Most farm murder victims in South Africa are BLACK
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu has moved to correct what he describes as a longstanding misrepresentation in the reporting of farm murders in South Africa, stating that black victims have historically included the majority of the affected.
'The history of farm murders in the country has always been distorted and reported in an unbalanced way; the truth is that farm murders have always included African people in more numbers,' Mchunu said.
Mchunu made the remarks, when he was presenting the fourth quarter crime statistics of the previous financial year (1 January 2025 – 31 March 2025) in Pretoria, on Friday.
The report showed a notable decrease in farm attacks, with six incidents recorded in the fourth quarter, compared to 12 in the previous quarter.
The victims included two farm owners, two farm employees, one farm manager, and one farm dweller.
While the South African Police Service (SAPS) does not categorise crime statistics by race, Mchunu addressed the racial aspect in response to recent claims of a 'white genocide' in the country.
'The two farm owners that were murdered during the fourth quarter were African and not white. Further to that, the two farm employees and one farm manager were also African – it is the one farm dweller that was white.
'Last quarter, we reported that a total of 12 farm murders had been reported, with one farm owner having been murdered.
'Notable progress has been made in respect of investigations into these cases, and a number of arrests have been made,' Mchunu said.
Mchunu reiterated the SAPS's commitment to prioritising all types of crimes with urgency; as well as to conduct thorough investigations to ensure that justice is ultimately served.
He further highlighted the government's commitment to the National Rural Safety Strategy, which aims to create a safe and secure environment in rural areas.
'We have appeared before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee multiple times to account for our efforts. The National Rural Safety Strategy is designed to create a safe and secure environment in rural areas, and we are committed to fully implementing it.
'As from this year, when we release the first quarter results, we will include a number of other categories of crime in the country, to show a fuller picture. For an example, killings in rural and urban areas, instead of just on commercial farms, but for now, our statistics are based on commercial farms,' the Minister said.
Mchunu also sought to dispel misconceptions about so-called 'land grabbing' in South Africa.
While confirming that land invasions do occur, he rejected the notion that they reflect government policy.
'Land invasions are not government policy but are by and large acts of desperation for land by African people who find themselves landless and in need to settle. It is sporadic and it remains unlawful, hence the cases and investigations thereof,' he explained.
Mchunu stressed that the policy of expropriation without compensation is a lawful and systematic effort to resolve the issue of landlessness.
'My colleague in the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development, [Minister Mzwanele Nyhontso], has expressed concern about the misuse of the term 'land grab' and will provide further clarification next week,' Mchunu said.
Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1
Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
TimesLIVE
an hour ago
- TimesLIVE
Ngugi was simply ordinary — a man of the people
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan playwright, novelist and thinker, who died on May 28, has left a huge intellectual gap in Africa's cultural and political landscape. Instead of mourning him, I have chosen to celebrate the intellectual legacy of this generous and authoritative African sage I was privileged to have encountered during my undergraduate days at Nairobi University and much later as a scholar of Ngugi and African literature. When I arrived in South Africa in 1991, Ngugi was the most widely known African writer in the academy, in spite of apartheid. As early as 1981, the widely respected South African journal, English in Africa, had dedicated a special issue to his works. His most widely referenced text then, was Decolonising the Mind. Indeed, he is the most widely taught African writer in the global north and the global south, alongside Chinua Achebe — the man who published his award winning novel, Weep Not, Child under Heinemann African Writers Series. When the prestigious Cambridge University Press decided to publish worldwide series on 'Leading Writers in Context', again it is Achebe and Ngugi who featured from Africa, and I am deeply privileged to have been asked to serve as the editor of the volume on Ngugi in Context. His works have been widely translated in several languages across the globe: Japanese, German, Chinese and in many parts of Asia. I hope we will soon see his works getting translated into African languages across the continent. During his last days, he had embarked on translating his novels written in English into Gikuyu. It needs no emphasis that Ngugi remains one of the most influential African writers over the past few decades of Africa's independence, not only for his creative works but also for his wide-ranging contributions on Africa's cultural thought and political life. Indeed, the role of the writer in shaping the cultural and political life of his people is an enduring theme in all his works. He was concerned with the role of culture as a source of historical memory and as a weapon against all forms of oppressive regimes. But he was also interested in narrative, specifically imaginative literature, as an agent of history and self-definition, an instrument for taming and naming one's environment. He was concerned with literature's role in the restoration of African communities dislocated by colonialism and the repressive postcolonial states that followed. As early as 1972, Ngugi was already drawing attention to how the tyranny of the past exerts itself on his works. He wrote: 'The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been,' a struggle as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history' (Homecoming, 39). For Ngugi then, the novel was an instrument that wills history into being and therefore, as a writer, he always located himself at the intersection of history and literary imagination. Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe. For him, the search for Africa's identity therefore lay in a reconstructive project to reassert a radical form of Africa's historiography conceived from below. At the heart of his restorative project was also his call for a return to the source, which would also involve the privileging of African languages in the production and consumption of local cultures. For him, it was only African languages that had the capacity to recover those African cultures repressed by colonialism and to equally carry the weight of a national history and memory. Genuine national literature, Ngugi argued, can only flower in local indigenous languages because literature as a cultural institution works through images and language embodied in the collective experience of a people. Ngugi always positioned himself as a writer in politics. He was hounded at home by one Kenyan political regime after the other and eventually driven into exile in the eighties by the repressive Moi regime in Kenya in the 80s. Little wonder then, that themes of dislocation, abandonment and exile dominates his works, written against the backdrop of authoritarian structures of control and imprisonment. Ngugi's early works are heavily weighted towards fiction, and the later lean towards non-fiction. In the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the publication of four novels, two plays and a collection of short stories, Ngugi produced only one volume of essays, Homecoming. But after his last major work of fiction in English, Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi wrote a total of five collections of essays as opposed to only three novels, Devil on the Cross (1981), Matigari (1986), and his latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow (Murogi wa Kagogo (2005), written first Gikuyu before translation. But it was the establishment of a community theatre in his home village of Kamiriithu, and the staging of the play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), that really raised the ire of the Kenyan authorities, leading to the banning of the play, his arrest and detention without trial. It also marked a major turning point in Ngugi's life when in prison, he used the language of his incarceration to write his first Gikuyu novel: Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross), on rolls of toilet paper. Subsequently, it is only Ngugi's collection of essays that he would continue to write in English, obviously aimed at the academy, with whom he continued to wrestle with over a range of cultural and political issues. The joy of reading Ngugi's essays is that they serve as a theoretical elaboration of themes and topics akin to his narrative. If Writers in Politics (1981), and Barrel of a Pen (1983) essays seek to question the colonial traditions of English and Englishness inherited at independence, Decolonising the Mind (1986), and Moving the Centre (1993) push the debate to its limits by insisting that the roots to Africa's freedom lay in the articulation of a new idiom of nationalism that would liberate the African identities from the prison house of European languages and cultures. The project should not only involve the privileging of African languages in the making of African cultures, but also the struggle for the realignment of global forces such that societies, which have been confined to the margins will gradually move to the centre, to become not just consumers but producers of global culture. It is the denial of the cultural space by the postcolonial state tyranny and global imperialism that Ngugi elaborates on in Penpoints, Gunpoint, and Dreams. Here the culture of violence and silence that has come to define the postcolonial state; the state's desire to saturate the public space with its propaganda, is counterpoised against a radically redemptive art that seeks to erect a new regime of truth by reclaiming and colonising those spaces through the barrel of the pen. In his most eloquent collection of essays, symbolically entitled Moving the Centre, Ngugi draws attention to the effect of the colonial archive in arrogating what constitutes the real historical subject to the imperial centre. When Ngugi calls for moving of the centre, he is in essence trying to suggest that in terms of history and discursive knowledges, the West has always positioned itself as the true self — the centre — while the empire remains the Other and on the periphery. Indeed, one of the legacies of the colonial encounter is a notion of history as 'the few privileged monuments' of achievement, which serves either to arrogate 'history' wholesale to the imperial centre or to erase it from the colonial archive and produce, especially in the Empire or the so-called New World Cultures, a condition of 'history-lessness', of 'no visible history'. Both