The 4m-high (13ft) electric steel gates, capped with spikes, creak open as Marthinus, a farmer, drives through in his pick-up truck. Cameras positioned at the entrance track his every move, while reams of barbed wire surround the farm in the rural Free State province in the heart of South Africa.”It feels like a prison,” he says as the gates clank shut behind him. “If they want to come and kill us they can.
At least it will take them time to get to me.”The fear of being attacked is very real for the white Afrikaner, who manages a farm with his wife and two young daughters. He did not want us to use his full name.His grandfather and his wife’s grandfather were both murdered in farm attacks, and he lives a two-hour drive from where the body of 21-year-old farm manager Brendan Horner was discovered five years ago, tied to a pole, with a rope around his neck.Marthinus says he can’t take a chance with his own family and, in February, they applied for refugee status in the US.”I’m prepared to do that to get a better life for my wife and children. Because I don’t want to be slaughtered and be hanged on a pole,” he says.”Our Afrikaner people are an endangered species.”Not all white South Africans agree that they’re being targeted and black farmers are also victims of the country’s high crime rate.
It’s estimated that thousands of Afrikaners – who are mostly white descendants of early European settlers – have begun the lengthy process of applying for refugee status in the USsince President Donald Trump signed an executive orderearlier this year, although the figures haven’t been made public.Despite announcing in October that the US would reduce its yearly intake of refugees from 125,000 to 7,500, Trump has made the resettlement of Afrikaners a priority.A presidential document posted to the official daily journal of the US governmentstated that those accepted would “primarily” be Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.For Marthinus it’s a way out.”I will give my whole life just so that my wife and my kids can be safe. Living in fear, you know? Nobody deserves a life like that.”Violent crime in South Africa is endemic.The latest crime figures released in November for the first quarter of 2025 show there was an average of 63 murders every day.
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While this was a decrease on the same period in 2024, South Africa’s homicide rate remains one of the highest in the world. Black farmers are also victims.On the outskirts of Ficksburg, a town at the foot of Free State’s Imperani Mountain, Thabo Makopo has a small farm of 237 acres (96 hectares), where he tends sheep and cattle. Like Marthinus, the 45-year-old says farm attacks are his biggest problem.”They are young men.
They are armed and dangerous. Whether they will lose their life or take yours, they are going to take those livestock,” he says.Thabo believes all farmers in the province, regardless of their race, are at risk of attack.”It’s all of us. I could be attacked today – it could happen to any of us.”Police response rates to reports of crime are notoriously low, something the police here acknowledge but have said publicly that they are working on.In the meantime, South Africans are becoming increasingly dependent on private security.
According to the official regulatory body for the private security sector in South Africa, there are more than 630,000 active security guards. That is more than the police and army combined. In Meqheleng, a township on the outskirts of Ficksburg where black South Africans were forcibly relocated during the apartheid regime, Nthabiseng Nthathakana owns a small general store.On 15 January this year, there was a robbery while her husband, Thembani Ncgango, was closing up.
He managed to run to a neighbour’s house but his attackers threatened to kill them if they opened the door.Nthabiseng found Thembani’s body on the ground outside.”He had bullets everywhere and stab wounds. They had stabbed him and hit him with rocks,” she says.No-one has been arrested for his murder.Nthabiseng is now the sole provider for her four children.”The kids ask questions: ‘Mama who killed dad?’ And you don’t know what to say,” she says.Two hour’s drive from Ficksburg, Marthinus and his family have just found out their refugee application to the US has been successful.They’re busy planning the big move, waiting to hear when their flights will be allocated.He maintains white people are being persecuted in South Africa.”A lot of people believe that it’s a political thing to get rid of us as white farmers or white people in this country, so they can have this land for themselves and this place for themselves.”I’m really grateful to be getting away from this feeling of fear. I’m thankful to almighty God for answering our prayers.”Additional reporting by Isa-Lee Jacobson and Tamasin Ford
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