heart, away from my job here seeking the truth,
I want him to tell me the cops are the good guys,
that I should keep the faith.
But he could not tell me that.
The political statements that are made on a regular basis
creates a climate that accommodates this kind of criminal activity.
The fact that police officers, individual police officers,
are either working with some of these criminals,
criminal syndicates, crime syndicates,
and assisting them, that is happening.
Not in every case, but it does happen.
The next thing is about the stolen money.
Once they conclude the robbery,
they have the money, I mean, they sit with huge amounts of cash.
They go to a trusted police officer's house and they leave it there.
The police officer then gets a cut out of that money
and his only responsibility is to provide a safe house for the stolen money.
And then after the dust is settled,
they arrange with this police officer to get the money,
the police do, and then they leave.
Thirdly, and they are quite open and frank about this,
because the other story is the police are investigating,
the police are onto them.
Then they either arrange to have the case docket stolen,
so you make a big enough offer, the docket gets stolen,
with all the evidence in it.
And they would also then try and approach the investigating officer,
you know, for him to be less efficient in his investigation.
So they are quite open and frank that these are the kinds of things that they are doing.
So the bottom line here is that,
what they are telling us is that at the price,
they can buy the cooperation of certain police officers.
And that's what they do.
So I believe that it is highly probable that the same thing happens with farm attacks.
Not a political directive, the political level provides a conducive climate, if you want.
Yes, yes, yes.
Sort of dissent and rage.
And criminals exploit this.
And we often hear during farm attacks that they would say to their victims,
you know, you actually stole this land, so what we are doing isn't wrong,
you know, we can do this.
You shouldn't be here in the first place.
So they justify their actions,
on the basis of what the political leadership are telling them.
I'm struck by this grim reality, one that seems hopeless,
and it recalls a question I'm asked over and over again.
If you know you're going to be killed, why do you stay?
Why don't you just leave?
But I realise the answer is not that simple.
Many of these farmers are simply hard-working, salt-of-the-earth people.
They're financially poor, and this is their home.
Where should they go?
Who will fund their exodus?
Which countries will offer them asylum?
And what are the ramifications of giving into what is tantamount to terror?
How does it work for you in terms of being able to stay in this country?
Presumably you're a man that would never leave this country.
I can't leave, I'm too old.
You're not too old.
I'm not being flattering you, I'm just saying.
But the General said to me, you share a thing with him,
he said to me, I'll die here, this is my land,
I'll be in the dust, they'll bury me in my boots.
We love the country.
And it's better to know than not to know.
Is it better to die knowing?
No, yeah.
In some way you can work out a way that you can carry on.
There's a real belief from people who say, I will stand here,
I will stand and fight, or I will stay with the farm,
and that in a way it doesn't matter if I die here,
it doesn't matter if I'm murdered on my farm, say,
I will die with my boots on,
but it doesn't matter if my blood's spilt for the land,
because there's a belief that God will look after.
So there's a thing that matters more.
When you go out and you do a farm attack or on patrol,
you believe that you will be looked after.
God will look after you.
And is that why you were willing,
before you just happened to have sold your farm
and moved to a different one or whatever,
but you said you would go back, you did go back to your farm,
you carried on living there.
I stayed there, I slept there, the next night I slept there.
The next night after you'd been shot in your bed?
And it's one of the key themes I hear over and over
amongst the big, strong men who know they're a target
and who see that time is running out
for the white farmer in South Africa.
The young, who can afford to leave, do.
The older farmers living close to poverty
cannot afford to even if they could.
Others are forced off their farms into white slum settlements,
just like this one outside Pretoria,
where Joey and Peter live with Joey's young children,
below the poverty line, without running water or electricity.
And so it is with both a sense of resignation
and ultimate resilience that they commit to the land
with everything they have and everything they are.
I will be buried in my boots
takes on a far more literal meaning here.
Sitting with Bernard, I'm struck that his relationship with God
and his land has a lot to do with being resigned
to his fate. If he's resigned to his future
and his life being ended, then putting his faith in God
is the only thing that makes sense and the only way to cope.
And the land provides a salve for his tired mind,
exhausted from his own internal dialogue
with the demons that were left behind by the gangs.
Sorry about my dogs.
I love your dogs.
Your dogs are a good way of looking at life sometimes.
All that matters is that you get to eat and wee.
Yeah.
I'm somebody that also shuts out other people
when I'm struggling with something.
So the farm, the fields and stuff
keeps me busy from early to late.
And is a friend.
