Recently I stopped off in Balfour, a tiny dorp outside Johannesburg. It was a wintry high-veldt night, with a freezing mist lifting out of the maize fields. The place only had one pub. Beside me in the bar sat three farmers, watching re-runs of old boxing matches on the big TV. Large creased men pulling on big brown bottles of ice-cold lager while black and white fighters slugged it out.
As each punch slammed home, the farmers growled a word, a mantra, an incantation that I thought forgotten, certainly forbidden: the word was "kaffir". Not just a word, but a curse, a prayer, a thin hymn of hate. The first syllable is held in the back of the throat, in a long "k-a-a-a", followed suddenly by the second syllable, spat out short, ending in a trill of whispery "r"s.
"Kaa-frrr!" Around this oath are others, repetitive, obscene, taken from the tiny word hoard of the South African racist. They mean "kill" or "kick" or "fuck", but meaning is immaterial - these words are mere scaffolding propping up the main chant, the ritual invocation to a brutal, boneheaded god, a prayer prayed by men who are most alive when they hate.
You don't see many strangers in Balfour and I was asked in Afrikaans (in which the use of the formal avuncular indicates respect): "Where does Uncle come from?" ("Waar kom Oom vandaan?"). From here, I said.
The fights rolled on. Another fist smacked into another face. The k-word crackled again with the old familiar frenzy. The night cooled, the mist thickened. This was how farmers had sounded all my life. Racist to their toenails. Effortlessly, unthinkingly, blindingly stupid. Same song, same fools singing it. Balfour was the place where I lived as a child. My Irish grandfather ran the pub and the farmers who sat at his bar after the Boer War 100 years ago would have sounded exactly like the trio sitting next to me.
Farmers have always had a bad press in South Africa. Simply calling someone a "farmer" is a form of abuse. The word conjures up big men of little brain who beat up their labour. At best, paternalistic and smug; at worst, bestial and blind, infamous for low wages, evictions, bad housing, shooting, stabbing, blinding and beating their black workers. A few years back, someone coined the slogan: "Kill a Boer, kill a farmer." And a popular appeal among those addicted to the mystical notion of taking back "the land" was "one settler, one bullet".
You might think, as Louis Farrakhan once remarked, that white South Africans are so awful they should be killed and buried, then dug up and killed again because they haven't suffered enough. But who is to say all farmers are the same? And since when did murdering people improve their manners? Not all farmers are racists. Not all Boers are alike.
But it is open season on farmers in South Africa right now. A farmer is murdered every couple of days, and in the cities they barely blink. It has been like this for years. And it is puzzling because whatever the motives, the results are quite mad. People leave the land and no one takes their places. Contrary to rumour, few people want to be commercial farmers in Africa. They are a vanishing species. Those who grow the food are being liquidated.
I left Balfour and headed for the high country along the Lesotho border, close to the Transkei, a place where farmers are less easy to caricature. In the high country near the Drakensberg mountains, farmers are often of Scottish and English descent. They feel themselves to be liberal employers, they go on duck shoots, visit the country club, play polo and tennis - and, from time to time, they get killed.
In East Griekwaland, astute rustlers come over the mountains from Lesotho humping 50kg bags of dagga (marijuana) and head back into Lesotho with a clutch of cattle. The farmers in places such as Kokstad and Swartberg go on night-time patrols and hire commercial security firms such as Executive Outcomes, the mercenary outfit notorious for service in Angola and other African wars. They form themselves into commando units, electrify the fences, use large watchdogs and razor wire, and take their rifles to bed with them.
It keeps the lid on things, but only just. Meat, money, marijuana and murder are big business in this cattle country.
Peter and Monica Davies have farmed near Kokstad for many years. Called out of bed one night to fight a fire started deliberately outside the farmhouse, Peter Davies was ambushed in his garage. Two pistols were pressed to his head, and he listened to his attackers discussing whether to kill him and drop his body into the service pit in the garage floor. "We want money and guns," they told him.
It was a classic attack. Money and guns. The Davieses are in their 70s and fall into the group most often beaten, raped and murdered - the elderly and the isolated. The couple are not like the men in the Balfour bar, but that didn't help them. In fact, the hard men in the Balfour bar are harder to kill.
The Davieses have watched as the valley where they farm closes down. They recall the Slabberts, husband and wife, murdered on the same day. Mrs Coghlan stabbed to death. "Right through our valley, everywhere, farms are for sale. And young people are getting out. Heading overseas."
The single piece of research into farm attacks asked those convicted why they carried them out. The responses do not suggest political motives. What the attackers were after was what they asked the Davieses for - cash, cars, guns. Most attackers travelled no more than 15 miles to the scene of the attack. What they wanted was not land, but loot.
I ask the couple what they think was behind the attack and Peter says: "History. White farmers have the land. We are the enemy". Down from the mountains, in the warm green valleys of the Natal Midlands, the town of Ixopo and its farmers have suffered a string of murders, robberies, attempted rapes, rustling, and arson.
Col Clive Lee-Cox is ex-British army with a background in military intelligence, and a naturalised South African. He runs the local Community Watch, a rapid response unit drawn from local farmers. He is one of the few to reflect on the killing grounds around Ixopo with reason and detachment. The colonel's background is delightfully murky, his manner temperate, but he knows what he is up against. Lee-Cox is the sole white man on the local town council, interestingly suspended between Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress. Lee-Cox's take on farm attacks is simple and direct. Farmers are isolated, farmers are not security-conscious and farmers have guns: this makes them targets.