notions are part of the imperial myth of history because history is defined by what is central, not what is peripheral and those not central to an assumed teleology or belief system, are without history. It seems to me that even a superficial reading of Ngugi's narrative and his critical essays over the years, point to a conscious project of transforming our inherited notions of history, especially the position of the colonial subjects as inscribed within imperial discursive practices. If the imperial narrative attempted to fix history and to read the empires history as the history of the other, by making reference to its set of signs located in its cultural landscape, Ngugi's position is that the history of Africa need not be contingent upon the imperial allegorising. Allegory here is used to mean a way of representing, of speaking for the 'other', especially in the enterprise of imperialism. Whatever the ideological drifts and shifts in his body of work, Ngugi's fundamental belief is in the restorative agency embedded in all human cultures — the return of the other to the self. This is what he celebrates in his theory of globalectics — a theory that seek seeks to destabilise the privileging Western ways of knowing and instead celebrates those many streams of knowledge, regardless of their origins, as humanities collective experience. The creation of a humanistic wholeness and healing, has been at the core of his poetics over the years. The return to memoirs over the last decade or so was perhaps his last attempt to lay bare his soul and spirit; his life history as fragments of many forces — a rich tapestry into a life crafted around complex and layered forces of family and larger biographical universe. As a person, Ngugi was profoundly warm and down-to-earth, and always carried himself around with a deep sense of humility and ease, not to mention his infectious laughter and humour. He was simply ordinary — a man of the people. May his legacy live on and his soul rest in peace until we meet again in the land our ancestors. James Ogude, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures. Professor and Senior Research Fellow, and author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, South Africa
The Citizen
4 hours ago
- The Citizen
‘Using k-word is illegal': Northern Cape teacher fired for racist outburst loses reinstatement battle
He was dismissed last year after being found guilty at a disciplinary hearing of calling two African pupils the k-word. A teacher in the Northern Cape has failed in his attempt to return to work after being dismissed for using a racial slur against two black pupils. Gerhard Louw took the Northern Cape department of education to the Education Labour Relations Council, arguing that his dismissal was unfair. At the time, Louw was employed at Technical High School Kimberley, where he taught technology and automotive subjects. He was dismissed in November last year after being found guilty at a disciplinary hearing of calling two African pupils the k-word. The arbitration proceedings were held on 8 April and 22 May. Pupils testify after Northern Cape teacher appeals dismissal over k-word During the hearings, the provincial department called two pupils to testify. The first witness, a Grade 12 at the time of the incident, said she was among seven girls who were transferred from the Northern Cape High School hostel to the Technical High School hostel on the evening of 23 June 2024. Upon their arrival, Louw – who was one of the supervisors at the hostel – emerged from his residence and expressed displeasure at the girls being relocated to 'his hostel'. She testified that Louw conveyed his frustration to their driver, Mr Tshabalala. After Tshabalala returned to the vehicle, Louw allegedly approached her and another pupil and accused them of tarnishing the school's reputation, then called them the k-word. ALSO READ: Racism in schools: born-free generation faces lingering inequality challenges She said that both she and the other pupil were shocked, as they had done or said nothing to provoke such language. She also indicated that a third pupil might have overheard the incident. The pupil added during cross-examination that they reported the incident to their families and the hostel's centre manager instead of Tshabalala, who was the groundsman and head of security. Tshabalala later advised them to report the matter to the authorities once schools reopened. The second witness, who was the third pupil mentioned, confirmed the first witness's testimony and added that Louw had yelled at the girls in the presence of his wife. Northern Cape teacher denies using racial slur Louw testified as the sole witness in his own defence. He stated that at the time of the incident, the hostel was occupied by boys attending winter school and that he felt it was inappropriate for girls to stay there as well. The teacher claimed to have warned the girls that they would be asked to leave if they did not behave. Louw insisted he could not recall using the k-word. He also contended that neither school management nor Tshabalala informed him of the allegations and he only became aware of the matter weeks later when he was served with legal documents. READ MORE: Eastern Cape teacher fails to get job back after being fired for fabricating marks of 200 matric pupils According to Louw, he never saw the girls again after the incident. During cross-examination, Louw admitted to being angry during the interaction, but again denied using the racial slur. He also said he could have called his wife and a second person to support his version of events, as they were present during the conversation. Louw asked for reinstatement on the grounds of what he claimed was unfair dismissal. Arbitrator upholds dismissal In a 5 June ruling, the arbitrator found that the testimonies of the two pupils were credible and consistent, making them reliable witnesses. 