Yeah. And that's where, if I do my prayers, it's there.
So the land and your God.
If I have a bad day, I'd rather go and sit there
and try to figure it out myself.
Your story is there.
It's your own story.
But that point of what keeps you going
is exactly the same as big others that I've met,
big people like you.
The things you face are unbelievable,
but the things you all go back to,
many of you is the land and God.
Well, that's the only thing we can hold on to.
There's nothing else we can put our trust in these days.
So you hold on to that.
Yeah, and God stays as well.
Sometimes it doesn't seem that way.
When I sat here, I thought, I was angry with him.
I said, what the hell, where were you?
But now I can see he was here.
Here's the bullet though, my son was there.
A lot of things had happened in this yard that day.
He wasn't in control.
This is why they cannot leave,
even if they could afford to or had somewhere to go.
They do not leave because the only way
they can make sense of life is to believe in land and God,
for better or worse.
And these beliefs do unite them.
As I drive about on this epic journey,
the symbols of faith are everywhere,
from crosses on the side of buildings to signs on the gates,
even crafted by the hands of the victims themselves.
It's almost as if the more desperate the situation,
the more important God or faith becomes.
Maybe that's true for all of us.
I say I'm not religious,
but when one of my own children was unwell,
I started bargaining pretty hard with a God I'd never believed in.
Who else can you lean on when nothing else makes sense?
He's our hero, and I keep telling my kids as well,
because if it wasn't for him taking literally all the bullets,
what would have happened to us?
So he gave his life for us.
And that is why I'm making a point of living life so largely.
Because this is why you're like you are.
That's why.
I would say a big part of getting through,
or not getting through living with what happened is my faith.
People will say, you know what?
It was God's plan, God's will.
No, it wasn't.
Not at all.
It was people.
Free will.
They made the choice.
It's not God.
He couldn't manage the whole situation or control it or stop it.
It's people.
We have free will.
But he was there.
And he said that he will let everything work together for the better.
So that's what I believe in.
And that's why from this box of ashes that I have, literally,
has to come something good.
I think I almost prefer Mary-Andra's take on things,
less resigned to her fate,
more clear that God was not behind this,
but that something good has to come from pain,
like the garden they have created in memory of Daddy.
We have little rituals that we do.
So we have a little garden that's our Daddy garden,
where they plant the flowers they want to plant.
And obviously, we have photos in the house of Daddy.
And the girls, Mika refused to talk about Daddy for a year,
because the trauma was so big.
She didn't want to grieve.
The grieving itself was a trigger for her.
Now we're at a point where we'll sit and say,
what was the best memory of Daddy?
And they'll make turns and talk about him.
And I'm hoping that that will form part of his roots,
or he will know who his Daddy was.
And there's a strong feeling of unity amongst these farmers,
forced together almost by their shared sense of being hunted
or being the prey.
Sometimes they come together for protection,
forming night patrols so that others may sleep more soundly.
And why do you do this?
What makes you, when you've got a family that it's bedtime,
you're putting them to bed, bath time, you might be missing that.
What makes you get in your truck, get your light on,
and patrol from one till four in the morning?
You've been paid to do this?
No, we're not being paid.
You don't receive anything for doing this.
Why do you do it?
So that I can sleep safer tomorrow night,
when my neighbour does it,
because who else is going to do it?
And how has it come to be that in South Africa,
so back where I come from, we avoid our neighbours?
I pretend to do up my shoelaces rather than speak to the guy down my road,
because I'm not so fond of him.
Does it work out here that you not only are lovely to your neighbours,
you will get up in the night to look after them?
Personal opinion, I think once you've seen what can happen to somebody
that is an older person that has been attacked and you see the scene,
then it makes you think twice about, I don't want to get up tonight.
And just as they work together in life, they are united in death too.
Here at the Plasmoord monument, outside Ysterberg,
each white cross represents a farmer killed in a farm attack,
row on row, clawing their way up the hillside,
in a last determined effort to make a stand.
And here, just as in the media and elsewhere,
the individual stories fall away.
Suddenly there are too many to count,
the sheer numbers hiding the horrors represented by each cross,
each of these crosses is not one farmer shot or stabbed,
it is a wife raped, or a child thrown in a boiling bath,
or a grandma scolded with hot irons across her chest,
just for the pleasure of her pain.
You know, when it rains here, the drops are heavy and warm,
just like the tears of Marie-Andra, Bernard or my own,
sometimes it feels like this whole damn place is crying.
