‘It’s not about race, it’s about male violence’
BBC correspondent Andrew Harding’s book on a headline-grabbing farm murder case brings an outsider’s objectivity and compassion to SA’s tortured race relations and imperfect justice system, writes Sue de Groot
‘Some people would assume I was talking about race, but that’s not true. The title has come to mean more ... really it’s about male violence’
‘But it is the political show that comes to town that gets the attention — rather than the people actually trying to fix it’
Sometimes it takes an outsider to map out the underlying patterns in a community riven by rage, despair and confusion. Strangers sometimes see things more clearly than those intimately and emotionally entangled in events. Not that Andrew Harding is a stranger in SA. He has lived in Johannesburg for 12 years as the BBC’s Africa correspondent and has been more immersed than most South Africans in the many and varied seismic events and political intrigues that tear through our cities, towns and villages. Still, it takes guts not only to write about a double murder on a Free State farm but to attempt to untangle the complex web of relationships, reasons, animosities and ambiguities that obfuscate farm murders in SA.
Harding’s new book, These are not gentle people, is the result of a four-and-a-halfyear investigation of a community torn apart by the deaths of two men and the lengthy trial that followed.
In January 2016, Samuel Tjixa and Simon Jubeba were cornered in a field, after an alleged attempted robbery, by a group of 40 white farmers. Who did what to whom and when, and whether they died as a result of the savage beating they received, the jolting ride in the back of a police van, medical negligence or a combination of all three, occupied the courts until a verdict was reached in May 2020.
Twists and turns
Long after the rest of the media had lost interest, Harding spent hundreds of hours in Parys, not just following the legal proceedings but getting to know all the players, their backgrounds, their families and their fallibilities.
Speaking from his Johannesburg home office, Harding said there were times when he wondered what he’d taken on.
“I could never have guessed quite how many twists and dramatic turns and extraordinary storylines would emerge from this strange double murder investigation outside Parys,” he said. “But I kept going as the years slipped by. Every time I thought it was going on too long and perhaps I should let it go, the next time I went back I was hooked again. I was just so absorbed in the lives of the people and the nature of the trial.”
He does not insert himself into the book. Only in the author’s note at the end does he reveal his “tactic”, which was deliberately and demonstrably to pay equal attention to everyone, from the families of the deceased to the prosecution team, the defence lawyers and their clients, the investigating Hawks, the court officials, the translator and many of the inhabitants of both Parys and Tumahole, its adjacent township. Each person, no matter how tangential their involvement, comes to life in vivid detail.
“It would be lovely to say there was some clever skill or technique but actually time is the key thing, just being there, year in, year out, and people realising that you’re not going away, but also that you’re not leaking information, you’re not telling dramatic stories in the press in a case that clearly kept twisting and turning throughout,” Harding said.
Not everyone was pleased to have him there. “I think many of the accused would rather I had chosen a very different story but some of them came to trust me and I hope the book doesn’t betray that, it’s a difficult balance to strike. I made most of the big breakthroughs in the last year or so in terms of people opening up about key parts of the story that I might never otherwise have understood properly, in a community that was and will remain, I suppose, in part closed to people like me, to outsiders. But a handful of people let me in and allowed this to go further than simply the court records, transcripts and cross-examinations … which were dramatic enough already.”
Provocative title
As an observer he also had to remain impartial. “My aim was to hide myself as a character and narrator. I think it’s probably pretty clear at times what I think but I didn’t want to weigh in heavily with any personal opinion, partly because that’s not the kind of journalism I tend to do, and also because I think in a story like this, which is such a mystery, if you nail your colours to the mast it makes it less mysterious and less interesting for the reader. Parts of it are still a mystery to me.”
The title of the book was a controversial choice. It is a quote from the book, a line recalled by a white woman, the wife of one of the accused farmers, and it refers to her own menfolk, “… who would surely be haunted forever by what they’d done, whatever the outcome of the trial. These are not gentle people, she said to herself.”
Harding said he knew that in SA the use of “these” and “people” would be seen by some as provocative.
“I knew some people would assume I was talking about race, or at least that the
person who said this phrase was talking about race, but that’s not true. Also, the title has come to mean something more than I initially thought ... really it’s about male violence.
