The end of apartheid was supposed to bring freedom. But many farm workers are still at the mercy of farmers who abuse, assault and even murder them, writes Chris McGreal
Pieter Henning moaned that he was being treated much too harshly as he was dispatched to prison for 30 years after beating, strangling and decapitating two of his farm workers because one of them called him “Piet” instead of “baas”.
Piet had a point. The KwaZulu-Natal farmer’s case was unusual only because he went to jail last month while other white landowners are getting away with murder.
Take the farmer given a suspended sentence for killing one of his workers after he accidentally drove a tractor over the family dog. Or the landowner whom police declined to charge for putting a bullet through the head of a black teenager he suspected of stealing fruit. Or the farmer in Louis Trichardt who walked free after shooting one of his labourers because he said he mistook the man for a dog.
The many abuses of white rule continue on the South African farms that provide a precarious existence for five million blacks. Deplorable working conditions and paltry wages in return for long hours remain the norm. Some labourers still sleep in the sties and stalls of the animals they tend.
But, for many workers, the worst thing is the impunity with which white farmers abuse, beat and even kill labourers and other blacks, and then walk free because of indifferent or incompetent police and friendly judges.
The Human Rights Commission has criticised “unfair collusion between the farmers, the police, prosecution services, the magistrates”.
Earlier this month, a farmer plastered a neighbour’s labourer from head to toe in toxic silver paint, in punishment for taking a short cut across his farm. The landowner was arrested only after 21-year-old Moses Nkosi’s shiny picture appeared on the front page of The Star.
The investigating officer, who failed to ask a single question of the abusive farmer in the week he was on the case, was suddenly reassigned.
Abie Ditlhake, deputy director of the National Land Committee campaigns for farm workers’ rights, says little has changed from the apartheid days when labourers were hardly better than slaves.
“Farmers developed a mentality that they are a law unto themselves, and a black life is worth less than one of their farm animals. That hasn’t changed,” he said.
Cases of white farmers abusing and killing blacks often don’t make it into the public eye. But the case of six-month-old Angelina Zwane did cause an outcry. The baby girl was strapped to her 11-year-old cousin’s back as they walked across fields on the smallholding on which their families worked and lived.
The landowner, Nicholas Steyn, spotted the children and fired a single shot into the air. The bullet ricocheted off a power line and hit Angelina. She died in hospital.
Because the killing occurred within striking distance of Johannesburg, it attracted attention – and outrage. It also exposed the indifference of the police and the complicity of the judiciary. Three days after the shooting, former president Nelson Mandela visited Angelina’s family with the investigating officers, inspectors SJ Muller and Esron Ramaroka.
Mandela asked why Steyn had not been arrested. The police officers fumbled for an answer. Muller said they were still investigating.
“Did you search his house?” asked Mandela.
“We are going to do that, Mr President.”
Mandela’s tone hardened. “You mean you didn’t search his house? How long have you been in the police force?” asked the president. Mandela called the shooting “callous, inhuman and deserving of the strongest punishment the law may impose”.
The judge at Steyn’s trial thought differently. Judge Tjibbe Spoelstra described Angelina’s death as a “tragic freak accident”. But he never asked what Steyn thought he was doing firing a gun to terrorise small children who lived on his own farm.
Spoelstra said the farmer “was not interested in politics”, a euphemism for “isn’t a racist”, before giving him a suspended sentence. Most of the subsequent torrent of criticism focused on the judge, who was denounced as the representative of an unreconstructed judicial system.
The region’s highest law officer denounced criticism of Steyn’s sentence as “uninformed” and described “unwarranted attacks” on the judge as “unacceptable”.
Late last year, the Human Rights Commission held hearings into the abuse of farm workers in the far north of the country. Labourers said farmers retain almost total control over their lives. Many live in perpetual fear of arbitrary violence with little hope of redress.
One woman told how a farmer caught her taking dead wood from his land. The man turned his dog on her, then ordered her to strip and lie in a coffin for five hours. The woman was fined R800 – about three months’ wages – for “stealing firewood”. The farmer was not prosecuted.
A commissioner at the hearings, Jody Kollapen, was shocked at the case of the landowner who shot one of his workers for accidentally driving over a dog.
