The first story broke in the morning: a local doctor’s farmhouse had been hit during the night. He returned home to find two men inside — one in the bathroom, one rifling through drawers. The doctor reached his shotgun before either intruder reached the door. One shot. One body. A detective later described the scene, “that bathroom, there was kaffir everywhere” – proof that brutality lived on both sides of the law.
The second intruder escaped through a barred window, leaving a trail of blood across the tiles. Days later, a farmer across from my mother and Ian’s home was shot dead. Nothing stolen. No motive. Perhaps a grudge. Perhaps nothing more sinister than just being – it happens.
Then came the neighbours’ dogs — poisoned to silence. Thieves attempted to steal the tractor but hadn’t noticed the six-foot vibracrete wall. They ploughed straight into it, leaving a smear of blood up and over the barrier. The neighbour, an odd man who lived with two enormous beasts — a Rottweiler and a Rhodesian Ridgeback — was shaken.
After that, he hired a guard. The poor man spent most nights sitting in a tree, as he was afraid of the dogs who the owner let roam at night.
The nights here had their own pulse. Sometimes they snapped with gunfire — warning shots mostly, farmers firing into darkness before sleep. Other nights were so silent they woke you, the stillness carrying its own threat.
One morning I told Mum about waking in fright when I heard shuffling outside my bedroom window and two-way radio chatter.
“That’s our security,” she laughed, folding over with amusement as I described rolling off the bed to hide behind the frame. To her it was routine. To me it felt like the world was splitting open.
“You could have warned me,” I muttered.
“We hardly hear them anymore,” she shrugged. “They move farm to farm. Horseback’s the only way — bush is too thick for vehicles. Noise carries at night because it’s so quiet.”
“So… they’re your private security?”
“For us and the district. Five, sometimes eight square miles. They’re ghosts. Only the control room knows where.”
And I believed her. These men were ghosts — ex-soldiers carrying the scent of old wars on them. They moved like something the veld had shaped, not born. How does a man with a past built on blood and conflict re-enter ordinary life? Perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps he simply patrols different borders.
Ian kept shotgun traps in the outer fields to deter crop thieves. He once forgot where he set one and nearly shot himself.
He tried to get Mum onto the firing range. She refused outright.
“Had much trouble here?” I asked.
“Nothing serious – touch wood,” she said, touching her head. “Theft, intimidation, some stabbings. Wives visiting the compound — that always ends in a fight, so we forbid them visiting.”
She told me about a stranger who wandered through the farm one Sunday. In this region, a stranger was cause for immediate concern. No one walked land they didn’t belong to.
Workers confronted him. He gave no explanation. They assumed he was scouting for robbery. They dragged him up the road and called Ian.
When Ian approached, the man pulled an iron bar from his trouser leg and lashed out. Ian caught the blow; the man bit his hand. The workers, enraged, struck him with the same bar until Ian intervened. He pinned the man, tied him with a belt, and called security.
The unit arrived in “African minutes,” bundled him into the truck, roughed him up, and took him away. Ian showed me the bite mark like a badge earned, not suffered.
Compared to all this, my own experiences were mild. Three robberies in three years — property stolen, nothing more. No blood. In this country, that counted as a blessing.
But a thought had begun circling among the liberal-minded. Nothing in South Africa truly belongs to you. You buy it. You cherish it. You hold it until someone else wants it more.
And when they take it, you learn to let go. Because here, ownership is temporary. And everything, land, animals, possessions, even peace is borrowed from the shadows for as long as they allow.