Senekal is a shard of a troubled nation

In a country where public discourse noisily roams from one issue to the next in the blink of an eye, important events often pass without us so much as gleaning their significance.

Can the unfolding drama in the Free State town of Senekal buck the trend to inspire a collective national reflection on its meaning, potential dangers and opportunities? Heaven forbid, imagine last week’s incident during which a group of white farmers stormed the town’s magistrate’s court, demanding the surrender of suspects to the murder of farm manager, Brendin Horner, resulting in the death of a black or white citizen, or both.

Since 1994, some quarters have sought to market the widespread acceptance of the perception that there is something more sinister to the vile incidents of farm murders. They desperately seek to affirm the race of the victims as a significant driver behind the attacks.

Assistant general manager of the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TAU SA), Major-General Chris van Zyl, recently commented: “The particularly high levels of violence and torture [in farm attacks] indicate a high level of racial hatred, which deeply concerns us.”

Yet, Free State farmer Fani Mashinini, an African male, this week expressed fears of insecurity, including alarming levels of stock theft in his area, without making racial attributions.

In September 2018, Van Zyl said: “Officially, the motive for [farm attacks] would be robbery. But the fact of the matter is that if you really analyse the victims, it is predominantly the farmer who is murdered and therefore there is a very strong perception that there is a relationship between these attacks and the land issue because the land issue has been a burning issue right from 1994.”

The perspective echoes crude right-wing populist historiographical (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations of colonial conquest and land dispossession and links these to post-apartheid attempts to right the wrongs of the past.

Van Zyl asserts further: “It is said that white people stole the land. “We [TAU SA] have gone through an exercise in 2017 of a reward of R100 000 to anybody who could prove that their land was stolen and we did not get a single application for that reward.”

In April 2001, the government established a safety and security ministerial committee inquiry into farm attacks. Its July 2003 report found that farm attacks were driven by nothing more than criminality.

Nineteen years later, it is likely that last week’s potentially explosive incident at the court in Senekal was instigated by the perception that farmers are targeted as a group because they are, as Van Zyl puts it, considered land thieves; their crime being remedied by these gruesome farm killings.

Yet, the available evidence – from the police and nongovernmental formations such as the Institute for Security Studies – has consistently betrayed the fallacy of this position. Hence, legitimate as the grievance about farm murders is, incidents such as last week’s storming of the Senekal Magistrate’s Court are misconceived and cannot be legitimate.

Judging from Van Zyl’s input, much of the premise for such acts is based on misdiagnoses that are immanent in our social and political condition. Felony is oftentimes as political as it is layered in the multiple onion rings of the social psychology of South Africa’s past and present racial, class, gender and other divisions.

Commenting on the recent Fairview Racecourse incident, Rhodes University Professor Richard Pithouse wrote: “If you grew up white in apartheid South Africa, or any of the other settler colonies in Africa, you’ll know that there is a profound fear stalking the white unconsciousness that one day ‘they’ will rise up and come to ‘slaughter’ ‘us’ with pangas [it’s always pangas for some reason…].”

Pithouse’s diagnoses is as relevant to the Fairview incident as it is to all aspects the black and white South African social intercourse. It is about time that we engaged in a frank national discussion – not an insult match – and moved away from the comfort zone of a false and pretentious consensus.

Last week’s incident, which also involved farmers burning a police vehicle, further illustrated the increasingly evident breakdown of the rule of law across the racial and political divide in our country.

It conjures up images of the August 2009 illegal protest by members of the SA National Defence Force, of all people, to the Union Buildings, during which a military police vehicle was set alight. Or regular violent protests throughout the country – some of which are instigated by party-political players jostling for pole position over their real and imagined competitors.

And the oddly South African predilection for senseless marches and demonstrations before the courts in support of causes which, in the process, erode self-discipline, society’s respect for the rule of law and thereby undermine social cohesion. While the fear of insecurity is palpable and cuts across all racial divides, the siege mentality which appears to pervade certain farming communities is deeply corrosive and far from healthy.

Major-General Van Zyl put it as follows: “We … train … people … to take the necessary safety and security precautions to … provide them with the longest possible warning time that something unnatural is in the process of developing.”

Evidently, we should advisedly not treat this issue as yet another security challenge. We must seize this moment to privilege politics and broader social dialogue which promotes far-sighted interpretations of our lived experiences that inspire the search for durable solutions to our problems and challenges.

Senekal is a shard of a troubled nation. It will buck the trend of our peripatetic public discourse, which erodes rather than contributes to the nation’s thinking processes, provided that South Africans across the racial and political divides can pause to appreciate that last week’s incident could easily have transformed the little town at the back of beyond into a messy theatre of our country’s growing low intensity racial war with jaundiced narratives battling for first place.

Like our many other national challenges, it is a function of leadership. South Africa is in desperate need of statespersons more than the politicians we have in abundance.

Mukoni Ratshitanga. Picture: Neil McCartney

Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator.

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