Former South African schoolteacher Anet Coetzee was lying in bed early one Sunday morning in 2023 when a double-barreled shotgun appeared through her shattered window, she told the Daily Caller
She recognized the weapon’s silhouette in the darkness of her home, currently without power thanks to another round of load shedding — South Africa’s term for scheduled blackouts.
“I knew the extent of what damage this kind of gun [can] do,” Coetzee told the Caller. “I called out, ‘God help me.’”
As she prayed, pellets struck her in the face and arm, knocking her off the bed. “I think they think they killed me,” she said.
With most of her teeth now gone, Coetzee shouted to her young foster son, “Hide! Hide!” A shot tore through the wall, passing about 10 centimeters above the boy’s headboard, she said.
“If he wouldn’t have hidden under his bed … he would have been dead,” Coetzee said. “They would have killed both of us.”
She made a run for the door, dodging a third shot that shattered it, something she told the Caller she learned from police after the incident. A neighbor, hearing the commotion, climbed the fence to help. (RELATED: Inside South Africa’s Farm Attacks: One Woman’s Fight For Survival And Justice)
Coetzee was taken by ambulance but left waiting on a gurney in a hospital corridor because the treatment center opened at 8 a.m. A doctor eventually intervened, scolding staff and admitting her to the emergency room.
Coetzee lost her right eye but she lived. “How on Earth am I going to survive this?” she recalled thinking.
University of South Africa criminologist Rudolph Zinn, who has interviewed convicted felons, told 24 News that greed, not race, is the most common motive in such crimes.
“In all cases, they are driven by the motive to get money or find possessions they can sell in return,” Zinn said. “They make calculated decisions on who to rob based on the information they have available, and the less the risk is the more likely they will rob those individuals.”
Zinn said data suggested farms closer to urban areas are more at risk of crime, adding that “there are is simply no evidence to show the attacks are racially motivated.”
Coetzee’s attackers — two or three men — were never caught, but nothing was stolen, she told the Caller.
General Manager Bennie van Zyl of Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa, a farmers’ organization that primarily represents commercial farmers, addressed comparisons of farm murders with crime more broadly, telling the Daily Caller that “you cannot compare these things with each other.”
“[T]he brutality of the way they do the farm murders is something that should be taken into consideration,” Van Zyl said, citing allegations of torture, including victims burned with clothing irons or mutilated.
A 2014 AfriForum report documented cases of extreme violence. In one case, a family was murdered — the mother and toddler were reportedly executed and the father had 151 stab wounds and a garden fork stuck in his neck. In another, a man was shot multiple times, then attached to his own car while he remained breathing and dragged nearly a mile before it crashed. Perpetrators were convicted in these two cases, according to the report.
Words, too, may signal deeper motivations.
The apartheid-era chant “Kill the Boer [a name for a portion of South Africa’s white minority], Kill the Farmer” has resurfaced, including at a March rally where Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema recited it. The EEF is a communist, black nationalist South African political party.
President Donald Trump recently called South Africa’s crisis a “genocide” and showed the video to President Cyril Ramaphosa during a White House meeting.
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 21: U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a printed article from “American Thinker” while accusing South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa of state-sanctioned violence against white farmers in South Africa during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. Relations between the two countries have been strained since Trump signed an executive order in February that claimed white South Africans are the victims of government land confiscation and race-based “genocide,” while admitting some of those Afrikaners as refugees to the United States. Trump also halted all foreign aid to South Africa and expelled the country’s Ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rasool. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
While South Africa’s Constitutional Court rejected an appeal on a lower court’s ruling that the chant is symbolic and not literal incitement in 2025, some disagree.
Jacques Broodryk, the Chief Spokesperson for AfriForum Community Safety, said the state is complicit in farm murders by ignoring and sanitizing such rhetoric. “When words glorify violence and target a specific group, they are more than just words,” he said. “They become weapons. They become instructions.”
When asked if he considered the situation in South Africa a genocide, Broodryk told Caller that the term was a matter of “semantics.”
“[R]eal people are getting brutally murdered here: fathers, mothers, children. It’s a semantics game,” Broodryk said.
“Crime is a major problem in South Africa. Everybody suffers from crime, but farm attacks and farm murders is the only crime that is incited by politicians. It’s the only crime that’s romanticized,” Broodryk said.
“No one else is singing, ‘Kill the black man,’ no one is singing, ‘Rob the cashier drawers [indecipherable],’ no one is singing, ‘Steal the copper cable,’ but they are singing, ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,’” Broodryk told the Daily Caller.
Broodryk said attackers often use tools such as boiling water, broken bottles, barbed wire and drills on their victims.
Although victims are often robbed during these attacks, Broodryk believes dismissing the murders as mere crimes of greed diminishes the tragedy — especially given the lack of response from what he believes is an unresponsive and complicit state.
