Is South Africa becoming another Zimbabwe?

Over 1,700 white farmers have been killed since the end of apartheid.

This is the tale of three South Africans, all worried by the same thing. It won't be on the G8 agenda at Gleneagles this week, and has gone largely unreported. Yet it may hold the key to South Africa's future wellbeing.

Two are farmers - one white and one black. The other is a white policeman who is struggling to keep the peace. All are fearful and angry at the growing threat of a war over land.
Captain Manie Van Zyl
Police captain Manie Van Zyl has just eight men and two cars to patrol an area the size of Scotland

The white farmer is Louis Meintjes, who, every year, makes a pilgrimage up the steps of the giant Voortrekker Monument that looms over the verdant valleys near Pretoria. The monument commemorates the Great Trek, and most especially the Battle of Blood River, in which a small number of his Afrikaner ancestors defeated a vastly larger Zulu army in 1838. Mr Meintjes makes his annual visit to renew his own commitment to fight for the land he bought and has worked for the past 25 years. But he and his neighbours are under siege.

Countless white farmers have fled after a huge rise in farm attacks in the decade since the end of apartheid. As many as 1,700 white farmers have been killed, many with a brutality that has shocked the police investigating the cases. The farmers that remain are gripped by an epidemic of fear.

In Mr Meintjes' neighbourhood of just four square miles, in the northern Gauteng province, there have been a dozen attacks in the past two years, nine of them fatal. He heads the local armed self-defence unit, which uses mobile phones and radios to keep track of intruders. But in the long grass and vast open plains, it is easy to hide.

Men such as Mr Meintjes believe that the campaign against them is orchestrated by the ruling ANC government, whose purpose is to drive them off the land in a Zimbabwean-style land grab, albeit disguised by legal powers.

Payete Ndlovana, the black farmer, explains the violence as revenge for the sins of apartheid. He and his family were kicked off their farm more than 30 years ago and since 1994 he has vainly tried to recover it.