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What's really going on in South Africa? 🇿🇦 We went to speak with the victims of farm attacks, to uncover the real stories behind the global headlines and see the devastation this brutal violence is leaving. By @jaglancy and @alexmaccaroon https://t.co/zxXyHeZaUz
Video Transcript AI Summary
South Africa struggles with high crime rates, including farm murders. Some claim these attacks are targeted and brutal, leading the Trump administration to grant Afrikaners refugee status. Dairy farmer Hendrik's wife was brutally attacked in their home, but survived. Victims are often elderly, and security is costly. Some see attacks on farmers as justified. The EFF, led by Julius Milema, sings "Shoot the Boar," deemed hate speech but later overturned.
In 2025, South Africa passed a law allowing the state to seize farms without compensation, reminiscent of Zimbabwe's disastrous land seizures. Livestock farmer Adrian Voss was attacked and his farm destroyed. Neighbors report increased crime and inadequate police response, with farm attacks removed as a specific crime category. Farmers live in constant fear. Motivations for attacks vary, but the "kill the boar" chant and the disproportionate number of attacks on white farmers raises concerns about racial motivations. The ANC, in power for 30 years, has not condemned the song.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: South Africa. In recent decades, the country, famed as one of the most beautiful on earth, has struggled with a grim reputation for poverty and violence. It has one of the highest murder rates in the world, affecting every ethnic group and every region in the country. However, in recent years, one form of crime has come to the world's attention, becoming a politically volatile problem for the Rainbow Nation, farm murders. Farmers are still living in fear following a recent spate of deadly farm attacks.
Speaker 1: Indre Pistorius' body was discovered by his workers. Farm. The bodies of six women and a 17 year old boy were found on the Lisnoy farm on Friday. She was tortured with boiling water. Seven murders in the last decade in a radius of 30 kilometers.
Their mutilated bodies were found by the couple's other son.
Speaker 0: First eight months of this year alone, the commission recorded a 48 attacks on farms resulting in the death of 33 farmers. The Trump administration has declared that these attacks have become targeted and so brutal that the victims' plight is the same as those fleeing war, and so granted Afrikaners refugee status. We traveled to South Africa to find out what's going on in the country's fields and farms. 30 miles east of Pretoria, I traveled to meet dairy farmer Hendrik on his farm. Two decades ago, there were around 4,000 dairy farmers in South Africa.
Today, there are less than 900. As South African farmers struggle to compete with the subsidized milk flowing from the European Union, many, like Hendrik's family, have been subject to horrific violence, making it even harder to make a living. In 2024, Hendrik's wife, Greta, was alone in the homestead when an assailant broke into the farm.
Speaker 2: As he went in here, he looked at everything, and he inspected everything. No. He didn't take anything. There was a knife. He took the knife and he got that knife in his bag with his other knives.
And as the door started opening, my dog went furious. He ran and he
Speaker 3: ran
Speaker 2: out. He came back the same way and then he got inside like this. This door was closed and we could see opening the door and he went in. He looked around. My wife was in the bedroom there in the bathroom as he was washing her hands and he came and he grabbed her, but he pushed her down on the floor and he started hitting her with a hammer and he demanded money at the first place.
It was his first choice, I want money. And then he dragged her out to the kitchen and then there was already blood. And he pulled out all the cupboards and he opened everything and it was lying on the floor. There was blood up to the ceiling and he stamped her here, he springs on her. It was ramsacked, what you call it in English.
It was demolished. Blood all over the place. He dragged her there. When he left her there at that door, on her face it was only, you know, a wound on her head is is that don't stop bleeding. The blood was running down her face when I came came in here.
She was sitting on the bed. And the people out there until the people of the ambulances came, and they took over.
Speaker 0: Is she fully recovered? Is she okay? Are you okay now?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Fully recovered. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 2: I say fully recovered. Yes.
Speaker 1: I am, but sometimes I thought why he wants to kill me because I doing nothing.
