Tensions in rural South Africa

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

In South Africa, racial tensions have been heightened in some rural areas, particularly after the murder of Brendin Horner, a young white farm manager. Cases like his have led to claims of ethnic cleansing. But as President Ramaphosa pointed out, the killings are cases of criminality, not genocide. Andrew Harding went to the small town of Senekal to investigate what's underlying these racial tensions. In Paraguay in South America, the river of the same name last week dipped to its lowest level ever recorded after months of drought. That’s a problem in this landlocked country which uses the waterway to transport the vast majority of its traded goods. And where does it leave the local fishermen? William Costa has been finding out, and asks what's causing the lack of rainfall. The Covid-19 pandemic has severely restricted international travel. That's meant Kamin Mohammadi can no longer divide her time between Italy, Britain and Iran as she used to, for family and work reasons. Now Tuscany has become a true home, not because of remote working, nor even finally having the time to appreciate things like bees on a lemon tree. But it was due to sharing the depths of Italy's sorrow at the height of the pandemic. After the First World War, tourists went to France to visit the battlefields. Among them was the future novelist Rumer Godden. Then a girl of 15, she was taken with her three sisters to see the theatres of war of the Marne. They stayed in the town of Château-Thierry, east of Paris. That holiday formed the basis of Rumer Godden’s celebrated later novel The Greengage Summer. It’s a favourite of Hugh Schofield, so it was on something of a personal mission that he set off in search of … the greengage summer.

Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.0	Good morning.
0:06.2	Today to South America, where Paraguay is a country of poor roads,
0:11.1	but a great river, though its waters are at a record low, we look at the impact
0:16.3	on the economy. W.F.H. Work from home. Now not just a choice of the few, but an obligation of the many. We have a nice
0:26.3	thought. Why not do it from Tuscany? And we hear of a long ago battlefield tour in France undertaken by a favorite author of our
0:36.4	correspondent. It's all about the green gauge trees one summer.
0:41.1	First to South Africa, where the statistics for everyday violence
0:46.2	are shocking, on average 58 people are killed a day. Farmers are a very small percentage of the victims, but because many are white, the white
0:56.4	farming community has spoken of ethnic cleansing.
1:00.1	President Cyril Rama pose a cautioned against such talk following the recent murder of a 21-year-old
1:06.4	white man saying the killings were cases of criminality, not genocide. Andrew Harding has been to the small town of Senecal to look into the case.
1:17.0	There was talk of a showdown, a bust-up, some even muttered about a bloodbath, a moment of racial reckoning for a rainbow
1:25.5	nation. And so we drove south out of Johannesburg across the Val River and into the free state with its vast horizons, waves of pale flat-topped hills and endless
1:37.2	farms. There were police roadblocks on the edge of Senecal, then a few eerily empty pothole streets and sun-bleached lawns.
1:46.8	We parked, loud speakers droning in the distance behind a church steeple,
1:51.2	the queasy sense of a small town braced for trouble. A few weeks earlier the body of
1:57.2	21 year old Brendan Horner had been found here tied to a pole, a knife at his feet, signs of torture. Brendan, a white man, had worked
2:07.1	on a local farm and for many in South Africa's wider farming community, his brutal murder, the latest to accompany a long line of
2:15.2	gruesomely violent farm robberies, seemed like a final straw. When two black
2:21.0	suspects were brought to the magistrate's court in Seneca a few days later,
2:25.2	several thousand people, mostly white, gathered peacefully on the street outside to show their anger.
	...

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