2 Black Women Killed & Fed to Pigs by Whites, Yet Blacks expel other Blacks in South Africa
South Africa is again in the grip of outrage after the brutal killing of two Black women, Ms Makgato and Ms Ndlovu, in Limpopo. The women had been searching for soon-to-expire dairy products, discarded for pigs, when they were murdered.
According to court documents, farm supervisor Mr De Wet claims he was acting under duress when he threw their bodies into a pig enclosure. Both the prosecution and his lawyer confirm he will testify to this, and if the court accepts his account, all charges against him will be dropped.
The details are as shocking as they are disturbing. The accused include Mr De Wet, Mr Olivier, 60, and Mr William Musora, 50, another farm worker. They also face charges of attempted murder for allegedly shooting at Ms Ndlovu’s husband, who was with the women at the time. They are accused of possessing an unlicensed firearm and obstructing justice by dumping the bodies in the pig enclosure to conceal evidence. Mr Musora, a Zimbabwean national, also faces charges under South Africa’s Immigration Act for his alleged illegal status in the country.
The Limpopo High Court was filled with supporters and grieving relatives. Mr Olivier’s wife was seen wiping away tears. Members of the opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters, who have previously called for the farm to be shut down, attended in solidarity. The trial has been postponed to next week.
This case has not only ignited calls for justice but has once again exposed the deep racial fault lines in South Africa’s rural heartlands. More than thirty years after the official end of apartheid, most private farmland remains in the hands of a white minority, while the majority of farm workers are Black and poorly paid. This imbalance fuels resentment among Black South Africans, while many white farmers point to high crime rates as a reason for their own sense of vulnerability.
And yet here lies the bitter question: How can Black South Africans kill their fellow Black Africans, tell them to leave the country, and even block them from healthcare, when the same land still bleeds from white-perpetrated violence against Black lives?
The murder of Ms Makgato and Ms Ndlovu is a tragedy that speaks to a deeper sickness. It is a sickness where poverty, inequality, xenophobia, and the residue of colonialism and apartheid twist into a hatred that finds its easiest target in those closest in skin but farthest in nationality. It is a sickness where oppressed people can be turned into enforcers of the same cruelty that once dehumanized them.
Meanwhile, white-perpetrated killings and abuses in rural farming communities continue to stain South Africa’s conscience. These acts of violence, steeped in decades of structural injustice, are often met with outrage but seldom with systemic change. That reality makes the sight of Black-on-Black violence even more painful, because it plays into the same machinery of division and deflection that protects the deeper structures of oppression.
This trial is not just about three men accused of murder. It is a mirror to South Africa, forcing the nation to confront the uncomfortable truth that liberation from apartheid did not end the violence; it only changed some of the faces who commit it. Until South Africa reckons with both the racial and internal fractures that fuel such acts, the blood of the innocent will continue to feed the soil of the same farms where freedom is still a promise, not a reality.
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