Attacks on farms have soured relationships between farmers and their workers. Swapna Prabhakaran visited a farm where mistrust has grown
`The attacks are happening with such regular monotony, I don’t think any fence will keep them out. I know they’ll come back and this time they might kill me or my family,” Colin Reddy says grimly.
Reddy, a livestock farmer in the Crowders district, near Umkomaas on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, is voicing a powerful emotion that many of his neighbours feel: fear, bordering on paranoia. And it is not unfounded.
Reddy and his 11-year-old son, Brandon, were brutally attacked by unknown assailants in mid-August. They are the latest victims in the area, which has seen more crime in the past two years than at any other time in living memory.
Considering only a small percentage of the country’s population lives in rural areas, and few of them are commercial farmers or farm workers, the statistics on farm violence read like a horror story. More than 500 violent attacks on farms have been reported each year since 1994, and every year nearly 130 men and women die in these attacks.
During the late-night attack, Reddy was bludgeoned repeatedly with a blunt metal object. Brandon was knocked down by a swift single blow to the head, and the force crushed his fragile skull.
“I was hysterical,” Reddy remembers. “I thought he was dead.” The father’s cries woke up the neighbours and the assailants ran away without stealing anything. The police arrived 40 minutes later, and “didn’t even bother to take fingerprints or search for the criminals”, Reddy says bitterly.
The investigating officer, Inspector Lionel Bridger, is on leave – and has been for the past two weeks. He said this week: “The case is still under investigation. We don’t have a motive for the attack. It does appear that whoever attacked them knew the farm.”
Brandon Reddy was unconscious for three days, and before he had recovered his father had made a decision. “I don’t want to live here anymore, and I don’t want to keep my family here.”
The family is leaving their farm in the hands of a manager at the end of this month. They are moving to a hastily rented flat in the nearby town, Umkomaas, trading open skies and years of country living for burglar guards and safety in numbers.
They know times are changing – this is the new South Africa, and it has become a matter of survival of the fittest. Two farms away, Anand Naicker’s poultry farm loses 20 chickens a week to theft. Another neighbour was held up at gunpoint only a few weeks before the Reddy attack. It has all added up to a wave of terror among the farming community and the Reddys are not the first to leave.
Vinodha Reddy was born over the hill from her husband’s farm and her parents are farmers too. “I’m going to be sad to leave my parents behind. I feel we are abandoning them,” she says.
Colin Reddy says crime is not his only reason for leaving: “The costs are too high, I’m not making enough profit on anything, and the attitude of labour has changed. I find it’s more difficult to motivate them now. They expect higher wages for less work. I’m not saying they’re lazy, but they are aware laws are changing.”
One thing that unites Reddy and his labourers is their common fear of skebengus [criminals].
Robert Mnyando, who works as a repair man on the farm, says: “I feel it could happen to me too. I feel scared. Every time [there is an attack] it’s getting more and more scary here.”
Mnyando joined the Reddy farm last September, and he remembers last year’s “Diwari” (Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights) with fondness. There have been good times, but the distrust the family now feels has curdled the relationship.
“I’m not saying it was one of my labourers, but whoever it was that attacked me, it was someone who knew the set-up here very well, someone who knew I would have thousands of rands in cash with me that day,” Reddy says.
Vinodha Reddy keeps an eye on Mnyando as he speaks to the Mail & Guardian. She nods encouragingly and interrupts: “You been with us for a long time now, Robert, haven’t you?”
“Yes, Madam, I have.”
“And tell the lady how things have changed, Robert.”
“Well, things are not the same as before in [FW] De Klerk’s time. But we are in the farms here, so we are not seeing the changes. I haven’t had changes in my life, but in Durban I know there are changes. I have heard the people in Durban are staying nicely. Very nicely.”
Vinodha Reddy shakes her head, as if she is disappointed at his reaction. “So you want to live in Durban and pay the rates in the city, Robert? You know you have to pay for everything there. Even for water.”
Mnyando shakes his head, smiles politely and leaves to fetch his friend Colin Myatu.
Colin Reddy foresees a time when the new laws will “bring serious problems” to farmers like himself. “Now, if a worker is lazy, we just get rid of them. But the new laws will mean if there is a lazy worker, I can’t fire the boy. I’ll have to keep on paying him. That will be a real spanner in the works.”
Myatu arrives. He says he is “in charge of chickens” on the farm and he was unemployed before he got this job, so he is grateful he gets R15 a day.
“I don’t know about the new laws. I haven’t heard about them at all,” Myatu says. “But I am angry about the skebengus in this place. They do a wrong thing to us. They hurt people, and they steal money.”
When Myatu is asked what he would like more than anything in the world, he hesitates and looks at Vinodha Reddy. She nods and he immediately speaks: “I want more money. With more money, I could get a house, a car, a wife and children.
“I would like to carry on living here [in this area]. But I don’t want to be a farmer. I don’t like farming.”