Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing. Life may be painted according to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other.
Olive Schreiner | The Story of an African Farm
For almost all of its 1,200 miles of polished tarmac and plump service stations, the N1 offers evidence that post-apartheid South Africa has avoided the bloodshed and collapse that have haunted its neighbours. In a continent awash with troubles, its prosperity and stability draw not just illegals from across the Limpopo, but even French-speakers from Niger and the distant Sahara.
A tiny half-mile section of the N1, though, past Mokopane in Limpopo Province, chills the heart. It is overlooked by a large white cross that lies on a green hillside. Look closer, and the cross is seen to be made up of scores of small white crosses planted in neat lines. And then the eye is drawn to what seem to be bursts of snowdrops on the kopjes, the two small hills that lie on each side of the cross. These, too, are little white crosses, swirling on the slope.
The Afrikaners, the native whites of South Africa, have a flair for setting monuments to their rugged history in such sweeps of landscape. The crosses are their handiwork – or, more specifically, that of the “Boers”, or “farmers”. They seem to commemorate some distant epic, a trek with ox wagons, a battle with Zulus or the British.
But Mokopane is not to do with the past. The word “Plaasmoorde” is hand-lettered on the slope. It means “farm murders”. Over 1,700 of South Africa’s commercial farmers and their families, mostly white and Afrikaans, but including a substantial number of English speakers, have been killed since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Times Online | Farms of Fear
News 24.com | Farmer's Achilles tendons slashed
News 24.com | Man survives 'execution' shot