I look around at these persecuted whites,
living in gated communities with 24-7 security,
a secure door between the house and the bedrooms,
windows covered by metal grills,
and I wonder if apartheid ever really went away.
It seems the only thing that has shifted is who has the power.
Cyril Ramaphosa, the new leader of the African National Congress,
who is pushing ahead with the expropriation of land
without compensation, removing any future
for all but the most wealthy farmers in South Africa.
Just simply handing over land to individuals who have never farmed,
who don't have the experience of trying to make this land
do what it does so brilliantly under the experts,
it's not a reality. Handing over land doesn't equal a farm.
No, it does not.
And there are so many examples of how this failed dismally.
Where beautiful productive farms were given to a group of people,
who then lost the farm through simple neglect.
The homestead, beautiful homestead, was broken down and plundered,
and parts of it, you know, the roof and other inside doors and stuff,
happened to appear elsewhere in shacks.
So all you have is the broken walls remaining of the farm.
And then of the productivity of that farm,
it's all went to, you know, to nothing. There's nothing left.
So you have bushveld again.
And if you look at that farm a few years afterwards,
you'd never believe that this was one of the best productive farms at its time.
And it is the food security of the South African nation that is at stake.
We really lost food security.
South Africa, between the 80s and the 70s, was a net exporter.
Rhodesia as well was also a net exporter.
Even with the sanctions that were put in place.
After independence, we used the more popular catch term, after liberation.
South Africa lost more farmers.
And as we lose more farmers,
and the farmers that do stay at the kingstone want to farm that too often.
No, no, no.
We have become an exporter of food.
We are no longer exporting our food.
Where is our food security?
Brian's own brother was shot during an attack on a farm.
But even having suffered this loss, like so many other good people,
he can see that to move forward, he can't be focused on vengeance for sins of the past.
He's right, of course.
Away from the brutality of apartheid,
there is another story in the relationship of black and white people in South Africa.
A long tradition of blacks and whites working peacefully alongside each other,
creating deep and meaningful relationships with generations of the same families.
I think it's quite cunning to say that you didn't stay at school for long,
so you don't know how long you've been here or how old you are.
I'm going to totally roll with that when I go back to the UK.
Do you know how old you are?
And it is a mistake to imagine that white farm attacks are only a white problem.
Black farm workers are also vulnerable to attack,
beaten alongside the farmers they work for.
They make us lie down, all of us here.
Like in a line? Do they get you face down?
Yes.
And this is your son, your wife, your workers, your closest workers?
We were 13 people.
Face down in here?
13 or 14 people were lying down here on the floor.
They shot you through the leg?
Yes.
They also shot one of my workers.
Through the leg?
Through his testicles.
Through the bum, through his one testicle.
Oh.
Here, there is the mark, told today.
Here, this is your where you were shot?
Yeah.
Do any of them still work with you?
Yeah, one of them is still here.
One stayed?
Yeah.
He'll stay with you forever?
I'm 100% sure about that, yes.
It's one of the things that people seem to miss, these farm attackers,
if you speak to them or speak to people around them,
is you say to them,
so what do you think happens when you attack a farm and the farmer leaves?
You know, you terrorise them so they are forced to leave.
What happens to the farm worker that depends on the farm
and they don't seem to have thought it through
or don't seem to recognise they're hurting their own
if it is about something else?
Oh, but that's what I'm saying.
They don't feel nothing if they're given their own.
No.
And this creates fear.
Many black workers are afraid because of what they've been through.
Fear is pervasive here.
And are you afraid now of being on the farm?
How do you feel?
Yeah, I'm afraid because I think at the end of the day,
they'll come back, you see,
because they think that I see with my eyes.
But I'm working, but I'm afraid.
You are afraid?
Yes.
Yeah.
And when they were shooting down the line,
they shot your boss in the leg,
then they shot a friend of yours, another farm worker,
they shot him as well.
Did you think they would shoot you?
Yeah.
They said to me they were going to shoot myself
because they asked, say,
who worked for a long time here?
And other people which was working here,
the fantasy is I worked for a long time.
They asked, say, how could you say you don't know the money
because you worked a long time here?
We were counting five times.
If you didn't tell us to say, well, where's the money?
We're going to shoot ourselves.
You see?
They pointed at us and they counted.
One, two, three, four, five.
At the end, they just know.
When the white farmer is hurt,
many of the workers speak about the pain they also feel
to see the person they love hurt so very badly.
One of Marietta's workers, Miriam,
came to her aid after she was shot in the face.
Yeah.
