The White Cross Project is planting 3 000 white crosses along the National Mall in Washington DC in remembrance of murdered South African farmers today.

The South African government and legacy media have lied about the extent of killings among commercial farmers. There is little doubt that they will use today’s memorial as another opportunity to deny the exceptional danger farmers face. Research conducted on farm murders by The Common Sense has refuted the claim that farmers face no greater danger than other South Africans.

The research produced three main findings.

First, farming households are roughly twice as likely to be the victims of an armed robbery as households or businesses in the broader population are.

Second, farm attacks are roughly seven times more likely to end in murder than armed house or business robberies.

Third, The Common Sense created an index to develop a sense of the relative degree of danger faced by South Africans and farmers alike of being violently attacked and killed in their homes and businesses compared to the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). The index was weighted so that the score for South Africa as a whole was set at 100, and the other scores were calculated relative to that. South Africa’s farmers recorded a score of almost 10 times that.

Readers seeking a detailed account of the methodology of the analysis can consult the full research report linked here.

This research is a testament to the suffering farmers have endured under the South African government. This government took away the protection that farmers enjoyed from the commandos of old and then sabotaged the police reservist system that was promised to replace it.

All the while, it increased the propaganda against farmers, falsely accusing them of theft and of abusing their staff, and blaming them for high food prices and therefore mass poverty – and all the societal tensions that flow from that. The public were told that farmers were a major risk to South Africa’s long-term stability and that something would have to be done about them.

It was a deliberate campaign of stigmatisation. Stigmatisation is used to get broader society to dissociate itself from a group so that, when that group is attacked, no one will come to its defence.

As the stigmatisation deepened, the government introduced a policy to have their farms and businesses expropriated, the ultimate statement that they were an illegitimate entity, and needed to be removed from South Africa, including by force if it came to that.

The crosses in Washington represent families who have paid for this with their lives, and give the bereaved families the recognition that Pretoria has denied them. The evidence of their exceptional vulnerability is clear, and the dead and bereaved deserve to be remembered with dignity. A government confronted with that suffering should have the decency to acknowledge it and the resolve to protect those who remain.