But it does nothing to explain the violence of the attacks. Take the recent assault on the Ushers. It is among the more memorable only for being so violent and because the Ushers should be dead. John and Jennifer Usher farm in a place called Springvale. They took over from old Harry Usher. A wartime picture on the wall shows a fine moustache, an aquiline nose under an army cap, a young soldier fighting with the South African forces in the western desert during the campaign against Rommel. The war our fathers fought in.
Springvale then was easier. Harry Usher kept the key for his gun cupboard in a cowrie shell. He seldom locked his doors. But Springvale is on the skids now.
"Every aspect of your life is touched," says Jennifer Usher. Her husband, John, believes there is a concerted attempt to drive them away: "Politically, they want to clear the area".
People talk about "politics" in these parts, and they mean land. When they talk about "them", they mean blacks. In Springvale, there are no black commercial farmers and there is a lot of animosity. When a white farm was handed over recently to black farmers, the wife of the local ANC leader objected to a vote of thanks being offered to the co-operating farmer. Why thank him? Whites should not be there at all.
Old Harry Usher once found a man in his house in the middle of the night and shot him, the blast gouging a piece out of the door frame in the living-room.
But that was small beer. A sense of fun or future is gone from Springvale. Harry Usher lived in another world. No one keeps the key to the gun cupboard in a cowrie shell any more. Springvale is a war zone. Neighbours are shot and killed. Many have fled. The community hall has been burnt down, the local Anglican church vandalised and cattle mutilated.
It was on a beautiful Sunday morning in May that Jennifer Usher was making her weekly long-distance phone call to her sister.
When she heard a commotion in the kitchen she asked her sister to hang on and went to see what the trouble was. Leaving the phone off the hook probably saved her life.
Jennifer found John bleeding on the kitchen floor. Four young men "with attitude", Jennifer says, had walked into the house and put pistols to his head. When he remonstrated with them they pistol-whipped him and stabbed him. They then stabbed Jennifer in the arm, demanding money.
"I wasn't frightened, I was affronted," she says. Jennifer's sister, many miles away and still hanging on to the phone, had heard enough to know something was very wrong and she phoned the Ushers' sons, Gregory and Anthony, who farm nearby. They put out a mayday on the CB radio all farmers use, grabbed their guns and headed for their parents' farm. Jennifer heard vehicles outside, and so did the gunmen. They smashed their way through the large bedroom windows in a scatter of glass and blood.
Outside the house, the Usher brothers and the gunmen blazed away at each other. Gregory was shot five times. Anthony and another gunman emptied their magazines at each other without either being hit. Then the gunman calmly walked out of the gate, pointed out to Anthony that he was out of ammunition and, as he left, says Anthony, "he told me to fuck off". Anthony went to help Gregory, who was lying on the grass complaining of the cold. "Take my shoes off, I'm dying," he said.
At that point, Col Lee-Cox's Community Watch group reached the Usher farm. The rescuers were led by Dave Mack, who farms nearby. The place looked bad. John Usher appeared to be bleeding to death in the bedroom and Gregory Usher to be dying on the lawn. Mack recalls when he asked Jennifer Usher how she was, lifted her blouse and showed him the wound in her breast.
"I've been stabbed," she said, and passed out. Mack is good with bullet wounds, at getting in a drip, at stabilising a patient. The exit wound in Gregory's stomach worried him; he knew the bullet might have hit the spine. Gregory's heart stopped twice, once on the lawn, again in the ambulance.
The bullet in his back had exited without touching the spine; another had passed cleanly through his liver ("luckily, they weren't using soft-nosed rounds"). Mack's experience, like that of many on the quiet dirt roads and the rolling hills around Ixopo, is hard-won.
Thick scrub makes it good ambush country. Left and right of the Mack farm, people have been shot. Then, two years ago, Mack lost his son, Bruce, who was gunned down in an ambush as he drove across the farm.
Mack's eyes glitter with pain and anguish, underscored with something like guilt. He thinks he knows who killed his son. The motive was political. His black neighbours wanted him out, and they still do. He suspects the black politicians who run this part of the country of complicity and he is not shy about saying so. He says they killed the wrong man when they shot Bruce. The ambush was meant for him.
He lists with weary authority the losses the neighbourhood has seen, people killed or frightened away. If his son's killers try again, Mack won't make it easy - but he doesn't give much for his chances.
"Any day they want to, they can take me out. If not today, then tomorrow ... and they'll dance on my grave," he says.
On one of those huge bright Sunday mornings, I go over to see John and Jennifer Usher. They are closing down Harry's old house, packing it up. They will keep on farming nearby, though they would get out if they could. But who would buy?
"We still have to go down a long way before we hit bottom," says John.
He is on crutches, the feeling gone in the leg where they cut the tendons. The Ushers are stunned, still. They move with great care, as if each part of themselves is brittle. Despite their anger, what is happening is so painful that they cannot talk about it. They are very quiet.
Jennifer shows me a picture of Gregory, propped up in a hospital bed. Doesn't he look like his grandfather? I glance at the photos of Harry Usher the dashing soldier, fighting Germans in Africa. She is right. Gregory is the image of his grandfather. The likes of Harry Usher won that war, maybe because they knew who they were fighting and why. This time, no one knows anything.