Land had always been the true currency of power in southern Africa, and its ghosts travelled freely across borders. When Zimbabwe unraveled into land seizures, bloodshed, and the collapse of its farming regions, many South Africans feared the same omen drifting south like dust on a restless wind.

Rumour painted a picture of ancestral tribes reclaiming what was theirs. Reality — always less romantic — revealed something harsher. Much of the violence came from migrants, men and women stripped of choice by hunger, exhaustion, and ruined homelands. They crossed the borders illegally from Zimbabwe and Mozambique in waves too large to police, slipping through broken fences and secret footpaths between thorn-thick acacia and fever grass.

I often imagined their journey: pushing through darkness, wading rivers swollen with crocodiles, dodging the jaws of lions in the Kruger Park.

And after surviving all that, the other side offered nothing close to paradise. Dreams were stronger than welcome. Hope was a currency that evaporated fast. Locals — black and white — saw them not as victims of circumstance, but as threats to land, livestock, employment, and survival. In a hard country, compassion had limits. Security became an industry. Fear became a business model.

Four companies patrolled the region. Three operated within the law — or at least waved at it. The fourth existed in a liminal space between church, militia, and whispered superstition. Owned by a charismatic Afrikaans minister, it blended scripture with the rituals of African ancestors, offering “divine protection” without courts, police, or bureaucracy.

Clients sought the reverend with the desperation of the cornered. He inspected their homes, determined a monthly fee based on turnover, and promised deliverance. Then a sangoma would arrive to perform the sealing rites — bones thrown onto dusty earth, chants rising into the heat, a fly-swatter of animal tail hair flicked through the air like a spell.

A sticker of a snarling leopard was affixed to the window. A warning to criminals. A curse to some. A blessing to others.

Absurd as it seemed, the system worked. Break-ins were followed by sudden informants appearing from every crevice. Suspects were caught and “interviewed.” Stories circulated of muti that made a man feel death breathing on his neck. Rumours of sjambok beatings drifted like smoke — never proven, never denied.

Many black businesses preferred this approach. It was cleaner, quicker, and, most importantly, invisible to the police. And when cases reached court, witnesses materialised like a choir of ghosts, offering the accused perfect alibis.

By contrast, the premier security outfit in the region resembled a private army. Ex-soldiers. Ex-Koevoet men. Veterans of the Namibian bush war — shadows with rifles, rumoured to have maintained a one-in-twenty-five kill ratio.

Now they patrolled farms with automatic weapons, bakkies, motorbikes, and horses, sleeping under thorn trees, moving silently through veld that obeyed them more than it feared them.

Another company mimicked their methods poorly, resembling more a safari tour group than a strike force. The fourth outfit was little more than a joke: one failing bakkie, a handful of untrained men, and a boss whose body overflowed the steering wheel like dough rising from a pan. Their “rapid response” depended entirely on terrain; mud or incline defeated them instantly.

Farmers were few in number but vital to the region, and violence hunted them relentlessly. Murders occurred monthly — theft, grudges, cultural misunderstandings gone fatal. The media framed it as “the plight of the white farmer,” but death cared nothing for skin. It simply counted what was easiest to count.

Workers were either a farmer’s strongest allies or most dangerous enemies. They knew every gate, every dog, every hiding place. Trust was not an option; it was a gamble.

Death lived everywhere here — in the veld, in the shadows, between neighbours. And you learned to walk beside it.

Multiculturalism, when stripped of idealism, was simply another word for tolerance — and tolerance wears thin in places where survival is daily negotiation. Even animals understood it better than people: lions, leopards, and cheetahs did not share territory; antelope grazed together but never mingled;
elephants and zebra drank at the same waterhole yet moved apart.

People carried their instincts too.

And in this uneasy landscape, the tension of borders — physical, political, cultural — was always humming just beneath the heat.