Outrage in SA over farmers accused of feeding slain black women to pigs

JOHANNESBURG: The white-owned farm was well known to residents of a rural community in

South Africa

as a place where they could get discarded food. But when two black women ventured onto the farm several weeks ago, they never made it back. The farm owner and two of his workers are accused of fatally shooting the two women and then dumping them in a pigsty, where, police say, they found the bodies decomposed and partly eaten.
The incident in Limpopo Province, northeast of Johannesburg, has ignited debate over some of South Africa's most explosive issues:

race

,

gender-based violence

and the ongoing tensions over land between commercial

farmers

, who are often white, and their black neighbours - which have sometimes resulted in bloodshed.

A judge on Wednesday delayed a bail hearing until Nov. 6 for the farmer and the two workers, who are still in custody.
The victims, Maria Makgatho, 44, and Locadia Ndlovu, 35, trespassed on the farm in search of food in mid-Aug after a truck from a dairy company dumped expiring goods there, according to prosecutors.
The farm owner, Zachariah Johannes Olivier, and the farm supervisor, Andrian Rudolph De Wet, 19, both white, had planned to shoot any trespassers who came onto the property, prosecutors said.

A 45-year-old black worker at the farm, William Musora, is accused of helping to dump the bodies of the two women.
Black residents have held protests outside the courthouse, and politicians are issuing angry statements. For some, it speaks to the broader issue of South Africa's lingering disparities in

land ownership

. During apartheid, many black people were forced from their land, and today most major commercial farms remain under white ownership. Many black South Africans in rural areas continue to live in poverty, resorting to scavenging for food on farms. At the same time, many white farmers say that they have been the targets of persistent attacks by intruders, making some of them jittery about anyone perceived as a threat. Some on the extreme right have used those attacks to adopt outlandish rhetoric claiming a "white genocide."