Violence besets rural South Africa

Second of two parts

BOEKENHOUTSKLOOF, South Africa — Jacob van der Westhuizen, 74, didn’t suspect a thing when a stranger came up to tell him a small deer, a duiker, was tangled in the fence down by his creek.

He left his work by the small house where he and his wife, Anna, had raised four children and followed the man past the old windmill, beyond the giant jacaranda tree and down through the wild cosmos that bloom in the autumn.

“He didn’t take the dogs. He had no weapon,” his widow recounted in her native Afrikaans, a derivation of Dutch spoken only in South Africa.

A short time later, the stranger returned to the house and asked for a knife, saying the duiker was dead and the men wanted to skin it.

“I gave him the knife. Then he attacked me. He wanted 30 rand [about $5], but all I had in my purse was 18 rand. Then I saw the blood on his pants,” Mrs. van der Westhuizen said.

“Then I knew I was in trouble, and I ran out. I saw my husband standing by that fence post.” Mr. van der Westhuizen had been beaten badly.

His death came a year ago, on the cattle ranch where he had been born, where the more familiar predator is a jackal or a leopard, while his wife was still waiting for the ambulance.

“Jacob was beaten with a stone. He was unrecognizable. His face was covered in blood. He died in my arms,” said Louis Meintjes, a neighbor and local crime-watch leader.

“Jacob was known as a good man. A tribal chief traveled [18 miles] the next day to tell us the man who did this would be caught and punished.”

A man named Kwa Ndebele indeed was captured and confessed to the killing. The crime had netted him less than $3, a pair of pants, a pair of shoes and a wristwatch.

In the 10 years since the transition from apartheid to democracy, almost 1,700 farmers, nearly all white, have been killed on South African farms.

Many of the killings were unspeakably brutal. Rape is common. One wheelchair-bound elderly woman was scalded with boiling water until she died. And the number of “farm attacks” — where no one was killed — number in the tens of thousands.

South Africa’s crime wave has become as frightening in the country as it is in the city. Men and women alike carry weapons full time. And many are abandoning the farms where they lived for generations.

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