Book on farm killings tackles one of SA’s most sensitive topics

South Africa is a violent society. There’s just no room for any doubt about the perils that each citizen faces every day.

Some more than others, and the farming community often gets the shortest end of the stick. Farm killings evidence the social disease this country suffers from.

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Author Dr Nechama Brodie’s 10th book, Farm Killings in South Africa, examines one of SA’s most sensitive topics.

Whether its farmers, farmworkers or anyone in the agricultural community killed, it’s a space fuelled by political motives, racial undertones at times and geographic disadvantage.

Brodie recently spoke about the book at the Helen Suzman Foundation in Joburg.

Her 2020 Femicide in South Africa was the first of a series of books on violence in SA. Farm Killings is the next instalment in her journey of violence.

She said: “I realised if I was going to understand this problem of fatal violence, it would have to be much more expansive. I wasn’t sure what was going to be next in the series. And then the murder of Brendan Horner happened in Senekal, during lockdown.”

The 21-year-old was murdered by suspected stock thieves on his family farm in 2021.

It was a murderous spark which could have set off a raging fire of violence and the town teetered on a knife edge for several weeks.

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Brodie said: “It was this in this one town where you had political leaders, heads of government departments arriving there and it could have honestly tipped over.”

And while farm killings represent less than a percentile of the SA murder problem, it always becomes political.

It has become a staple of the national narrative on violent crime and, at its heart, a novel-sized history of race and fear.

“It became clear that even though it was a very small part of the homicide problem, it dominated the narrative. So that was kind of why I had to do the book.”

Much of SA history, after all, is built on violence.

Boer vs Africans, British vs Boer, concentration camps, conquest, apartheid crimes and the ANC’s campaigns of terror. The list is very long.

Brodie’s interest in violence is not morbidly curious as much as it is a yearning to understand what is really going on, today, and to understand that fully, the past must be examined, too.

“Because we don’t know enough about what happened before, and because of that, we have this mistaken idea of what’s happening now,” she said.

“There was a lot of violence from the 1990s. We were in chaos.”

In the book Brodie challenges much of the urban legend and propaganda served up to narrate farm killings and dispels much of it, while stripping down the tentacles between people, history and present circumstances.

Some of the motivation behind farm murders may have nothing to do with criminality or politics, but runs much deeper.

It’s an important question to interrogate.

Brodie drills deeper, stirs thoughts and interrogates a problem that ripples far greater and wider than people may have thought.

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