Sports Calendar

The last town on the N1 before Musina and the Zimbabwe border is Makhado. It was named, until recently, after Louis Trichardt, the Boer Voortrekker, who reached the foot of the Soutpansberg mountains here in 1836, on his way north to escape the British at the Cape.Tollbooths mark the approach of the town. A gravel road leads from the tarmac. After some distance, a gate and a long rutted track mark the entrance to a farm set well back from the road.

It is owned by Ernest Breytenbach. He has 120 cattle on 5,700 acres, with a simple house built round an Aga brought in by wagon in the 1920s.
His father, André, was killed when he got out of his “bakkie” (pick-up truck) at the gate in August 1998. It was a bad month on the farms: 66 people were murdered – four of them set on fire. In another attack, the farmer had been bound and beaten, but nothing was taken from the house and his firearm was still on the wardrobe.

“They were waiting for my dad to get back from dropping off his workers,” Breytenbach says. “He was shot in the stomach. They made off with his bakkie and dumped him. When we found him, they’d taken the spotlights off the bakkie. They put them by his face, like eyes, and they put the licence plates at his head and his feet. I don’t know why they did it. Maybe it was to say, ‘Look what we did,’ to get on the front page.”

Breytenbach blames the ruling ANC, President Thabo Mbeki’s African National Congress, for continuing incidents on the farm. “I see people hunting with dogs or collecting firewood on my land,” he says. “I ask my people if they know them. It’s always ‘No’ because they have to answer to them. I have a lot of game theft. They make snares from my fence wire. I think it’s ANC intimidation. They want us out.”

His father was the first to be murdered at Louis Trichardt. Many attacks have followed. Werner and Brigitte Wiedeck live close by, in a pin-neat house with garden gnomes in the conservatory and doilies on the armchairs. They have been robbed eight times in three years. Twice they were beaten. The worst was last April.

“They put a gun to my husband’s head and tied him up, and gagged me with a scarf,” says Brigitte. “Then they started beating me with a steel pole. They already had all our money, but they kept demanding more. I was choking on my own blood. I feigned dead and they went.

“I got free and I cut Werner loose. I was very lucky. The doctors were fighting for three days for my life. I had serious skull fractures. I needed nine steel plates. I lost my right eye.” The police, she says, took two hours to drive the few miles from town. “No one checked for bullets, for fingerprints, for tracks in the bush. They did more or less nothing.”

Dolores de Agrella runs Adam’s Apple, a roadside inn on the way into town. “There was a whole spate of attacks in June 2004,” she says. “We were robbed twice: videos, TVs, even a pot of oxtail I was making for Father’s Day lunch. We were cleaned out, so I thought we were safe. One evening, the dog barked, and a figure appeared in my room. He pulled my jaw down and put a gun in my mouth, and pulled the trigger. Without a word. Just like that. But it didn’t go off. Then he started trying to pull me down. I started kicking and screaming and grappling with him. He was a puny little thing. As fast as he’d arrived, he was gone. I’m only alive because he had the wrong calibre bullet in the gun.” The aftermath, she says, was terrible. “The pit of my stomach was churning and churning. My life-saver was a pepper spray. I’d sit clutching it the whole time like a TV remote.

“If we got a good offer, I’d be straight off. It’s harder for the Afrikaners, though. This is their heritage. Their fathers and grandfathers were born on their farms. It’s different for them.”

One of those is Celia Guillaume. She was the first woman in Africa to become a licensed big-game hunter. She has ranged across southern Africa in her bakkie, an independent and once fearless soul who grew up with the locals. She built a house on her father’s land, looking out across the Soutpansberg, green and alpine in the rain, with thatched rondavels (circular buildings) in a miniature village she built for conferences.

She grows flowers and nuts on her 500 acres, and has a seed export business. “I was 100% self-sufficient,” she says. “I grew maize and coffee, soya beans, chickens, butter, milk. I shot a bushbuck every month. I loved it. I didn’t mind being alone. Now, I won’t come here on my own. I don’t like being here at night, even if I have people staying.”

Her four attackers came one morning last year. “I’m sure it was an inside job,” she says. “I was packed to go to Zambia the next day, and I had a lot of foreign currency. They knew I was alone. They hit me with guns, and stripped me, and tied me up and gagged me. They had everything they wanted right away. Everything in my safe, my guns, everything with a plug on it – TV, stereo – all my CDs, the keys to my bakkie. But they stayed on for hours. I thought they were going to kill me. My father comes up to see me at 5pm every evening, and I thought, ‘Please, God, don’t let Daddy find me dead like this.’ Then they went off in the bakkie, and I managed to free myself. But it’s still there. They f*** up your future, and they also steal your yesterdays.”