"Since the early 1990s, there has been a marked increase in assaults and murders of the owners and managers of commercial farms and their families, disproportionate to general crime trends in South Africa." [1]

Which does not say farmers, or white farmers specifically, are targeted disproportionately - I was unable to find statistics on this. But they are targeted:

"Yet the available research shows that most crime against white farmers is criminally motivated, the perpetrators seeking firearms, money, or vehicles, and that the violence used is instrumental to these purposes. Farms, remote and scattered, are seen as easy targets. In a small number of cases, the motive may be revenge for eviction or past ill-treatment." [1]

Note that South Africa has 6x the murder rate of the USA, so saying farmers are under attack is certainly true, even if they're not disproportionately under attack.

Edit: I looked around some more, and there does not appear to be very reliable data, but depending on how you slice the numbers, farmers may be disproportionately under attack by a factor as high as 6 [2].

Let me also remark on how curious it is that the media would so confidently call this theory 'debunked' (and racist!), when by their own admission, there is insufficient official data (gathered by the majority black government) to conclude either way [2]. I do not recall this level of skepticism being so widely applied to the Black Lives Matters movement.

Edit 2: User angersock (whose post is dead) did find what looks to be official statistics: "According to the South African Institute for Race Relations, commercial farmers, who are predominantly white, were twice as likely to be killed as the average citizen." [3]

I am confident that, should this be brought to the BBCs attention, they will run a front-page story correcting their earlier claims that this is a racist myth.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/safrica2/Safarms1.htm#_1_1

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-41807642

[3] https://www.refworld.org/docid/5283411d4.html

That is almost 20 years old, and still doesn’t support the racist theory that white farmers, specifically, are attacked that started this thread.

See the Wikipedia article someone else linked for more recent sources of data, and the observation that farm attacks today are actually decreasing.

Hey hey,

I’m reading this thread with no context or agenda and I don’t see the first commenter saying anything about white farmers.

When you say “started this thread” that seems misleading because you brought an interesting perspective about allegations regarding the victimizations of white farmers in to this. But it didn’t seem to be at all what the original commented was elucidating.

Actually the vulnerability of farmers to violent depredation in contrast to hunters or herders has been proposed as a huge factor throughout history and prehistory guiding physical and social evolution.

That was my first association.

So, I don’t know what the original commenter meant but I’m not certain you do either.

This is simply not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks

Your Wikipedia article says exactly the same in the very first graph?

Quote: “it is unclear whether farmers are at greater risk of being murdered than other South Africans”

Later: “Fact-checkers have widely identified the notion of a "white genocide" in South Africa as a falsehood or myth.[12][17]”

If you follow the source into the BBC and then a study that they quote in the BBC as well, you’ll see that farmers regardelss of skin color are at greater risk: https://irr.org.za/reports/research-policy-brief/Farm%20atta...

> Unsubstantiated claims that such attacks on farmers disproportionately target whites are a key element of the white genocide conspiracy theory and have become a common talking point among white nationalists worldwide.[11][12][13][14][15][16] However, there are no reliable figures that suggest that white farmers are being targeted in particular or that they are at a disproportionate risk of being killed.[1][4][12][17][18][19][16] In fact, while South Africa has more white farmers overall, black farm workers are more likely to be killed.[2][3] Fact-checkers have widely identified the notion of a "white genocide" in South Africa as a falsehood or myth.[12][17]