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WS MoreOrLess: Genocide in South Africa?
00:09:37
It is claimed white South Africans are being systematically killed because of the of...
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
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Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts
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hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander, listener. Liane has emailed us from the Czech Republic with a question about her country of birth, South Africa.
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I'm very worried about the claim often made in some Afrikaans circles that a genocide is being carried out against white South Africans or that white farmers are systematically being killed. Personally, I cannot see it, but a very intelligent friend I know seems to believe this. I have tried to look at the statistics, but it is beyond my comprehension. Could you perhaps help Liane emailed us
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before the death of Nelson Mandela, but some reports suggest the former South African president's death has stoked the of these fears, felt particularly in some right wing Afrikaans circles. One of the most vocal people holding this view is the South African musician Steve Hoffmeier. Here he is being interviewed during a march opposing violence against white people in October.
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Any group in South Africa has the right, constitutional right to mobilize and count their own graves. This time it's this group. They feel themselves targeted. You can't take that paranoia away from them. If it's based on figures or something that they are not used to, we are not used to this mortality rate.
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The statistic Steve Hoffmeier's argued in popular Facebook and blog posts shows white South Africans are, in his words, being killed like flies.
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The problem and the fundamental flaw in his arguments is that he's taking a very race based view of crime in South Africa.
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Julian Rodomire, editor of fact checking website AfricaCheck, which has been trying to get to the truth of this matter, one of the claims made is that the number of white South Africans killed by black South Africans would fill a soccer stadium. Rodomare couldn't track down all of Hoffmeer's sources, but he thinks the claim is in part based on a paper written 10 years ago by Rob McCafferty from the Conservative Cape Town lobby group United Christian Action.
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McCafferty had looked at the crime research that has been done in South Africa, added up the numbers of murders that had taken place over various years, and aggregated 44 years of murder numbers to reach an average of 7,000 murders a year under apartheid and a much higher murder rate in post apartheid South Africa. The fundamental problem there though is that McCafferty despite stating this in his research, that factors such as population growth differentials in time periods should be taken into account, and that it would be unfair to make a comparison if you didn't take those factors into account, then went ahead and did exactly that. He didn't take population growth into account. And the raw numbers look a lot more frightening than the reality. If you break it down with the international standard of looking at murder rates per 100,000 of the population.
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And if you look at murder rates per 100,000 population, Rodemeyer says, you see that the murder rate was about 20 killings per 100,000 people in 1950, about 32 in 1970, as high as 62 in 1994 when Mandela was elected, but 10 years later had dropped to 43 and and is now about 31 per 100,000 population, the same level as in 1970. But as Rodemeyer himself knows, even these calculations can't be relied upon. Under apartheid, the crime in some of the areas where black people lived wasn't included in the national figures because they'd been set up as semi autonomous homelands by the apartheid government. Senior researcher at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria, Johann Berger explains.
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South Africa was divided into a number of self governing states, or bantustans or homelands as they were called. These states had their own police agencies and all of them kept their own crime records. Those crimes were not included in the central crime database of the South African police that were responsible for white South Africa. And that is what makes it so difficult, if not impossible, to really compare the situation that existed at that time with the current situation.
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So the murder rate in apartheid South Africa could have been higher than the old official statistics suggest. These days the national crime figures are more reliable. But there's still a problem for anyone trying to work out how many white murder victims there are. Race isn't noted in official death records. So is there anything we can say for sure about how many white murder victims there are in South Africa?
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All we have is the comparison that was done a few years ago by the police themselves when they looked at just under 1,400 murder case dockets that was representative of murders committed throughout South Africa. Almost 87% of those murders were committed against black people, and less than 2% of those murders were white victims. It's difficult to see how anyone could argue that genocide is aimed at wiping out whites in South Africa.
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So the police survey showed that in about 2% of murder cases, the victims were white. White people make up about 9% of the South African population. If there were a genocide going on, you'd expect to see the percentage of white murder victim to be higher than that of the percentage of white people in the general population. In fact, the statistics show that you're most likely to be a murder victim in South Africa if you're a young black man. Johann Berger.
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Again, our murder rate is about four and a half times that of the international average. But about 80% of our murders happen between black people themselves. In other words, both victims and perpetrators are young black men.
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The fact that the perpetrators of crime are also most likely to be young black men is why the white genocide rumour persists. Berger believes so. There's no statistical evidence that there is a genocide being carried out against white people in South Africa. But what about the claim made about a subset of that population, the white farmers? Are they being systematically killed for historical reasons? The vast majority of commercial farmers are white. And farmers face a murder rate that's much higher than that faced by the general population, according to Johann Berger.
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If you look at the real numbers in South Africa last year, something like just over 16,200 people were murdered, and only relatively speaking, only 39 farmers were murdered. But if you express this in terms of ratios, then the picture changes completely. Then the average murder rate for South Africans is just over 31,000. But for farmers it is 120 per hundred thousand. If you look at the murder rate for police officers, the murder rate is approximately 54 per 100,000. But for farmers it is 120. So it does show you that farms and farmers are particularly vulnerable to attacks by criminals.
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But are farmers more at risk than the general population because farms are in dangerous areas or because the farmers are white? Johann Berger thinks the research suggests that these people are not being targeted because of their race. Of the 39 farmers killed in 2012, all but three were white, and yet that is in proportion with the racial split. Berger believes most farmers are white, so you'd expect most who are killed to be white. A survey carried out on behalf of the Minister of Police 10 years ago showed that sexual crime is also high in farming areas, he says, and that black women are most often the victims of this sort of crime. But however you look at the numbers, the crime rate in South Africa is terribly high. I asked Julian Rodemeyer why.
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I don't think there's any real research that has successfully managed to put a finger on the exact reasoning for the violence behind some crimes. But certainly South Africa is a country that is skewed by massive disparities in wealth. It's a country that is still battling with the historical legacy of apartheid and the massive damage that apartheid did. You know, here was a system that ruthlessly set out to divide people, and we still grappling with the fact that many, many people don't have access to the economic wealth of the country, don't have access to proper facilities, don't live in communities where they have the riches that certain communities in South Africa do have.
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Julian Rodemeyer of AfricaCheck, if there are any numbers you'd like us to have a look at, do email us. Our address is more or less@bc.co. and you can download this program and previous editions at our website, bbcworldservice.com more or less
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