“It could be saying ‘these are not gentle men’ because there is a culture of violence that goes beyond race in rural SA and one can point fingers at where that culture came from, but it’s there, within families, within marriages, within communities, within workspaces, and I uncovered an extraordinary amount of it that didn’t even end up in the book. It made me think that this is about violent men and the women who are left behind to clean up the mess, or at least just get on with life. There is something more to this than just the narrow confines of the murder investigation at work.”
His immersion in this story, he said, “took me out of my journalistic comfort zone, with those short deadlines, to take the longer view, something one very rarely gets to do”. Having been given time off to complete the book, he is back on the journalistic beat covering a similarly volatile court case in Senekal following the torture and murder of white farm manager Brendin Horner in October. In a recent podcast, Harding relates a conversation with a white onlooker who said: “This isn’t about race, we just need the police to do their jobs,” and then muttered: “These people …”
Political sideshows
In Senekal, as in Parys, rolls of razor wire had to be dragged across the streets to separate angry groups of black and white protesters. Both murder trials, to quote Harding’s report on Senekal, “provoked a spasm of communal anger now being framed and inflamed by racial politics as another sign of SA’s unravelling”.
Harding is measured, thoughtful and considered, preferring to listen and gather evidence rather than to give opinions. He makes no political pronouncements but finds it irksome when violent crime and the legal process become muddied and obscured by political sideshows.
In the case of Parys, although there was political pressure in the beginning, “the extreme politics eventually retreated to the sidelines and I was glad of that because I didn’t want to write a book that was dragged to those extremes. As we saw in Senekal, elements of what we saw last month there were pure political theatre. And that’s not what I wanted to write about.”
He wanted to write about a community and individuals. He does not ignore the compound evils and inequalities that have caused widening divisions, increasing animosity and the continued inability of people to treat each other as human beings, but he also identifies a common enemy.
“The structure or skeleton of the book is about institutional collapse,” Harding said. “It is about the failures of these systems to deliver justice and all sorts of other things to the community, even to the point that there is no shared newspaper or shared place where Tumahole and Parys can collectively know about this case and decide whether justice has been done. There aren’t those systems.
“When you add to that the failures of the forensic pathologist, the postmortem, the hospital, the medical failures, through to the prosecution’s fairly weak handling of the case, through to all sorts of other things, that’s where you see SA’s struggles.”
The Senekal trial feels, to him, like history repeating itself. “These explosive moments pop up like a drumbeat, and more so in Senekal perhaps than in Parys, but identically to some extent: political opportunists and right-wing fringe groups attach themselves to these distant incidents and somehow manage to turn them into national political events. Which, of course, they are not really.
“These are issues about the criminal justice system, about policing — and profound ones — but SA seems very easily drawn towards these theatrical moments of created, manufactured tension. I don’t mean to play down the anger of the farming community in Senekal, they and the people in the town told me just how frustrated they are with policing and with soaring crime, but it is the political show that comes to town that gets the attention rather than the people actually trying to fix it.
Joining wrong dots
“These struggles are not so much along racial lines, and that’s what I found fascinating in Senekal, where people are joining dots, as Pravin Gordhan used to urge journalists to do, but they are joining the wrong dots or they are trying to find coherent conspiracies between dots where there aren’t any.
“For instance, a white farmer in Senekal last week was saying to me that the brutality of the attacks means surely there is a racial element. Now that’s very possible but because statistically it’s so slanted to white victims it’s hard to know. It’s impossible to know. Black people, black farmers are also tortured. But it’s tempting to jump to that point, and then the next point is, well often the police fail to investigate them properly, these attackers, these brutal murderers get away with it.
“So, therefore, there’s the political link, establishing some sort of conspiracy. And yet that second point is clearly not linked to the first because that second point applies in this case, in Parys, where a black prosecutor and a black political class were pushing for this case to be investigated, for these farmers to be put away for life, and it was the same failures of the same system that let down everybody irrespective of race.”
Among the many human truths he explores in These are not gentle people, and with sympathy for the very real fears of those who farm in isolated areas as well as for the hardships of the disadvantaged, Harding demonstrates just how entangled and complicated things are in SA: between races, between classes, between viewpoints, communities and even between members of the same family.