It seemed like the bad old days were back in the Free State this week when a white man was fined for beating a worker, writes Ann Eveleth
A 38-year-old Free State farmer grinned in the Welkom Regional Court last Friday as he paid a R3 000 fine for beating and chaining a shepherd to a workshed table, but the black community members who attended the trial were not amused.
The paltry payment ended a year-long saga for the burly, khaki-clad Bothaville farmer, Wessel Wessels.
It changed next to nothing for 55-year-old herdsman Samuel Moabi, who had arrived at the local hospital in September 1996 with a chain around his neck and blood on his clothes.
Eugene Roelofse, a former ombudsman who attended the verdict, warned the minimal sentence could inflame racial tensions already on the rise in the wake of recent farm murders in the province. “I fear revenge attacks could take place. I was frightened by the level of hatred I saw in black eyes outside the court after the verdict,” he said.
Moabi’s frail body still bears the scars of a macabre experience last year that easily conjures up images of Kunta Kinte, the main character in the most brutal scenes of Alex Haley’s African-American slave-era blockbuster, Roots.
Welkom magistrate Andries Visser convicted Wessels of kidnapping and common assault. The judgment fell short of the attempted murder charge Wessels originally faced, and even further from Moabi’s sordid tale, even though Wessels’s defence advocate, Johan Nel SC, never called his client – or any other witnesses – to contradict Moabi’s version of events. Nel only intimated during his cross- examination of Moabi that the farmworker had precipitated the attack by attempting to steal a sheep from his employer.
Moabi denied the allegation under oath and told the court he had merely tried to prevent three dogs from scaring a herd of sheep as he put them out to pasture, but that one of the sheep got caught in the kraal in the process.
It was the story of abuse that was the centre of the trial, however. Visser ruled that he could not accept the ageing farmworker’s full story because medical evidence gathered after the attack did not indicate he had sustained substantial injuries, such as rope-burns or bruises. The magistrate convicted Wessels only of kidnapping and chaining Moabi and punching him once.
Moabi had testified that Wessels also forced him to undress, tied his hands and legs behind his back with a single rope and kicked and beat him unconscious. Moabi eventually managed to untie the rope and drag himself to a nearby toolbox where he found the tools to break the chain around his neck free from the table and escaped to the local hospital, evading Wessels, who was searching for him with dogs.
Moabi told the Mail&Guardian this week that a hand-sized raw abrasion photographed on his back after the attack – and still visible as a black disfiguring scar – was caused by “something I heard Wessels plugging in when I was on the floor of the workshed. I couldn’t see what it was but after that I felt pain there.”
A Bothaville lawyer Moabi consulted about possible civil action against Wessels, Toenie Niewoudt, said he understood why Visser did not find Wessels guilty of causing the abrasion, as “Moabi could not say what caused it”. He added that the kidnapping charge was diminished by the fact that Moabi’s period of captivity lasted only about four hours. Wessels did not, however, release Moabi after that time – Moabi escaped.
Niewoudt, who plans to sue Wessels for crimen injuria, defamation, loss of income and pain and suffering on Moabi’s behalf, said he found Visser to be “a competent magistrate” who had “a difficult time because there has never been a case like this before”.
But former ombudsman Roelofse saw things differently. Roelofse stumbled on to the case while in the final stages of a new book on the history of rural abuse he witnessed during his tenure from 1976 to 1983.
“Of course there have been cases like this before. What happened to Moabi is not bizarre. It’s as common as boerewors around here. I don’t know why the magistrate asked the defence attorney if there was a precedent. He should’ve asked the state,” said Roelofse.
State prosecutor Elize le Roux said she had never prosecuted such a case before but added: “It’s shocking, but only because black rural people don’t usually take such cases to court.”
Roelofse cited an “almost identical” 1979 case in which a farmer had “chained a little boy and then beaten his rescuers so severely that one of them died”.
But, added Roelofse, “The political, legal and social situation has changed dramatically in the intervening 18 years. In those days the South African Agricultural Union boasted to me about the tranquility in rural areas and that farmers as a matter of course left their doors unlocked. Today we see security gates, razor wire, special patrols, deputations to the minister and appeals to the state president – in short, the emergence of a siege mentality.”
Niewoudt also hinted at a link between Moabi’s fate and what he called “a lot of tension in the whole Free State about farmers getting killed and everybody wanting the death penalty back”.
But Roelofse said the growing security problems of farmers demands a different response. “Farmers who add fuel to the fire need to be dealt with drastically as a response to a national emergency. The only logical solution is to remove sadists from agriculture at least a decade at a time to places where they can contemplate their violence behind bars in the company of others sentenced for similar crimes,” he argued.
Roelofse said Wessels “grinned smugly” when he paid the fine in court last week, but never apologised to Moabi. “He showed no contrition.”
Wessels pleaded amnesia about the case when the M&G spoke to him through the barbed-wire fence surrounding his Regina farmhouse this week. He said he had “had some problems” with Moabi and asked him to leave, which Moabi did. He denied knowledge of the case, his conviction or the fine he had paid.
Roelofse has asked the the minister of justice, the Free State premier and the Free State attorney general to intervene on various aspects of the case. He said earlier approaches to the Human Rights Commission to take on the case had failed. “The Free State commissioner sits in Gauteng and he decided not to go down. If [this case] doesn’t justify a commissioner getting into his luxury car and driving down to Bothaville, I don’t know what will,” he added.
Moabi says he is not satisfied with the outcome of the case. He does not demand Wessels’s imprisonment, but wants R25 000 compensation for his wife and five children.
Their lives have changed little since Moabi found employment on a nearby farm two months ago. They had been staying at the Presbyterian Church in Bothaville’s black township of Kgotsong, which is ironically Sotho for “peace”, but are now living on the farm of Moabi’s new employer.
The employer gave his name only as Labuschagne, chased the M&G off the farm and berated Moabi for giving an interview without his permission. “You must ask me if you want to speak to my service,” he shouted.