South Africa’s farm murder phenomenon grew out of liberation-era political violence and persisted as the state weakened institutions capable of combating it.

Addressing the White Cross Project Conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC on Friday, Myburgh traced the history of farm attacks from the mid-1980s. His speech preceded a planned commemoration of close to 3 000 documented farm murder victims. Myburgh heads the BRE-DE-RE policy group in Germany but was educated in South Africa and at Oxford, and is also a regular panellist on the Talking Sense podcast on The Common Sense.

Drawing on police and agricultural organisation records, he said 327 attacks and 66 murders were recorded in 1991. Annual murders rose to 150 in 1997 and remained around that level for several years, before falling to just under 90 in 2003. They remained around that level until 2010, with subsequent declines occurring alongside a diminished population on farms and smallholdings.

Myburgh credited sophisticated private security measures with reducing attacks and murders since 2020. He cited 30 recorded farm murders in 2025, describing this as the lowest number in 26 years. Despite that decline, he said recent estimates indicated that farmers and smallholders remained more likely than other South Africans to be attacked near their homes and killed during those attacks.

His historical argument began with what he described as an African National Congress (ANC) campaign, directed from exile during the mid-1980s, “to clear the white farmers off the land”. He identified three elements in that campaign, namely incitement to seize land, landmine warfare and the infiltration of guerrillas to train and direct paramilitary youth groups.

According to Myburgh, guerrillas were taught to provide training inside South Africa, while the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), permitted robbery to obtain weapons and operational funds. He argued that this doctrine mattered when assessing later attacks because the presence of robbery did not, by itself, exclude a political motive.

He also linked the introduction of the “Kill the Boer” chant into South Africa to this period, saying it originated during the Rhodesian Bush War.

Turning to 1990, Myburgh said the unbanning of liberation movements was accompanied by continued underground activity. He argued that the ANC rebuilt paramilitary units, providing firearms training, ideological instruction, and methods for obtaining weapons through reconnaissance, ambushes and raids. A map from The Star, dated 11 July 1990 and reproduced in his presentation, showed attacks in Natal around areas where, he said, units were being activated.

He said covert arming and training continued during negotiations and intensified in 1993 and 1994. Units were encouraged to “use your own initiative” to secure weapons and funds. He distinguished this indirect targeting from what he described as an explicit policy by Pan Africanist Congress paramilitaries to target white farmers.

The 1994 election brought a sharp reduction in many forms of political violence, Myburgh said, but farm murders increased from 84 in 1993 to 92 in 1994 and 121 in 1995. He presented this as a continuation of revolutionary strategies and operations that had acquired momentum before the transition.

Citing a police analysis of 443 incidents in 1997, he said attackers were mainly armed groups of young people and victims were usually elderly. In a third of the cases, assailants had waited to ambush their targets. The incidents analysed left 84 people dead and 135 seriously injured. Of those killed, 82.0% were white and 18.0% were black.

Myburgh challenged the government’s position, which he dated to late 1998, that farm attacks should be regarded as ordinary crime. He argued that treating robbery as evidence against a political motive ignored MK’s own doctrine. He also criticised Western governments for failing to exert pressure to curb the violence.

He said the dismantling of specialised murder and robbery units, followed by the abolition of the commando system, weakened the state’s response.

Myburgh concluded as follows: “This normalisation of farm and home attacks by our intelligentsia and the government’s dismantling of the state's capacity to combat this kind of crime has had terrible consequences, not just for the victims of farm attacks, but for all South Africans… In 1991, farm attacks constituted about a third of the 1 100 or so attacks recorded by police that year on people in or near their homes. In 2021, two decades on, about the same number of farm attacks were recorded. The number of armed robberies of people in their homes had, over that same period, risen to 22 000, from 1 000 to 22 000… Reversing the demoralisation of South African society requires recognising the farm murder phenomenon for the horror that it is and was. But the goal must surely be to ensure that what is taken for granted in other societies should once again become the norm in South Africa as well, that no South African, wherever they live, should have to fear even their own houses, to fear both day and night alike”.

Myburgh heads the BRE-DE-RE policy group in Germany. Educated in South Africa and at Oxford, he is also a regular panellist on the Talking Sense podcast on The Common Sense.