When Pieter Snyman came home from his rounds on a cattle farm near Vivo in Limpopo last December, his attackers were waiting for him, pangas in hand.
The house invasion lasted six hours. As Snyman bled to death, the attackers tied his wife and two daughters to his body and dragged them into the bathroom, ransacking the house. When the attackers finally left in the early hours of the morning, Snyman’s wife, Jeanine, escaped and alerted the local farm watch.
“It was horrendous,” said Japie van der Goot, the stocky, red-haired chief of the Vivo farm-watch patrol, who was the first to arrive at the Snyman home. “Even more horrendous was the fact that the police were too scared to enter the house. The farm watch had to secure the scene.”
Jeanine dialled the farm patrol first because she believed — like many farmers in the area — that they are the real protectors of the community. Increasingly, farmers in Limpopo are setting up their own patrols to secure their district and gather intelligence, no longer relying on the local and provincial police to do the job.
“Farmers are at the back of the queue, as the best policemen are sent to the cities. We end up with outsiders who know little about the area and have no relationship with the farmers,” said Van der Goot. “Unfortunately the trust between police and farmers is deteriorating. But farmers trust the farm watch.”
Even though Snyman’s Toyota bakkie had a Netstar tracker on it, Van der Goot said that the police were too late to catch the killers; they found the abandoned vehicle in a Polokwane township a day later.
Three months after the attack, there was still no new information from the police. After Snyman’s wife started receiving suspicious calls, Van der Goot decided to follow up himself. He tracked the calls to a house 500m from where the car was found. A subsequent police raid recovered most of the goods stolen during the Snyman farm attack.
One of the men arrested was a labourer who had once worked for the Snymans, while other gang members were known to local police. Wanted in the Tzaneen area for robberies and murder, they had never been caught.
“This is where the penny drops in farm attacks,” said Van der Goot. “Perpetrators are not caught by the police and grow bolder. These attacks are all about information and soft targets — the Snymans were definitely soft targets.”
He said Snyman was a liberal who did not see the necessity of joining the volunteers who dedicate an evening every week or two to patrolling the roads and gathering intelligence about who was doing what in the district.
“The gang knew he wasn’t a member,” Van der Goot said. “The Snymans weren’t particularly rich; they were just too predictable.”
The Snyman attack has farm communities on edge, especially in Van der Goot’s Soutpansberg region — and it was not an isolated occurrence. Between November 2007 and April 2010, the Transvaal Agricultural Union recorded 42 farms attacks in Limpopo. Jan Moller and his wife were attacked in March 2008 on their farm in the Sterkriver near Mokopane; Jan Myburgh was shot dead in front of his television in April 2008 in his home near Groblersdal; Jan Potgieter was killed in October last year on his farm near Marken and in February this year, 61-year-old Etienne Canearts was murdered in the Baltimore area.
“These attacks are more than criminal,” insisted Doors le Roux, the Soutpansberg Agricultural Union leader in charge of security, who lives near Levubu, about 150km from Vivo and 30km from Louis Trichardt. “Why are these farmers tortured? It’s because there’s a political conspiracy. There has to be.”
Some farmers in the area believe that they are under siege. Following the murder of AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche and fuelled by Julius Malema’s “kill the boer” slogan, farm watches in the areas have been flooded with new recruits, including foremen and tenants on farms.
Le Roux, who lives in a quiet, tree-covered valley near Levubu in Limpopo, gives regular workshops and training in how to handle weapons and how to deal with any farm attack.
He said the local patrol does not stop people or harass them. “We just stop and ask if they need help or if they’re lost. But the message is clear: these are our roads — and we’re watching.”
The “green light” patrol groups that have sprung up in recent years in Limpopo are an attempt to fill the void left by the disbanding of the commando system, the former voluntary, part-time arm of the military, for which government provided weapons, vehicles and infrastructure.
It was the commandos’ strong links with the apartheid security system that sealed its demise; it was phased out between 2003 and 2008. The new system is entirely voluntary and receives no government funding, but getting rid of the commando-era image will not to be easy.
Farmers in this area all have a 9mm pistol lurking below the belt of their khaki shorts. It doesn’t invite argument “but it also doesn’t build bridges”, a police officer told the Mail & Guardian. “Most of these guys are all right, but when you first met them you think, ‘AWB, here we come’.”
Police were reluctant to go on record about farm patrols. Provincial police spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Ronel Otto was cautious, saying that “overall, the co-operation between the SAPS and members of the organised farming structures is very good. It includes patrols in the rural and farming communities, as well as roadblocks.”
But the fragile relationship between police, farmers and farm patrols has sometimes erupted in outright hostility. Le Roux recalled a night when provincial police commissioners and a local patrol nearly had a showdown on the road to Levubu when police spotted the green lights on their vehicles. Tensions were defused, but distrust remains.
Otto insists that police do not have a problem with farm patrols as an element of community policing structures, in spite of farmers’ complaints that the provincial police structures are not always accommodating.
Marie Helm, the secretary of the Soutpansberg Agricultural Union, also said the relationship has been rocky. “But we’ve had more luck with the local police by building relationships and getting to know station commanders. When we work together it becomes great community policing and rural security is improved.”
A senior policeman in Louis Trichardt, who asked not to be named, told the M&G that building bridges between black policeman and farmers who were sometimes perceived as rightwing could be difficult.
“But the more we talk, the more we work together. And the farm watches have done a lot to make our community safer. That makes our work easier,” he said. “We have no problem with the green light watches.”
Otto said police management took rural security in Limpopo very seriously and interested parties, including farmers’ representatives, met every quarter in a special forum. “Burning or contentious issues are discussed in these meetings,” she said.
The police oppose the use of green lights on vehicles, saying they are illegal. But the patrols have no plans to abandon the light or their farm watch structures any time soon. Said Le Roux: “We want everyone to see that we’re ready.”