Dispatches From The Front

A low-intensity civil war is grinding on just north of Pretoria.

- Wessel Ebersohn

A LOW-INTENSITY CIVIL WAR IS being waged just north of Pretoria. Between the dusty business district of Bon Accord and the continually spreading townships of Hammanskraal and Soshanguve, farmers and plot-holders are struggling to hold on to their land, while shack dwellers and other opportunists try to take possession of them.

One of the recent victims of the district’s undeclared war was Johnny Moloi*, a nephew of the owner of the plot on which he lived.

Usually in farm attacks the aggressors are black and the victims white, but this was not the case on this occasion. Johnny’s uncle, who bought his plot a few years ago, is one of the growing number of black owners of plots in the area. Moloi lived in a house on the plot while he studied information technology. No meaningful farming was being conducted. He was simply the caretaker.

The attackers left his dead body in the living room of what is a modest middle-class home. He had received a blow to the head with a blunt instrument and was stabbed many times. His hands and feet were bound with iron bailing wire, his wrists and the Achilles tendons of both legs had been severed, and he appeared to have been sodomised.

The reason for his death is a matter for conjecture. Some locals say he had a disagreement with Mozambican immigrants and that the people from that country are always the most militant, so it must have been them. White people from surrounding areas say the reason is simply that the young man’s family are property owners and the killers are probably shack dwellers who resent their relative wealth.