the times | Saturday October 17 2020 2GM 43
Rivals on either side of South Africa’s
racial divide faced off in a parched rural
town yesterday to hurl rocks, abuse and
threats outside a murder hearing that
has re-ignited festering tensions 26
years after the end of apartheid.
Police in riot gear used vast bundles
of barbed wire to separate white farm-
ers and black activists who descended
in their hundreds on tiny Senekal, in
Free State province, the focus for a
national political confrontation since
the killing of a farm manager a fort-
night ago.
Although Brendin Horner was South
Africa’s 42nd farm murder victim of the
year, his fate has been seized on by
white farmers, who cited it as further
evidence that they are being targeted
by criminals and a black government.
After a white mob stormed the holding
cells of the local courthouse last week
in search of the black accused, Julius
Malema, the firebrand leader of the
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF),
ordered hundreds of his followers to
defend the building.
Police helicopters drowned out
shouts of “shoot, shoot” by the red-clad
EFF “ground troops” as they were
stared down by hulking farmers wear-
ing Boer Lives Matter T-shirts and
brandishing apartheid-era flags and
crosses for farm murder victims.
Inside the court Bheki Cele, the
police minister, and Mr Malema sat
through a bail application for Sekwetje
Mhlamba, 32, and Sekola Matlaletsa,
44, who are accused of stabbing and
strangling Mr Horner, 21, and tethering
his body by the neck to a fence.
As the bad-tempered scene played
out in Senekal, at the headquarters of
the rural safety committee Tinus Oost-
huizen peered at a bank of videos
streaming in from the local farms.
“The criminals will be busy today
thinking that the farmers are away in
town,” he said. “We must stay vigilant.”
The high-tech 24-hour operation is
funded by local landowners who long
ago lost confidence in local policing. Mr
Oosthuizen is among many convinced
that senior officers in the eastern Free
State are in cahoots with the rustling
gangs. One of the suspects in the Horn-
er case has been arrested for livestock
theft 16 times.
On the high plains of South Africa’s
agricultural heartland, Senekal is a
microcosm of the fallout from the
crooked era of Jacob Zuma, the former
president, which emptied the local
coffers. Not a single local authority in
the province, which for years was run
by the Zuma ally Ace Magashule, was
given a clean bill of health in the most
recent national audit.
The brokenness has deepened in-
equality — two thirds of black house-
holds in the province are in poverty —
and hollowed out the justice system,
which has created a perfect storm for
rising tensions, Mr Oosthuizen said.
“Brendin’s murder has been hijacked
by extremists and politicians,” he said,
denying that any local racial frictions
existed. “Black and white here areBlack agitators and
Boers square up
over farm murder
united against our common enemy,
which is crime and corruption. We are
too busy sorting out our bad roads,
hunger, shortages of power and water
to fight among ourselves.”
Still, the ownership of land in the area
reflects a national historic imbalance
that has kept 70 per cent of the
country’s privately owned farmland in
the hand of whites, who make up less
than 9 per cent of the country’s popula-
tion of 58 million — a disparity that
President Ramaphosa is determined to
put right. His controversial move to
expropriate land without compensa-
tion is one of the drivers of growing
distrust among white rural communi-
ties towards his African National
Congress government.
The ANC would certainly like to see
more landowners like Selina Maileh, 71.
She inherited a modest commercial
operation from her late husband, who
was given it by the state. But the widow
also symbolises how fraught the gov-
ernment’s land reform ambitions are.
She told The Times that she would
like to do more with her 900 acres butlacks the expertise and a workforce.
Growing the fodder to keep her 73 head
of bonsmara cattle and 14 sheep in the
dry months is as much as she can man-
age.
“There’s no point growing food, they
would just come and steal it,” she said,
pointing in the direction of Fateng-Tse-
Ntsho township, three miles away over
the fields and from where one of Mr
Horner’s alleged killers comes.
Thieves have targeted her merciless-
ly since her husband died 13 years ago;
her arms bear the scars of the time she
fought off a knife-wielding intruder
during the night.
None of her three children is inter-
ested in taking on the land. “They’re
too scared to live here,” she said, adding
that she relies on her dogs and night
patrols by her mostly white neighbours
to keep her safe.
She shakes her head at the idea that
the EFF speaks for her. “They only
want to talk about black and white, but
that is not our problem here,” she said,
adding that realising her dream of land
ownership — illegal under apartheid —
now often feels like a curse. She won-
ders whether, if nothing is done about
lawlessness, “are we going to just end up
poor hungry like the Zimbabweans?”
She added: “To live in fear like this,
when everything you have or make is
taken from you, doesn’t feel much like
freedom.”South Africa
Jane Flanagan Senekal, Free State
The white farmers and black activists
were kept apart by barbed wire rollseight-hour queues for early voting
week, offering an impersonation of his rival Joe Biden — whom he described as a “corpse” — battling to follow proceedings
groups. “Anybody who believes there
will not be violence is fooling them-
selves, because we’ve already seen vio-
lence,” he added.
Bill Meriweather, 72, also a Biden
supporter, said he was more
concerned about “voter
suppression”; a long-
standing complaint of
black voters in Georgia
who accuse the Republi-
can authorities of not pro-
viding enough facilities in
areas presumed to be
mainly Democrat. “They
don’t really make it easyto vote here. They haven’t for years —
shortage of equipment, computer prob-
lems, you have to stand in line for hours.
That’s ridiculous.”
More than 1.1 million Georgians have
already voted in person or by post,
about a quarter of the 2016 turnout.
Fears of violence from a different
source were voiced by a Trump sup-
porter in Cartersville, a small town
in Bartow county, rural Georgia,
which voted for Mr Trump by three-
to-one in 2016. Mark, 54, a trucker,
said it was the first time he had
voted early. “It worries me
the way things are nowa-
days. It is like there is
going to be violence,
everybody’s very
concerned about
that,” he said.
Asked who would
be behind it, he said:
“BLM [Black LivesMatter]. I don’t know about here, but
down in Atlanta.”
A man wearing a red “Make America
Great Again” cap and a T-shirt with the
slogan “Downloading liberal opinions”
under an image of a dog defecating, said
he wanted to vote in person to circum-
vent “liberal chicanery, cheating and
ballot harvesting”.
He added: “I am concerned about
what the liberal fascists are doing. They
will say or do anything because of their
lust for power.” He refused to give his
name.
Janine Eveler, director of elections
and registration for Cobb county, said
that waits of eight hours or more on the
first day of early voting were due to the
size of the crowd and computers being
slow to complete check-in details. “We
did have some technical issues, and we
had a lot of people on the first day.” She
added: “Part of our mission is certainly
not to suppress anybody’s vote.”JASON MOORE/ZUMA WIRE/REXAnnette Copeland,
79, said she would
stand in a queue for
as many hours as it
took to vote — a
privilege denied to
her forebearsTeacher murdered after
Prophet cartoon lesson
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Migrants to Italy plough
their own furrow
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