And on the day I was shot,
I drove up to down there nearby her house
and then I called her.
I asked, I showed her son.
He came to me.
He was bringing money to me for me to buy some tomatoes for her.
And then he saw and I said you must go and call her, you know?
This is when your face was shot?
When I was shot the same day.
After your face was shot, you were driving?
I had to.
And then she came to the car and I told her to get on the buggy
and we drove to the tar road.
Her son took over then.
He was able to drive.
And then I was sitting next to him.
With your...
Yeah, it was just blood.
Did you hold a towel or...
No.
Nothing because you didn't know.
No, I didn't.
You know, I was in such pain.
I don't know what happened.
Or where you were.
Afterwards she went to the tar road again where I was standing
and she took the blood and she buried it there.
Where I was standing it was just blood.
And then I wrote on the box my brother's phone number
and his daughter's and the friend's at Plattbrook.
And she stopped the car and she asked for somebody to help us to phone.
And actually it was a police guy.
And the guys had phoned to her and she spoke to my brother
and said he must come.
I was shocked.
And what do you think about what she's been through?
How do you feel about what she's been through?
It strikes me that this is a perverse way of unifying people,
this hurt they all feel.
One key worker was at the cattle.
He was crying.
He was crying a lot.
He was angry.
They all were very close with my father.
One of the guys that's working here is actually...
He's not on pension.
He mustn't go on pension
but he's actually not worth a lot on the farm.
He doesn't do actually nothing.
But I keep him here because he worked with my father.
He's here for 20 years so he stays here.
And yeah, give him a fence to fix.
Even if it takes him two hours for me, it's okay.
You're a good man.
As long as he stays here, I'm okay.
You're happy.
He's part of your dad.
Yeah.
Do you think your dad can still see?
Yeah.
No, I don't think so.
I know so.
No, I don't think so.
I know so.
This incredible loyalty between blacks and whites
endures despite the attempts by black gangs
to sabotage all that is good.
Jacob talked about his responsibility to his workers
and to Meme.
So would you ever leave the farm?
Never.
No.
Because of your farm worker or because of the farm
or because you're you?
There's a lot of everything.
I am the farm.
If I'm not here, there is not a farm.
And you feel responsible because you put his life.
Yes.
Now I was going to even tell him, sorry,
no job for you anymore because of the criminal activities
in our land.
So where must he go now to support his family?
Farm attacks are ripping families like these apart.
Farm attacks are ripping South Africa apart.
Yeah, it was a normal day.
We took the girls to school.
I took them to school.
Johan came home a bit later that evening
and we had supper and we fell asleep on the couch
in front of the television.
Mika, my oldest daughter, fell asleep on a little mattress
with us in the lounge.
And at about, I would say half past one, 12ish.
In the morning.
In the morning, I heard the dogs barking.
And then I went back upstairs and I fell asleep
on the couch again.
Thinking living on a small holding,
it could be a cat or a rabbit or.
Just something that disturbed the dogs.
Something.
So I fell asleep again.
I was, well, literally woken up by a sound
that the police later said was described
as the cocking of the gun.
As I sat up straight, they were,
there were two of them standing at my feet
with the gun pointed at me.
And I of course started screaming hysterically.
I woke my husband up.
And was your daughter awake obviously at this point?
She woke up.
Because she was screaming.
She woke up when the screaming started
and the one attacker said,
this man is a killer and he's here to kill you.
And my husband still said, please, no.
Just take anything you want.
There's the car outside.
There's TVs.
You can take anything.
And the shooting just started.
Bullets were just flying.
While Mariandra and her children
are still dealing with the psychological scars
from their attack, others, like Marietta,
have to deal with the physical repercussions
for the rest of their lives.
Marietta was shot while in her car,
ambushed by a farm worker on a road leading to her farm.
The attacker tried to shoot her in the head,
but Marietta lurched back,
resulting in the bullet shattering her jaw.
She escaped with her life,
but permanent disfigurement
was just the beginning of her suffering
as state healthcare botched Marietta's operation.
Surgeons took skin from Marietta's leg
to reconstruct her jaw,
but unfortunately, the tissue they used
was still rattled with shrapnel,
causing the wound to become gangrenous.
She could smell her own face rotting.
Worse still, the skin was grafted the wrong way around,
resulting in Marietta's own leg hair growing into her mouth.
While Marietta's body was permanently disfigured,
other women have been faced with a grim choice.
Endure gang rape and potential exposure to HIV,
or allow their entire family to be murdered.
