‘We are an endangered species’

The 4-meter (13-foot) electric steel gates covered in nails open as farmer Marthinus drives by in his pickup truck. Cameras placed at the entrance follow his every move, while bundles of barbed wire surround the farm located in the rural Free State province in the heart of South Africa.

“It feels like a prison,” he says as the gates close behind him. “If they want to come and kill us they can. At least it will take some time to get to me.”

The fear of being attacked is very real for the white Afrikaner, who runs a farm with his wife and two young daughters. He didn’t want us to use his full name.

His grandfather and step-grandfather were killed in attacks on the farm, 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 post with a rope around his neck.

Martinus says he couldn’t risk it with his family, and in February, they applied for refugee status in the United States.

He says: “I am ready to do this in order to have a better life for my wife and children. Because I do not want to be slaughtered and hung on a pole.”

“Our African people are an endangered species.”

Not all white South Africans agree that they are being targeted, and black farmers are also victims of the country’s high crime rate.

It is estimated that thousands of Afrikaners – most of them white descendants of early European settlers – have begun the long process of applying for refugee status in the United States. Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order Earlier this year, although the numbers were not made public.

Despite his announcement in October that the United States would reduce its annual refugee intake from 125,000 to 7,500, Trump has made resettling Africans a priority.

A presidential document published in the Official Daily Journal of the US Government He stated that those accepted would be “primarily” Afrikaners in South Africa and “other victims of unlawful or unjust discrimination in their homelands.”

For Martinus, this is the way out.

“I would give my whole life just so that my wife and children would be safe. Do you know that I live in fear? No one deserves a life like this.”

Violent crime in South Africa is endemic.

The latest crime figures released in November for the first quarter of 2025 show there are an average of 63 murders each day. Although this represents a decrease from the same period in 2024, South Africa’s homicide rate is still one of the highest in the world.

Black farmers are also victims.

On the outskirts of Vicksburg, a town at the foot of Mount Empirani in the Free State, Thabo Makhubo owns a small farm of 237 acres (96 hectares), where he raises sheep and cattle. Like Martinus, the 45-year-old says attacks on farms are his biggest problem.

“They are young men,” he says. “They are armed and dangerous. Whether they lose their lives or take yours, they will take those cattle.”

Thabo believes that all farmers in the province, regardless of their ethnicity, are at risk of attack.

“This is all of us. I could be attacked today – it could happen to any one of us.”

Police response rates to crime reports are very low, something police here acknowledge but have publicly said they are working on.

On the other hand, 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. This is more than the police and army combined.

Many farmers, like Morgan Barrett, who is white, hire their own security guards, if they can afford it. He owns a 2,000-acre farm that has been in his family for six generations.

Wearing a thick jacket and hat, he gets into his car to start a night patrol. Between Morgan and his neighbors, they go out almost every night. Six of his cattle had been stolen the previous week.

“You can call the police, and they may arrive two or three hours later, by which time the thieves will have fled,” he says.

Like Thabo, he does not believe he is being targeted because of the color of his skin.

“I don’t agree with that narrative that attacks in this area only target white people.”

“If they think a black man has 20,000 rand ($1,200; £880) in his locker, they will attack him just as quickly as they would attack a white man with 20,000 rand.” [rand] In the safe.”

When asked what he thought of people claiming there was “white genocide” in South Africa, he said he believed they “don’t have a real understanding of what genocide is.”

“What happened in Rwanda is genocide. What is happening to white farmers is very bad, but I don’t think you can call it genocide.”

Trump repeated widely disputed claims of genocide against white farmers, while South African-born billionaire Elon Musk accused South African politicians of “actively promoting” genocide.

The government here has strongly denied that Afrikaners and other white South Africans are persecuted.

The country does not publish crime figures based on race, but in May, in order to debunk the allegations, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu provided details of farm killings.

Mchunu said that between October 2024 and March 2025, 18 murders had occurred on farms across South Africa. Sixteen of the victims were black, while two were white.

Despite these statistics, the theory that white people are persecuted because of their race, previously an idea limited to far-right groups in South Africa, continues to spread into the mainstream.

Systematic racial oppression is something black South Africans, who make up more than 80% of the population, have faced for decades.

Under the apartheid regime, which lasted for 46 years from 1948, the white minority government legally segregated people based on the color of their skin.

This law was based on discriminatory legislation that already existed.

The right to vote, buy land, and work in skilled jobs was reserved for whites. Millions of black South Africans were removed from their lands and forced to live in segregated neighborhoods where school education was restricted to maintain the racial hierarchy.

The regime was imposed through violence and repression.

Although apartheid ended in 1994, deep racial disparities still exist more than 30 years later.

The post-apartheid government introduced affirmative action policies to try to address some of the issues, but they were criticized by some for their ineffectiveness and the introduction of “race quotas”.

However, 72% of private farmland remains in white hands, according to the government’s 2017 land audit report. This is despite whites making up just 7.3% of the population.

The agrarian reform programme, which is based on the principle of willing seller and willing buyer, has barely moved things forward. New law this year The law gives the state the authority to confiscate some privately owned lands without compensating their owners, but this only happens in rare cases, according to legal experts who spoke to the BBC.

While white farmers own more private land than any other group in the country, victims of agricultural attacks span across all races.

The political spotlight is on white farmers, but crime and violence on the land is indiscriminate.

In Mqeleng, a town on the outskirts of Vicksburg where black South Africans were forcibly relocated during apartheid, Nthabiseng Nthathakana owns a small general store.

On January 15 this year, a robbery occurred while her husband, Thembani Nkgangu, was closing his shop. He managed to escape to a neighbor’s house, but his attackers threatened to kill him if they opened the door.

Nthabiseng found Thembani’s body on the ground outside.

“There were bullets everywhere and stab wounds,” she says. “They stabbed him and hit him with stones.”

No one has been arrested for his murder.

Nthabiseng is now the sole breadwinner for her four children.

“Children ask questions: Mama, who killed Daddy?” “And you don’t know what to say,” she says.

A two-hour drive from Vicksburg, Martinus and his family have just discovered that their asylum application to the United States has been successful.

They are busy planning the big move, waiting to find out when their flights will be allocated.

He confirms that whites are being persecuted in South Africa.

“A lot of people think it’s political 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 am truly grateful that I have moved away from this feeling of fear. I thank God Almighty for answering our prayers.”

Additional reporting by Iza Lee Jacobson and Tamasin Ford