Crime in South Africa More Vexing and Vicious

Every tree, every rock and blade of grass on the farm of Cornelius and Olive Lourens is saturated with sad memories. They died terribly. The 78-year-old Cornelius, apparently ambushed first, was savagely beaten to death. His wife, 79, was tied to a chair and strangled with an electrical cord.

Their son, Ian, described his father as “an atypical farmer” and “a soft touch.” His mother was a gentle soul and a champion of the underdog. They loved the slice of the Hekpoort Valley in central South Africa that had been in the family since the 19th century.

But the elder Lourens had a complex relationship with his farmhand, Daniel Ncube. He had dismissed Ncube many times for pilfering or not showing up for days on end. But he’d forgiven the worker and re-employed him. Over the years he had lent Ncube nearly 100,000 rand (close to $15,000), not expecting its return.

But after a security door key was taken and later returned, and after money started disappearing from the house, Lourens dismissed Ncube again in January. Two months later, Lourens and his wife were dead. Ncube’s son, Ben, 18, confessed to the killings.

“I don’t know if it was revenge for his dad or to get money for drugs, or whether it was just pure evil intent,” said the couple’s daughter, Denise Rogers.

Like many killings in South Africa, the level of violence and the motive are difficult to fathom. The debate on violent crime in South Africa, so often colored by race, statistical manipulation, excessive secrecy and political rhetoric, is a part of how a still-divided country sees itself, a decade after the first post-apartheid elections in 1994.

Murders, farm attacks, child rape and violent robberies are the most disturbing crimes, but even after many inquiries and reports, there is no consensus on why violence in South Africa is so high.

Alarm about crime is almost universal, according to the 2002 Global Attitudes survey, which found that 96% of South Africans see crime as a “very big problem.” Three-quarters of people feel unsafe walking near their houses in the daytime, according to a survey of nearly 5,000 people across the country in 2003 by the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.

“There is no one satisfactory explanation for South Africa’s high levels of crime -- especially the high levels of violent crime,” said a committee of inquiry set up by the government to investigate the rise in killings of farmers and farmworkers last year.

Ian Lourens, the son of the slain farmers, said the poison of apartheid would leave a legacy of crime for generations.

“I think there’s no doubt that the damage that has been done under apartheid is going to take generations to heal,” he said. “That legacy of the denial of education, health facilities, opportunities, the denial of self-respect is working its way through the system right now.

“It’s a fact of South African life. There are marginalized people, and we are not creating jobs. But you have got to deal with it seriously. It’s an issue which you can’t just wish away,” he said.

Crime was one of the most contentious issues in recent elections. The government of President Thabo Mbeki boasts that the number of homicides has dropped since the early 1990s, but that was an era of intense ethnic and political conflict, and those killings were included in homicide statistics.

Each year, about 20,000 South Africans are slain.

“What we have got is an outrageous violence rate in this country,” said Ted Leggett, crime analyst with the Institute for Security Studies, noting that the nation’s homicide rate was as bad as that in Washington, D.C., which has the worst urban homicide rate in the United States. In some areas, it was almost twice as high.

Whites tend to be more fearful of crime and critical of police, and blacks argue that crime has always been prevalent in black areas because of inadequate policing and resources.

One of the most politically fraught debates is about farm slayings, which have risen sharply in the last decade. The homicide rate among farmers is four times higher than among the general population, according to the committee of inquiry.

Farmer lobbies see the attacks as a campaign to drive white farmers off the land, but most studies have concluded that they are random crimes, usually motivated by robbery.

“We have had babies burned. We have had people shot through the knees before being killed. We have had people strangled with barbed wire. We have had people shot in different parts of their bodies,” said Chris van Zyl, of TAU South Africa, a farmer group. “The whole message of farm attacks is that living in rural areas is dangerous. I think the message very strongly is, ‘Get out of here.’ ”

The committee of inquiry agreed that violence and cruelty in most farm attacks was extreme. “Most state advocates [prosecutors] attributed this extreme violence to racial hatred,” the report said, adding that most attackers were young, poorly educated, unemployed males.

Commenting on general crime levels, the report said possible explanations included the country’s violent past, the proliferation of guns, the growth of organized crime and the poor performance of the criminal justice system, in which conviction rates are extremely low.

The survey by the Institute for Security Studies found that about 23% of South Africans had been victims of crime in the previous year, a level similar to that of 1998, allowing for statistical error. But it found that 53% believed crime had jumped sharply in the last three years.

“Significantly less South Africans feel safe in 2003 than they did in 1998,” the survey said. Nearly half the population thinks the police are doing a bad job, it said.

The government has been so sensitive about crime that in 2000 it shut down publication of crime figures for a year. It also introduced a National Crime Combating Strategy. Analysts say it is impossible to tell whether the strategy is working because station-level crime statistics, including those from the police stations in the 10 worst areas that produce half the country’s crime, remain a secret.

“I think that paternalistically they feel it’s going to feed panic and upset people. They think that what we don’t know won’t hurt us -- which is a very apartheid-era attitude, if you ask me,” Leggett said.

When Kholiwe Nobangela appealed to the police in Soweto after the abduction of her 8-year-old daughter, Nokuzola, they told her to go search the morgues and hospitals herself. She pleaded and cried, but they said to come back in two weeks.

So the girl’s relatives investigated. They searched. They found her body dumped on vacant grassland a few hundred yards from her house, raped and tortured. They found the suspect -- the man Nokuzola was last seen with -- and tried to catch him. The police finally arrested and charged him with murder.

“The police did nothing,” Nobangela said. She wept silently at the memory of how her child died, shedding too many tears to catch on her fingers.

Nokuzola had been playing with the children next door to her grandmother’s home. A neighbor’s friend, Brian Sisili, 31, whom everyone in the neighborhood knew, had promised Nokuzola to take her to have her hair done, so she had gone with him.

“He wasn’t even a thug,” Nobangela said, trying to understand.

Nearly 21,500 children were raped in 2000, the last year statistics were available.

At the Transvaal Memorial Institute in Johannesburg, the youngest abuser in the program for young molesters is 5. An analysis of 47 rapists and child abusers ages 7 to 14 in the program showed that all were poor and black or mixed-race children living with their mothers.

“Their victims, whose participation is sexually obtained through threats or trickery, are younger, smaller, weaker or in some way disadvantaged in relation to themselves. Their behavior includes violence, rape, sexual gratification and abuse of power,” the analysis found.

Asked about sex, one boy described it as “when a boy pulls off a girl’s clothes and throws her down.” One described rape as “forcing a girl to enjoy having sex.”

Crime leaves a legacy of hate.

“It’s a poison in our society. It manifests itself everywhere: in our own state of mind and the quality of life we have here,” Ian Lourens said. “It stops people wanting to come and live here and invest here. It has tentacles in every little aspect of life.”

He and his sister, devout Christians, say they feel no hatred for the killers. But their pain is so great that they are selling the beloved family farm.

“I’m sad in my bones. I’m really, really sad. I’m sad for my parents. I’m sad for myself. I’m sad for my country. I’m sad for the perpetrators,” Ian Lourens said. “It was such a senseless murder, so pointless.”

Daniel Ncube, the father of the confessed killer, is moving off the property. His house will be razed. Lourens can’t quite explain why.

“Why are we doing that?” he asked his sister. “I’m not sure. Why are we doing that?”