Speaker 2: Victims are old people. Actually, my cousin was murdered four years ago on his farm on a Sunday morning. They strangled him with bald twine to death. I am ashamed about some farmers that does not have all that good security, but it might be a problem of what does it cost? It costs a lot of money to secure your farm with electric fences and electric gates and everything else.
This is where my wife was in hospital. She was in ICU for a week. This is where the ambulances came in Yeah. They took her out. Now we are all we are over everything.
We're not don't have any grudge. As Christian people, we're forgiving and we hope you will get forgiveness. We are going on with our lives as usual because we are living here since I was born there. My great grandfather's always there. We produce food for the people of South Africa.
Many farmers got stickers on their puckies as we call it, their vehicles says no farmers, no food.
Speaker 0: Do you think the farm attacks are gonna continue?
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it will continue. It won't stop. Almost every week, there is one or more, even more, farm attacks with murders. Really, it's not new news anymore.
We always you can think it was somebody else, but when it came near to yourself, you realize how bad it really is.
Speaker 0: After the attack, did you discuss with your wife and family leaving this farm or leaving farming?
Speaker 2: No. We never we will never leave this farm because of the attack No, he is not nobody is going to intimidate us To do it, but I think there are people that left their farms and said they cannot cope anymore there. But now we are living here and my children are living here and my grandchildren and what come after us must live and work on this farm. We are not going to flee or jump out just because of that or any other region actually harming us, putting us down, intimidating us.
Speaker 0: I was shocked by the ferocity of the attack meted out on Hendrik's wife, though incredibly, she was one of the lucky ones. Human rights lawyers have highlighted that farm attacks in South Africa stand out for their sadistic brutality, with many involving hours of torture. However, in some quarters, attacking farmers is seen not as a crime, but something to be encouraged. The EFF, a radical Marxist political party, has become famous for its confrontational approach to white landowners. Its leader, Julius Milema, a former ANC member, regularly leads its rallies in the apartheid era anthem, Shoot the Boar.
Speaker 4: Kill the Boar. The Boar. The Boar.
Speaker 0: The South African courts ruled the song to be hate speech in 2010. That ban was overturned in 2022. Such racial incitement is often written off as rhetorical or a metaphor in the media, an argument difficult to square with the sheer frequency of murders on South African farms.
Speaker 4: We'll kill the children. We'll kill the women. We'll kill
Speaker 1: anything that we find on our way.
Speaker 0: In January 2025, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa controversially passed a law allowing the state to seize farms without compensation.
Speaker 1: Should we get our land back? And the answer is yes.
Speaker 0: A disturbing echo of Robert Mugabe's policy in Zimbabwe Twenty Five Years before that left dozens of farmers and farm managers dead, destroying Zimbabwe's economy and its ability to feed itself.
Speaker 5: Now only a handful of white commercial farmers are still operating in the country. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of the Sub Saharan region, now faces food shortages
Speaker 0: annually. Adrian Voss, a livestock farmer west of Johannesburg, was attacked in March 2025. Although Vos survived the ordeal, his farm did not.
Speaker 6: We have been there, say, about twenty five years now on the main farm. I met my wife on that farm. We got married. We had a daughter, Yolanda Foss. She's been born on that farm twenty two years ago.
And, yeah, that's a place she know. She told me the other day that everything is gone now, but we still love each other. Around about 01:00 Sunday morning, the March 16, I was asleep The dogs wake me up. And as soon as I got out of the the farm yard at the gate, then the first shots went off. And I just felt pain in my legs, and they shot me in the knee.
And the bucky the the engine stalled. I couldn't get the engine to go in. And I tried to get the engine going again, got it going, and then more shots went off and glass and stuff hit me in the neck and in the face. And then they shot me in the back, and I could feel something was wrong in my lung because I couldn't breathe, and I know it's time now. And, yes, And that is when I realized it's now or never.