'A mere denial by the applicant is not enough to sustain a plea of not guilty when faced by allegations of this nature. 'The usage of the word 'k****r' is not just illegal and degrading to the humanity and dignity of the learners, but it reminds us all of the horrible past of our country,' the award reads. The arbitrator also pointed out that Louw agreed with almost every detail of the pupils' accounts, except the use of the racial slur. 'If the applicant was really truthful about this, surely his wife and Mrs van der Lith would not have deemed it troublesome to come to this council and to corroborate his version.' Describing Louw's conduct as 'despicable', the arbitrator concluded that the teacher being fired was an appropriate sanction and 'a matter of last resort'. Therefore, the dismissal was 'substantively fair'. 'In this democratic South Africa, people like the applicant are anti-transformation and should not be allowed near children and the good citizenry of our society.' NOW READ: Can you get fired for being racist? Here is what employers and employees need to know
IOL News
5 hours ago
- IOL News
Tragic shooting at Cape Town taxi rank claims four lives amid ongoing conflict
Police and crime scene investigators at the Mfuleni taxi rank after a tragic shooting claimed four lives and left three others injured this morning. SAPS urges anyone with information to assist in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Image: Henk Kruger / Independent Media Desperate families stood outside the police cordon, anxiously awaiting to identify the bodies of their loved ones, who had been gunned down in an attack at a Cape Town taxi rank. Many arrived in large numbers as the police combed the scene for clues. One woman explained that she had been told her husband was among the four victims killed at the Mfuleni taxi rank on Monday at around 6am. 'I called my husband's number several times. It rang but wasn't answered, and that's when I knew he had been killed.' Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ Four Codeta members were killed and three were injured, including a commuter. Image: Henk Kruger / Independent Media The family requested to see his body, in accordance with their cultural practices, to send off his spirit before it was removed from the scene. However, the police requested that they wait until the area was cleared to avoid further chaos. Major-General Bongani Maqashalala, deputy police commissioner for the detection division, confirmed that two gunmen had stormed a Cape Organisation for the Democratic Taxi Association (Codeta) office, killing four men and injuring three others. 'One of the three injured is a commuter. We believe the suspects used high-calibre firearms, as evidenced by the crime scene. We have since increased police presence to ensure the safety of commuters.' A distraught woman is comforted by the police as she tries to run to her shot brother at Mfuleni taxi rank in Cape Town. Image: Henk Kruger / Independent Media Maqashalala suggested that the motive behind the attack was related to the ongoing conflict within the taxi industry. 'Codeta has a permit to operate in Somerset West but does not have a taxi rank there. We believe this is causing tension with the Cape Amalgamated Taxi Association (Cata),' he said. The situation is being monitored by the Department of Mobility. The police have announced a reward of R100,000 for any information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. Codeta chairperson Nceba Enge explained that the association had previously written to the MEC of Mobility on August 29, 2024, notifying them of partial services on the M18 route, as Cata operators had prohibited their return with passengers. 'Despite a notice issued on June 3, 2025, to resume operations, upon doing so, Cata operators blocked legal operations, leading to a meeting scheduled for next week. Unfortunately, the dispute escalated into violence, resulting in this tragic loss of life.' Codeta has called on the Western Cape government to strengthen the regulatory framework to protect both taxi operators and commuters. They also urged for enhanced safety measures to prevent further incidents. The shooting occurred just across the road from the Mfuleni satellite police station. 'The conduct of the attackers showed this was no random act; it was planned. The police station was operational at the time, and we had been monitoring the Somerset West route. This remains one of the motives we are investigating,' Maqashalala added. In response, police have deployed additional officers around taxi ranks and have identified potential threats. Maqashalala also urged taxi association members to remain calm. 'We request their cooperation, and we are scheduled to meet with the Department of Mobility. To the community, we ask that they come forward with any information that could assist us in the investigation.' Western Cape Police Oversight and Community Safety MEC Anroux Marais expressed deep concern over the violence. 'It is devastating to see such incidents in our communities. We've been working closely with the SAPS and LEAP services to apprehend the perpetrators and stabilise the industry. The illegal firearms on our streets are also a major concern. We all know that the SAPS is understaffed, and that is why we have been calling for the devolution of policing powers to the province."
