The last straw for Michael Mogale and Peet Van Staden came on a brisk, clear morning in mid-April when they found themselves standing over a dead body.
Splayed on the edge of a wheat pasture two hours north of Johannesburg, the victim had bloodstains on his face after being beaten to death with wooden sticks. His cheeks, eyes and lips were swollen to a pulp.
Mr. Mogale, who is Black, and Mr. Van Staden, who is white and Afrikaner, arrived at this dreadful moment from different backgrounds, but found common ground in the need to stop the violence afflicting South Africa.
With a murder rate about six times that of the United States, Africa’s largest economy has a serious crime problem; that is not in dispute. But in the months leading up to this murder in a rural community near the town of Brits, President Trump had been misrepresenting the violence to support his immigration policy.
Mr. Trump has suggested that Afrikaners, who descend from European colonizers, are being targeted in “a genocide,” though police statistics show that to be untrue. He has used the claim to justify punishing South Africa with high tariffs, cutting aid to the country and making Afrikaners virtually the only group allowed to seek refugee status in the United States.
Most recently he said he would boycott the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg this weekend because of the Afrikaner issue.
None of the politics mattered to the two men standing over the body. Mr. Van Staden, a third-generation farmer, owned the farm where the killing happened; the victim, a Black father from neighboring Malawi, worked there as a security guard. Mr. Mogale, a mining consultant, lived across the road in an all-Black settlement of mostly tin shacks, where the community had grown fed up with crime and feared they could suffer the same fate as the security guard.
Residents along this stretch of vegetable farms surrounded by heaping granite mines say crime affects everyone — Black and white, rich and poor — and all they wanted was for the perpetrators to be caught and handed over to the police.
South Africa’s national police force is stretched so thin that officers struggle to monitor rural areas like Brits. It can take hours to respond to emergencies. Citizen-led community groups often step in to fill the void.
Groups made up mostly of Afrikaner farmers usually patrol the vast network of farms in their pickup trucks, while Black residents typically monitor their settlements on foot. But Mr. Mogale and Mr. Van Staden decided that the only way to make things safer was to join forces.
“We must stand together and take out these criminals,” Mr. Van Staden recalled telling Mr. Mogale and his neighbors from the settlement.
“That’s the only thing that will work,” Mr. Mogale replied, “for us to work together.”
The Informal Farm Settlements
After the murder on his farm, Mr. Van Staden connected Mr. Mogale with Janus Fourie, the leader of the Crocodile Community Policing Group, a volunteer safety patrol. Established in 2016, Crocodile consists mostly of white farmers like Mr. Van Staden, who tote high-powered rifles, fly drones and use night vision cameras.
Mr. Mogale and Mr. Fourie met at a gas station next to where the security guard had been killed and quickly struck up a pact. Mr. Mogale and his neighbors would try to find out who was behind the crime in the area, and Mr. Fourie and his team would help them apprehend potential suspects and turn them over to the police.
“Michael, he’s not afraid. He’s a strong leader,” Mr. Fourie said of Mr. Mogale. “That helps a lot because the people will listen to him. If I go in there, the people are not going to listen to me, the white guy.”
Mr. Mogale lives in one of South Africa’s many informal settlements, vestiges of apartheid when the government restricted where Black South Africans could live. Black workers, whose cheap labor was needed on farms, would build shacks out of corrugated metal and set up informal encampments along the edges of farmlands to be closer to work.
Criminals who attack the surrounding farms now live in settlements — and they pillage them, too.
Though he can afford to live elsewhere, Mr. Mogale chose to move into the settlement because it’s where his wife lived when they met, and she preferred staying in a rural area. He built his family a single-level house of cinder blocks and plaster, with Spanish-style roof tiles, solar panels and a water tank feeding into his taps. It is by far the grandest home in a settlement with no piped water or electricity connections. Over time, his neighbors began to see him as a community leader. He would hear stories about who had done what and who lived where, the type of intelligence only residents could get.
Days after the meeting with Mr. Fourie at the gas station, a resident told Mr. Mogale and a community patrol team of about 20 people that he had witnessed the killing. He pointed the team toward a row of tin shacks where he said the perpetrators lived.
Later, Mr. Mogale led the group toward the row of shacks. They spotted several men on a dirt lot beneath a towering ivory tree, huddled around a fire.
‘Burning Them With Irons’
Mr. Mogale started rallying his neighbors to fight crime a few weeks before the security guard was killed. He had been jolted awake in the middle of the night by banging outside of his house. With his 9-millimeter gun in hand, he tiptoed toward the door while his pregnant wife remained nervously tucked in bed.