I must get out of this situation as soon as possible because I won't make it. And it was still firing all over, And I just pulled away and luckily nothing else hit me because I was just waiting for that headshot or something, and then everything will be over. So I just pulled out there and just hoped for the best. Yeah. I lost a lot of blood.
Speaker 2: So
Speaker 6: And we got out of there. Ambulance stopped there on top. They opened the door, that's when I saw mouse was on fire there on top. Thing is why they burnt mouths, that I can't explain. Really, can't explain that.
I don't know if they're angry that I got away. The only thing that I think, kept me going is Just to call my daughter, that's all. Yeah. So luckily I did it. I did it.
We lost about everything, me and Yolanda. I just think about we staying in South Africa and trying to feed the people in South Africa and to survive. We need some help because we're not getting help in South that I can promise you. So I want to ask the world, help us. That's all I want to see, say.
Just help us please.
Speaker 0: When news of the attack came, I traveled to see the farm myself and spoke with Voss's neighbors who came to his aid. Due to the likelihood of reprisals, we've concealed their identities.
Speaker 3: Alright. You see this pullet up? It's a 45 the millimeter that it was shot with. And then you can also see it's a 45 that I shot. So there's two guys shooting?
Speaker 7: No. There were multiple guys shooting by us. Multiple weapons used. It's definitely a pattern emerging because it wasn't the only incident to happen here in the past few years. There was an incident on this ranch that I drove out of the ranch and they waited for me in a bush and they shot me while I was driving out.
Two weeks later, they came back to this ranch and they were shooting at us while we were in our house and they shot my dad through his hand. They've been raiding houses, shooting people, cutting their electricity, and every time they walk outside to see what's going on, they shoot the people to steal the stuff in their houses. So this area has been having major crime incidences. I think it's overall any type of farmer you are gonna be targeted. We're struggling to get any help from the police because we usually, if something like this instance happened, you can say it's a farm attack, and it shows on record that it's a farm attack.
But our government took away the farm attack option on the crime report. So if you if the the guy's not shot dead, you should just say it's attempted murder.
Speaker 4: Do you think you're likely to get attacked again on other phones as well?
Speaker 7: Yes. We every night now, if we we can't drive, if it's after dark, you have to be up. It's still when the sun's up. And even when the sun's up, we're still struggling to think that we'll be okay.
Speaker 4: So, I mean, it's you're essentially living in fear. So it feels more like living in a conflict. I mean, how do you see it?
Speaker 7: Living in fear.
Speaker 3: The ambulance don't come to the scene if the police is not on scene. The ambulances were shot at while they go into the scene. That's how bad it is at the moment. Last night, they came back to his place and stole his transformer. They fired shots at me again, and we got now permanent security.
Now you can't even bribe outside. You can't even invite friends to your farm because you don't know when is the next farm attack. There's some black farmers also that gets attacked, But the the problem is we get seven to to 16 guys that that surround your place, and that happened, that was also. It's it's not only our farms. If you go further on in in our area, there's a woman that was shot just before I was shot, and she died on the scene.
They cut almost throats while they were sitting in a wheelchair, and their husband they killed in the store. What must we think? It's not normal. We all got the right to live.
Speaker 0: I was impressed that these farmers resolved to stay and farm their land, no matter the cost. South African farmers live lives difficult to comprehend in America or Europe. They are spread across vast distances and live tough, isolated, rural lives, with the threat of death looming over them after every sunset. Motivations for farm attacks vary. Some are financial, some are workplace dispute, and while black farmers also suffer from attacks, the chanting of songs calling for the murder of white farmers in a country where they are being killed in large numbers does nothing to dispel the implication that these attacks could be a precursor to violent racial land reform, not a first for Southern Africa.
The ANC, who have repeatedly refused to condemn the song, kill the boar, has governed South Africa for thirty years. Over that time, they have led a prosperous but unequal nation into a state of dangerous chaos, severe economic decline, and worse inequality. No one is safe in South Africa now.