“The farmer got a suspended sentence. That said the value of the life of the dog was more valuable than the life of the worker,” Kollapen said. “Other parts of society have been exposed to the tide of change and they have gone along with it. That’s not true of many farming communities. The police, magistrates, farmers work together and socialise together in a close-knit community.
“There’s resistance to the idea that these people we had control over all these years now have rights of their own. Most farm workers don’t trust the criminal justice system to protect them. The police would drive 40 or 50km to pick up a person accused of trespassing but wouldn’t turn up when a farmer beat one of his workers.”
It’s not just farm workers who are at risk, as a story some months ago in the Mail & Guardian demonstrates. Eskom employee Sello Masinyane was examining the electricity lines on a Free State farm with his assistant, Isaak Mogale, when a car came at the two black men at high speed. The farmer, Chris van Zyl, leapt out.
“Kaffirs, kaffirs, kaffirs. I’m going to kill you like dogs today,” he screamed and shot out the tyres on the clearly marked Eskom car.
Masinyane tried to explain: “I said, `Baas, please call the police if you don’t trust us. We are from Eskom.'”
Van Zyl replied: “I don’t talk to kaffirs.” The farmer fired another shot and Masinyane ran. Van Zyl pursued him, trussed him up with rope and dragged him around for a few minutes.
By then the farmer’s wife and son had arrived to view the spectacle. Van Zyl tied his two victims to an Eskom pole and told them to watch as he shot up their car. “This is what I’m going to do to you,” he taunted. Five hours later, another pair of Eskom employees arrived to find out what had happened to their colleagues. They pleaded with Van Zyl to let them go. He refused.
The local police superintendent, Danie Truter, turned up with two detectives. Van Zyl refused to allow them on to his land. Despite the other Eskom workers’ assertion that a violent crime was in process, Truter said he had no right to enter the farm.
It was only when officers attached to the local farm watch self-protection scheme arrived that the Eskom men were finally freed. The police decided Van Zyl had no case to answer because he was “well- respected” in the area.
The South African Agricultural Union would rather talk about the abuse of farmers than their workers. Many landowners consider themselves under siege from pervasive crime and killings.
“Murders of farmers are four times higher and violent attacks twice the equivalent figure for the rest of the population,” the union says. At a crisis summit with Mandela last year, it called the numbers of killings “nauseating and atrocious”, and said farmers were justified in taking the law into their own hands.
The land committee argues that the farmers frequently bring the violence on themselves through barbaric abuse of workers who turn on their employers or, at least, see no reason to risk their lives helping them during a robbery.
But crime is only part of it. For the first time, farmers see labourers as a threat to their control of the land itself. In certain circumstances, black communities can claim back land from which they were expelled, and those who have lived on a farm for long enough are guaranteed the right to remain. Many farmers see the new laws as a first step toward redistribution.
Some landowners have become so paranoid that they are refusing to allow dead workers to be buried on their land in case it is used to justify a claim. Gert Smith permitted the body of a 105-year-old labourer who had lived on his farm for 40 years to be buried only after the man’s wife signed an agreement not to use the grave as a basis for a land claim.
Ditlhake argues that lenient sentences for killing and abuse discourage farm workers from pressing charges and lead farmers to believe they can act with impunity.
“If the courts made an example of two or three people, making sure they were thoroughly punished, that would deter others. I can’t think of a single case where the farmer has been properly punished,” Ditlhake said.
Occasionally the courts do respond. Henning did not walk free for murdering his workers after inviting them to a braai. The farmer lost his temper when, after a few beers, Ernest Mkhize called his boss by his first name. He drove his car over his labourer and then ordered another worker to chop Mkhize’s head off with an axe. After returning to his braai, Henning turned on his other guest. Sipho Mabaso was beaten, thrown in a dam, strangled and eventually decapitated as well.
The judge noted that Henning was already serving a 23-year sentence, imposed before he came to trial, for strangling another labourer.
Henning’s father faces a conspiracy to murder charge for hiring a hitman to kill the detective investigating his son. The man, a member of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging , thought it was a trap and reported the contract to the police.