He heard footsteps outside, but whoever it was eventually ran away. The episode left his wife so anxious that she thought she would have a miscarriage, she said.
More than 25,000 people were murdered in South Africa in the previous 12 months, according to police statistics. Most of the victims were Black. Only 42 of those killings — less than two-tenths of 1 percent — occurred during farm attacks.
“The first lie is that white South Africans are being targeted,” Mr. Mogale said. “For myself as a Black South African, I suffer more crime than anyone.”
Many Afrikaners say the numbers don’t tell the whole story. They say they continue to be demonized for the racist Afrikaner-led apartheid system, and face blame for the country’s lingering economic disparities.
White South Africans are just 7 percent of the population but own most of the country’s privately held farmland. Such disparities fuel resentment that some Afrikaners believe makes them a target of violence.
“It’s more aggressive. They’re burning them with irons,” Mr. Van Staden said, referring to cases where white farmers have been burned with clothing irons during robberies. “Is that something to send a message?”
About eight years ago, five intruders broke into the farmstead where Mr. Van Staden’s sister lived with her husband, son and mother. The assailants put guns to their heads, tied them up and struck them several times, he said.
Both Mr. Van Staden and his sister fortified their properties afterward with palisade fencing, cameras, dogs, security doors and lights, he said. At night he keeps his gun next to his bed rather than in the safe.
Mr. Mogale said his sister and brother were both murdered in rural settlements, and that the killings were never solved.
As he and his neighbors charged toward the men sitting around the fire, some fled into thick brush near a lake along the settlement’s western edge, Mr. Mogale said. The residents quickly seized the others.
Mr. Fourie arrived with his patrol team about 15 minutes later. The team flew a drone toward the lake in search of those who ran. After the flight operator spotted someone, the patrollers took off in pursuit.
The drone pilot gave directions over a radio: Go left, go right! Be careful, he’s close by!
The group came upon a man hiding in the bushes who immediately dropped his machete, seeing that he was outnumbered. The patrollers detained him and called the police.
When Mr. Mogale and his team searched the men’s shacks, they found what some farmers identified as stolen goods from their properties: a truck battery, a wheelbarrow, weed eaters and other tools.
As they waited for the police to arrive, the group began interrogating the men, who initially were uncooperative. Some of the patrol members slapped the men hard until they talked, Mr. Mogale said. They quickly admitted to the murder and to theft, and shared the names of other accomplices.
Hours later, the police arrived and arrested two of the men. Mr. Mogale’s team handed over the items they found. Everyone seemed to collectively exhale, but the relief didn’t last long.
Back on the Streets
South Africans have reason not to trust the police.
They complain of officers showing up hours late, or not at all. While they wait, people are sometimes tempted to deal with criminals themselves, leading to mob justice. Under these circumstances, South Africans have become desperate for better solutions.
A week after the arrests by Mr. Mogale and the others, one of the men was spotted back in the settlement. Both of the arrested men had been released because of insufficient evidence, a police spokesman said, adding that the investigation into the murder was continuing.
Residents were incensed.
As they saw it, they had delivered a case on a silver platter. Rather than wait for the police to follow through with the investigation, some community members decided to confront one of the men.
They took all of his belongings and those of the people he lived with out of their shacks, put them on the street and told them to leave. Members of the patrol group razed the shacks, leaving behind only the concrete foundations.
“Listen, we told you not to come here again,” Mr. Mogale recalled them telling the men. “Please leave.”
Since the patrols, Mr. Van Staden said thefts had stopped on his farm, where he plants 320 acres of wheat and soybeans. He has been busy renovating a house on the property for his daughter and her family to move into. He has hired a security company with armed guards who patrol the farm in a van — the guard who was killed only had a flashlight and patrolled on foot.
“The farmers are saying nothing happens, nothing disappears anymore,” Mr. Fourie said. “Everyone is very, very happy.”
But whatever relief Mr. Mogale and the other residents of the settlement felt has vanished.
In early September, Mr. Mogale got a call from a police detective asking him to come to the station. When he arrived, he said, he was told he was being charged with malicious damage to property for the destruction of shacks belonging to the men accused of the murder and theft. He was one of several members of his community patrol to be charged.
Mr. Mogale denies involvement in the destruction of the property and asked why the police were charging residents who were trying to fight South Africa’s runaway crime.
“Nobody’s going to talk to them” after the next killing, he said.
Community patrols have stopped for now. And that, Mr. Mogale said, is just what the criminals want.
John Eligon is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, covering a wide range of events and trends that influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa.
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