On the night of 5 March, on South Africa’s rugged West Coast, a farmer Hugo Louw was beaten to the brink of death. The attackers left him with severe head trauma and were later found hiding in nearby bushes, their clothes stained with blood.
The following day, hundreds of kilometres away in the historic town of Swellendam, two elderly Dutch tourists staying on a guest farm were tied up, robbed and assaulted, suffering injuries that saw them rushed to hospital.
While those outside of South Africa may see these as isolated crimes in a distant and violent land, for many in the country’s rural communities, they form part of a brutal and relentless pattern. Between 1994 and 2020, South Africa experienced roughly 13,000 farm attacks, resulting in the deaths of around 2,000 white farmers, alongside significant numbers of non-white farmers and farm workers.
According to the Western Cape province’s Minister of Agriculture, Economic Development and Tourism, Ivan Meyer, “each assault on a farmer or agricultural worker is an attack on food security, the agricultural economy and the wellbeing of rural communities.” Furthermore, the Western Cape province alone welcomed 11 million tourists in 2025, many drawn to its vineyards, guest farms and rural landscapes. Farm attacks threaten not only farmers and farm workers, but also tourists and the wider rural economies that depend on them.
This is a crisis that threatens long-term food security in South Africa, yet rather than implementing policies that seriously address these problems, the South African government has adopted a policy of denial. In 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa told Bloomberg that “there are no killings of farmers or white farmers in South Africa.” Rather than challenging these falsehoods, many in the South African domestic media simply amplify them.
Beyond mere words, the policy of denial has had direct policy implications. In the early 2000s, the government dismantled the rural Commando System, a network of civilian farm protection units that had operated in South Africa’s countryside. Ostensibly disbanded because of its association with the apartheid era, the move came despite warnings that it would leave rural communities dangerously exposed.
At the same time, the South African government continues to pursue radical legislation that seeks to undermine private property rights. The recently enacted Expropriation Act allows the state to seize private property with “nil compensation,” while proposed legislation such as the Equitable Access to Land seeks to bring landownership in line with the country’s demographics using race as a basis.
What makes the situation even more disturbing is the political rhetoric that surrounds it. The far-left Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, regularly lead crowds in chanting “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.” The chant is accompanied by gestures mimicking the firing of rifles. While many farmers see this as explicit incitement to violence and even genocide, South Africa’s so-called “Equality Court” ruled in 2022 that the chant did not constitute hate speech - a decision upheld by the Constitutional Court in 2025.
Increasingly, what has been treated as normal political theatre in South Africa is beginning to rightly provoke international outrage. The administration of US President Donald Trump has publicly pressured the South African government to condemn “Kill the Boer”, declare farm murders a priority crime category and reconsider its land policies. President Ramaphosa himself was invited to the White House in May last year where he was confronted by Trump himself on these issues. Yet rather than compromise, the South African government has sought to frame these reasonable demands as attacks on their “national sovereignty".
Sovereignty comes with responsibilities. A state that cannot - or will not - protect certain classes of its citizens will ultimately undermine its legitimacy. It is therefore no surprise that there are growing numbers of people in South Africa discussing alternatives to the existing political order. Across the country, Afrikaner civil society organisations such as AfriForum have created extensive farm security networks, while in the Western Cape - the only province not governed by the ANC - politicians have increasingly called for greater policing powers to be devolved from the central government.
Either the government confronts the reality of violence and hate speech threatening its rural communities - or the South African political system itself will have to adapt to this new reality, as communities driven by necessity rather than ideology begin to self-determine their own futures.
No state can indefinitely ask its citizens to live under a government that refuses to defend them.
This article was initially written at the request of German newspaper Junge Freiheit.