This brave woman endured being raped by three men
so that she would be able to see her grandchildren again.
I said, you know what this is, now I have to shoot you.
And there I also decided, listen,
I still have my kids, I still have my grandchildren,
I still have my husband in the room next door,
I don't know what happened to him,
and I want to stay alive,
so I have to decide now what I want to do.
And in that moment, I suppose there's a sort of thing for me
that goes, what choices did you have?
Do I want to be shot dead,
or do you want to stay alive for your grandchildren?
Yeah, I have to stay alive for my kids and my grandchildren and my husband.
So you decided to let him?
Let him do whatever he wants to do, yeah.
And what happened next?
Well, yeah, then I asked him,
what's the way do you want to do it?
And he said to me, somewhere outside here,
if she won't excuse me, no, I don't think so.
Everybody else here, the other two guys, is watching us,
so I'm not going to let you do this to me, yeah?
I've got back problems.
As it is now, I can't stand too long,
so I have to sit all the time.
So he said, yeah, okay, let's go into the room.
And he said, yeah, he wants to do doggy style.
Okay, let's go into that.
So we tried, and he couldn't do it,
and he said to me, yeah, I must turn on my back,
on the bed.
And then, yeah, then he started raping me.
And how long did that go on for?
How long were you raped for?
About an hour, about an hour,
because he raped me first, and then he walked out,
and then another guy coming in, and he raped me,
and then he goes out, and then the last one comes in.
So all three of them?
All three of them, yeah.
And I've spoken to other people
who've been involved with these rapes,
and they say that they like to take their time.
Do you think that's...
Oh, yes, yeah, they do like it.
That wasn't in the area to go anywhere,
because they knew the police is gone,
so why will they be in the area to go away?
And your husband is just in the room next to you?
My husband is in the room, yeah, still tied up.
Now, I just keep quiet,
because I know if I'm going to make any sound
or try to fight them, they will shoot me,
and they will go inside and kill my husband as well.
So I decided not to do anything,
let them do what they want to do,
and just get out of my life.
I'm speaking to God all the time,
and I say, please give me strength, please give me strength.
So you just talked to God while these guys are raping you?
All the time, yeah.
All the time I was spoken to him,
just give me the strength to go through this
and let me get out alive.
No one, neither young nor old,
is spared in these brutal attacks.
Bernard recalls other details of the day
that changed his family's life forever.
Shall we carry on the journey that you took?
So your son fell down there, they shot at him.
Your wife is currently...
They took her in, yeah, they took her in.
At that stage, I was lying here,
the other car was standing here, I was lying here.
They took her, they put her down here at the back
and tightened her as well, but they handled her not that...
Roughly, like more gently than you.
Yeah, my mother as well.
They worked more gently, and the kids,
they didn't do anything to get this.
Didn't touch the kids?
No, nothing.
My youngest son, he's the middle one,
they put him there, he sat in the door,
he saw everything.
He saw every time they kicked me.
He saw how they tightened my wife and grandma,
and he saw everything.
And ultimately, the attackers strip even the strongest men
of their ability to defend their families.
Yeah, it's very, very hard.
Remember, you are young, you have dreams, you have ambition.
You want to change the world?
And then something like that breaks you.
It has a hell of an impact on everything.
On your marriage.
You feel like you didn't protect your wife and your children.
Angry with yourself.
There are a lot of things you must make peace with.
They took Bernard's dad.
They take a woman's self-worth by raping her.
They take strong men's dignity and pride.
But worse, they take what is truly priceless.
Farm attackers rob little boys and girls of their childhoods.
Amber innocence.
Mika was diagnosed with PTSD.
She was on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medication.
At the age of?
Six.
At six, she's on anti-anxiety?
Anti-depressants.
Bernard tells me the same thing.
His 11-year-old son was shot at and dragged across the property
whilst his younger brother looked on.
Aggressive, sleepless and detached from everyday life,
the child was prescribed strong anti-depressants.
And how are the children?
We took them for counselling.
The middle one that saw everything.
The one in the doorway that saw you being kicked and kicked and hit.
Yeah, and he saw his brother pulled over the lawn and stuff.
He's going there tomorrow again.
He was last week for counselling.
To counselling?
Yeah, in Pretoria.
Can he sleep?
No, he's on anti-depressants.
Anti-depressants and then things to help him sleep?
Yeah.
And how old is he?
Eight.
And he's on anti-depressants?
Strong anti-depressants.
Just that my son is nine, so your son's eight,
and your son's on anti-depressants and strong ones
and he can't sleep at night?
