Johannesburg: The white-owned farm was well known to residents of a rural community in South Africa as a place where they could get discarded food. But when two Black women ventured onto the farm several weeks ago, they never made it back.
The farm owner and two of his workers are accused of fatally shooting the two women and then dumping them in a pigsty, where, police say, they found the bodies decomposed and partly eaten.
The incident in Limpopo Province, northeast of Johannesburg, has sparked widespread outrage and ignited debate over some of South Africa’s most explosive issues: race, gender-based violence and the ongoing tensions over land between commercial farmers, who are often white, and their Black neighbors — which have sometimes resulted in bloodshed.
A judge on Wednesday delayed a bail hearing until Nov. 6 for the farmer and the two workers, who are still in custody.
The victims, Maria Makgatho, 44, and Locadia Ndlovu, 35, trespassed on the farm in search of food in mid-August after a truck from a dairy company dumped expiring goods there, according to prosecutors.
The farm owner, Zachariah Johannes Olivier, and the farm supervisor, Andrian Rudolph De Wet, 19, both white, had planned to shoot any trespassers who came onto the property, prosecutors said. Makgatho’s husband was shot, but survived and escaped, prosecutors said.
A 45-year-old Black worker at the farm, William Musora, is accused of helping to dump the bodies of the two women.
One of Makgatho’s sons, Ranti Makgatho, said Wednesday that he could not bring himself to think about the horrific way that his mother’s life had ended. He said she had been only looking for something to feed her four children.
“She was a good person,” he said. “And she liked to take care of us, as her children.”
Black residents have held protests outside the courthouse, and politicians are issuing angry statements.
For some, it speaks to the broader issue of South Africa’s lingering disparities in land ownership. During apartheid, many Black people were forced from their land, and today most major commercial farms remain under white ownership. Many Black South Africans in rural areas continue to live in poverty, resorting to scavenging for food on farms.
At the same time, many white farmers say that they have been the targets of persistent attacks by intruders, making some of them jittery about anyone perceived as a threat. Some on the extreme right have used those attacks to adopt outlandish rhetoric claiming a “white genocide.”
“Farmers’ lives here in South Africa, they are in danger, 100 per cent,” said Petrus Sitho, a Black activist who is advocating greater protections for farmers.
Sitho said that the government has not done enough to protect farmers, particularly white ones, leaving many of them feeling vulnerable.
He said, however, that farmers should not be attacking and killing people, and he did not defend the farmer accused of killing the two women.
“We can’t say all the white farmers are the same as that one,” Sitho said.
This was not the first time that Makgatho, who was out of work, had gone to that farm seeking food, because it was a common spot for locals to forage, said her niece, Moloko Mathole.
The family is stunned at the turn of events, Mathole said, adding, “We feel so sad.”
—International New York Times