Family of Five, 8-Year-Old Girl Brutally Stabbed to Death on South African Farm

 

The White Cross Monument near Polokwane contains over 4000 crosses for murdered farmers

A family of five was brutally stabbed to death on their farm outside Harrismith in the Free State, South Africa. Their bodies were found by a traditional healer Saturday morning. The youngest victim was an eight-year-old girl. In a sad twist, the family’s farm was named “Toekoms” (Future).

“The bodies of a 47-year-old man with multiple wounds and that of a woman in her early 40s, who was also stabbed multiple times, were found next to each other,” News 24 reports.  “The bodies of a boy aged 16 and a girl estimated to be eight years old were found in the same room. The fifth deceased – a 23-year-old man – was found on the floor in another room. He had stab wounds all over his body.”

In the first seven months of 2021, there have been 165 farm attacks and 24 farm murders in South Africa, according to The Rome Research Institute of South Africa.

“Farm attacks continue to be a source of grave concern because of the excessive violence that regularly is used during these crimes,” AfriForum said in a statement May  12, 2021. “In  22% of the attacks, victims were brutally tortured by burning them with irons, by battering or kicking them to death or by repeatedly stabbing them with a sharp object.”

For the period 1 January to 31 December 2020, on average, a farmer was murdered every 4.7 days in South Africa. There were 77 farm murders and 446 farm attacks, an attack every 1.2 days.

AfriForum spokesman Ernst Roets, author of the definitive “Kill the Boer: Government Complicity In South Africa’s Brutal Farm Murders“, did a fact check on violent crime in South Africa: Over the 26 year time frame since the ANC took power in South Africa, 527,534 people have been murdered, said Roets. “That’s 60 murders per day… More than the number of American soldiers killed in World Wars 1 and 2 combined.”

Over the same time frame, there have been 1,479,142 sexual offences reported, or 169 sexual offences per day in the country of 60 million. There were 5,574,649 serious assaults (636 per day), 6,707,282 residential burglaries (766 per day), 2,021,397 car and motorcycle thefts (231 per day), 3.448,776 drug crimes (394 per day), 3,371,121 cases of property damage (385 per day), and 134,747 kidnappings (15 per day) in one country.

“South Africa is sick, and the problem is not only violent crime. Violent crime is the symptom and not the problem.”

“What we have also learned here in the Southern tip of Africa is that we cannot be dependent on government… That includes even keeping people safe”, Roets said. “But we have learned that well-organized communities who take control of their safety, who are vigilant, who establish communication lines, who organize community safety structure, who drive patrols, who communicate with their neighbors and work with the police as far as possible, are able to keep themselves safe. We have serious problems in this country. But we are learning the lessons that the rest of the world has yet to learn.”