Yeah.
So what will happen to him?
Will he stay?
Because presumably as a farmer, usually it's the sons that take the farm.
Yeah, well, the problem I have with him is aggressive.
He's really aggressive towards his teachers.
He doesn't have friends at school anymore.
He doesn't.
For him, everything just went downhill, totally a mess.
He's really good in sports, rugby, hockey, athletics, everything.
He's good in it.
But he doesn't have that.
It's as if he doesn't want to fit in anymore.
You mustn't ask him to open the garage.
During the day, my garage doors were standing open.
I didn't close them.
They didn't want to play outside.
They didn't want to go fishing.
They damaged just here.
They didn't want to go fishing.
They didn't want to do anything.
And finally, it is all too much for all of us to take.
My crew were in tears.
I'm a mess.
And Bernard calmly tells me his oldest son wants to commit suicide.
He blames himself for his grandfather's murder.
The oldest one was on the stage.
He wanted to commit suicide.
He said he wanted to kill himself because he wanted to go to his granddad.
The oldest one?
Yeah.
How old is he?
Eleven.
And he said he wanted to commit suicide.
Yeah, he wanted to kill himself because he wanted to go to his grandfather.
They were supposed to kill him, not his grandfather.
And stuff like that.
For me, as a parent, there's no book that can teach you parenting.
I'm sorry.
There's nothing that can teach you that.
You try your best.
But how do you handle that?
How does a parent handle that?
Jacob experienced the same kind of troubles with his own son,
who was just ten years old when a gun was held to his head.
In the beginning it was a problem.
We take him for some help.
To talk to someone?
Yeah.
But you know, I want to give you an example of that child.
He was the most friendly, innocent child for what you get.
When they have chips and sweets and that stuff,
they were always walking on the farm, giving to the workers.
Do you understand?
Yeah, like a family. Like friends and family.
Like a really, really big family.
And after the attack, and you must remember, he was ten years old.
And that's why there is a gate by the road now, because it was always open.
Someone can get in for help and for this.
Now they can't.
And if you see something now, they ask you, Dad, let's shoot.
Shoot him.
So you can clearly see the impact on that child.
The way he sees the world now.
He believed everything is good and right,
and now he sees another side of the world.
So...
They take that.
They take...
They're making him...
This story was making him an adult before its time.
Yeah.
In that way.
Yeah.
So yeah, I think they robbed him a lot.
Yeah.
In this place where people so strongly believe in God
and are determined to carry on,
there is also a fatalistic side they've come to embrace.
Their lives have changed irrevocably, and they know it.
It's a path to walk.
I have to take them every night and show them,
look, Mommy's locking the door.
Look, Mommy's closing the windows.
Look, there's burglar boys.
And if they hear something, I have to go look for what the sound is,
because immediately we expect the worst.
If I, myself, hear something outside, I expect the worst.
And then I have to rationally rewire my brain and think,
you know what, the wind is blowing, it's probably...
And I have to go look, and then I can show them,
look, it's just the wind.
They aren't afraid of monsters, they're afraid of people.
And this is my truth from South Africa.
Whites are being systematically cleansed from the land by black gangs.
Black gangs are supported by the language and actions of mainstream politicians
and are equipped by corrupt members of the police.
It's a sad conclusion, but an inescapable one.
You know, something happened to me as I was leaving South Africa.
I was detained leaving the country and my passport confiscated.
I was told that my actions in South Africa amounted to spreading racial hatred
and that I was to stay in country until they could figure out what to do with me.
In the end, they couldn't.
And because it was a Sunday and no one was in the office, they let me go.
It was not a small issue, it was a serious charge,
a charge that put me in real jeopardy.
As it stands, I am banned from entering South Africa
and will not be able to report from there again.
They don't want you to hear these truths.
South Africa's political class would prefer you never hear my reporting,
never hear the voices of victims and survivors,
never hear how bad things are for the white people of South Africa.
Well, now you know.
South Africa's political class would prefer you never hear my reporting,
never hear the voices of victims and survivors,
never hear how bad things are for the white people of South Africa.
South Africa's political class would prefer you never hear my reporting,
never hear the voices of victims and survivors,
never hear how bad things are for the white people of South Africa.
South Africa's political class would prefer you never hear my reporting,
never hear the voices of victims and survivors,
never hear how bad things are for the white people of South Africa.
South Africa's political class would prefer you never hear my reporting,
never hear the voices of victims and survivors,
never hear how bad things are for the white people of South Africa.