Donovan Marx was left fighting for his life after being attacked on his farm between Potchefstroom and Ventersdorp on Wednesday morning. According to the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), Marx was shot in the back and subjected to torture so severe that the party declined to disclose the details publicly. Reports provided to The Common Sense include that the attackers cut off Marx’s ears, among other horrors. Such violence is common to farm attacks in South Africa.

The attack occurred shortly after a family member left for work. The attackers reportedly tied up a farmworker, who subsequently escaped and raised the alarm. The suspects fled in Marx’s bakkie and remained at large when the FF+ issued its statement.

Both the Democratic Alliance (DA) and FF+ condemned the attack. DA mayoral candidate for JB Marks Local Municipality (Potchefstroom), Professor Theo Venter, called for stronger rural policing, improved crime intelligence, and better coordination between communities and law enforcement.

FF+ leader Dr Corné Mulder called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to recognise the seriousness of farm murders and prioritise their prevention. He also criticised the continued singing of “Kill the Boer”, arguing that such rhetoric contributed to a climate of hostility towards farmers.

The origins and seriousness of South Africa’s farm attack crisis have long been minimised or dismissed by the country’s legacy media and political establishment. Yet historical research raises disturbing questions about the origins of the phenomenon, the extreme violence sometimes associated with these attacks, and the consequences of successive governments treating them as ordinary criminality.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, in September, researcher James Myburgh traced the origins of farm attacks to the political violence of the 1980s. He argued that elements of the liberation movements encouraged attacks on white farmers, trained and armed paramilitary groups, and legitimised robbery as a means of financing revolutionary activities. According to Myburgh, these methods survived South Africa’s democratic transition, helping to explain why farm murders increased even as other forms of political violence declined.

Myburgh challenged the government’s subsequent decision to classify farm attacks as ordinary criminality, arguing that the presence of robbery did not necessarily exclude a political motive. He also criticised the dismantling of specialised murder and robbery units and the abolition of the rural commando system, which he said weakened the state’s capacity to prevent such crimes.

His broader argument was that the normalisation of farm attacks had consequences extending far beyond farming communities and that the state’s failure to confront extreme violence in rural communities contributed to a wider deterioration in public safety.

Much of the legacy media, left-wing activists, and the government in South Africa have gone to great lengths to argue that the extent of the farm attack crisis is overstated and that efforts to highlight the situation are illegitimate. A key argument is that farm attacks are simply a manifestation of broader trends of criminal violence and that farmers are at no greater risk than anyone else.

This is false.

Recent research by The Common Sense provides a statistical basis for understanding the exceptional danger facing farmers. Using South African Police Service data on farm attacks and armed robberies at homes and businesses, adjusted for the relative number of households, the newspaper found that farming households were between 1.47 and 2.94 times more likely to suffer an attack than the broader population. The central estimate placed their exposure at almost twice the national rate.

More disturbing was the lethality of these attacks. The research found that a farm attack was 6.7 times more likely to end in murder than an armed robbery at a home or business elsewhere in South Africa. Farmers were therefore not merely more exposed to violent attacks. Once attacked, they faced a dramatically greater risk of being killed.

The research also established that this elevated danger was not confined to white farmers. Black commercial farmers faced the same broad category of threat, reinforcing the conclusion that rural isolation and the particular circumstances of farming create exceptional security vulnerabilities.