WS MoreOrLess: Genocide in South Africa?
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. Listener Leanne has emailed us from the Czech Republic with a question about her country of birth, South Africa.
What question about a 'white genocide' in South Africa kicks off this episode?
I'm very worried about the claim often made in some Afrikaans circles that a genocide is being carried out against white South Africans or that white farmers are systematically being killed. Personally, I cannot see it, but a very intelligent friend I know seems to believe this. I have tried to look at the statistics, but it is beyond my comprehension. Could you perhaps help?
Leanne emailed us before the death of Nelson Mandela, but some reports suggest the former South African president's death has stoked the fire of these fears, felt particularly in some right-wing Afrikaans circles. One of the most vocal people holding this view is the South African musician Steve Hoffmeyer. Here he is being interviewed during a march opposing violence against white people in October.
Any group in South Africa has the right, constitutional right, to mobilise and count their own graves. This time it's this group. They feel themselves targeted. You can't take that paranoia away from them if it's based on figures or something that they are not used to. We are not used to this mortality rate.
The statistics Steve Hoffmeyer's argued in popular Facebook and blog posts shows white South Africans are, in his words, being killed like flies.
The problem and the fundamental flaw in his arguments is that he's taking a very race-based view of crime in South Africa.
Julian Rodemeyer, editor of fact-checking website Africa Check, which has been trying to get to the truth of this matter. One of the claims made is that the number of white South Africans killed by black South Africans would fill a soccer stadium. Rodemeyer couldn't track down all of Hoffmeyer's sources, but he thinks the claim is in part based on a paper written ten years ago by Rob McCafferty from the conservative Cape Town lobby group United Christian Action.
McCafferty had looked at the crime research that has been done in South Africa, added up the numbers of murders that had taken place over various years and aggregated 44 years of murder numbers to reach an average of 7,000 murders a year under apartheid and a much higher murder rate in post-apartheid South Africa. The fundamental problem there, though, is that McCafferty, despite stating this in his research, that factors such as population growth, differentials in time periods should be taken into account and that it would be unfair to make a comparison if you didn't take those factors into account, then went ahead and did exactly that. He didn't take population growth into account. And the raw numbers look a lot more frightening than the reality if you break it down with the international standard of looking at murder rates per 100,000 of the population.
And if you look at murder rates per 100,000 population, Rodemeyer says you see that the murder rate was about 20 killings per 100,000 people in 1950, about 32 in 1970, as high as 62 in 1994 when Mandela was elected, but 10 years later had dropped to 43 and is now about 31 per 100,000 population, the same level as in 1970. But as Rodemeyer himself knows, even these calculations can't be relied upon. Under apartheid, the crime in some of the areas where black people lived wasn't included in the national figures because they'd been set up as semi-autonomous homelands by the apartheid government. Senior researcher at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria, Johan Berger, explains.
South Africa was divided into a number of self-governing states or bantustans or homelands, as they were called. These states had their own police agencies and all of them kept their own crime records. Those crimes were not included in the central crime database of the South African police that were responsible for white South Africa. And that is what makes it so difficult, if not impossible, to really compare the situation that existed at that time with the current situation.
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