‘We starved along with the pigs’
Family tell of 47-day ordeal on Thandi Modise’s farm of death
MAKGOTSO Vanwyk had no food to give her one-year-old. It seemed the child was always crying, a wail that drifted across the dusty landscape.
Makgotso’s husband, Tebogo “Nina” Moekaedi, knew then: they would die here.
It had been nearly two months since their predecessor on the farm, Shadrack, had left. “You’re going to suffer here,” he warned the couple before making his way down to the big road.
Shadrack said he had worked for three months on the farm and received R800 in payment.
Moekaedi would try anyway. The two months without a job had been tough and he could not continue to rely on his mother’s pension to feed him and his family.
He knew Nimrod “Koroba” Tlhoaele, a North West provincial government employee from Mafikeng, and had worked for him before. So when Tlhoaele called and said there was work on Thandi Modise’s farm, he immediately made his way to Potchefstroom.
Shadrack had stuck around for a day to show Moekaedi what needed to be done. Let the cattle and goats out to graze. Run the water. “Feed the pigs every second day, otherwise the food won’t last,” he told him.
Moekaedi settled into the rhythm of farm life, rising when his breath trailed ahead of him and leading the cows back to their kraal when the shadows grew long over the Highveld.
To break his solitude, Moekaedi sent for Vanwyk and his one-year-old, Kekotso.
Tlhoaele delivered a 10kg bag of mealie meal and soap.
The family shared a single bed, going to bed dressed in all their clothes and wrapping the curtains around them to stave off the biting cold.
In the mornings, Moekaedi built a fire to boil water for tea and washing from a 20-litre bucket.
With Kekotso strapped to her back, Vanwyk helped with the running of the farm, cleaning the sties, feeding the pigs and herding the livestock.
As the weeks wore on, not a single visitor arrived. The food began to run out.
“I called Koroba, and he told me to cook once a day and to eat at 12 at night to make the food last,” said Moekaedi.
The 30 20-litre bags of pig feed were also running low.
“They [the pigs] started charging me, trying to knock me down. Makgotso and the child couldn’t go there any more.”
The pigs started dying — five the first day, 10 the next. Tlhoaele told him to throw the dead animals in the pit.
“It was a deep hole. We filled that hole to the top with pigs and
They wrapped curtains around them to stave off the biting cold
cows. I thought then even we are going to die here.”
Tlhoaele stopped replying to his please-call-me messages. The family were now living on water alone.
Vanwyk’s breast milk had dried up and Kekotso refused to drink the water. “She was crying, always crying.”
In desperation, he turned to a neighbouring farmworker, David Masobe, who had seen many of Moekaedi’s predecessors — all desperate, few ever getting paid.
He gave the family a small packet of mealie meal and tea. He also gave Moekaedi R5 airtime, with which he phoned his mother.
With the R400 she sent him, 47 days after arriving there, the family left the farm.