Dropping Like Flies

BURNT with hot irons, sliced open with pangas, thrown into a bath of boiling water, raped in front of their children, beaten and kidnapped – this is the terror SA farmers face.

- Vanessa Papas

TREVOR REES was a proud farm owner. He had worked incredibly hard to maintain his small holding in the southern Drakensburg. When his dog was killed last month, Trevor grew even more worried about security on his farm, knowing full well how attacks on farmers had escalated out of control. It’s believed he knew ‘they’ were there. He’d heard the buzz of his tracker as they tried to ram down his wall and he ran and hid in the cupboard but the criminals found him. For two days, Rees was tortured at the hands of his attackers. Police say it appeared the men had used a set of pliers to pinch his skin and poured bleach down his throat. They beat him to a pulp and shot him twice. When Rees’ employees found him, he was lying in a pool of blood, desperately clinging to life. Sadly, his injuries were too severe and he died in hospital a few days later. 

Rees’ death is shocking, but in reality, similar incidences have been occurring at a dramatic rate across farms all over South Africa. In the last two months alone there seems to have been a peak of farm attacks. Among those who have lost their lives are Gavin Carter, who was shot to death in his farm in Underberg, Ryno Janse van Rensburg, who was found dead by a co-worker on his small holding near Bela Bela, and an entire family killed – Louis Smuts, his wife Belinda, and his parents, Gert and Paulina, found shot in their heads at their farmhouse outside Balfour in Mpumalanga.