Five years ago several young men broke into the South African home of Brisbane mortgage broker Arno Nel’s parents. They stripped the 66-year-old couple naked, tied them to chairs with phone cables and tortured them for three hours.

After they left, Nel’s father chewed through the cable and called for help from their neighbours. Three weeks ago the 51-year-old son Nel visited his father in Pretoria, where he is dying from a brain cancer that Nel believes was caused by the attack.

The Nels weren’t farmers. But they are white victims, a group whose collective plight has ignited a debate in Anglo-majority countries around the world: is South Africa’s former ruling race now the victim of a black majority?

The question resonates in Australia, one of the most popular destinations for emigre South Africans (who are more likely to be white because most blacks can’t afford to leave).

#WhiteGenocide

The answer, for many on the right, is yes. The plight of the white South African has become a rallying point for white supremacists, white nationalists and regular conservatives in the US, Europe and Australia.

Photographs of bashed white farmers have been splayed all over the internet. Atrocities are indexed using the hashtag #WhiteGenocide. “Killed because you’re white”, a headline in the Murdoch press said this week over horrific accounts of black-on-white violence.

Politicians appealing to white grievances in the West are using the farmers’ plight to bolster their support. In Australia they include former prime minister Tony Abbott, Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar and West Australia Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and Ian Goodenough, whose large South African constituencies have been energetic lobbyists for their white compatriots.

Political pressure

The pressure is working. In a speech to Parliament this week Goodenough compared white South Africans’ situation with the Syrians, where civil war has displaced half the population and killed some 400,000. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who is in charge of immigration, says they need the help “of a civilised country like ours”.

“I think these people deserve special attention and we’re certainly applying that special attention now,” he told conservative commentator Miranda Devine.

The trigger for the sudden outpouring of sympathy comes not from on-the-ground violence, which has been a reality for years. But the latest evolution in South African politics, where the African National Congress government is shifting to the left to undercut the black Marxist leader Julius Malema, who has big ambitions for next year’s national election.

Land appropriation

Pushed by Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters party, the South African parliament last month resolved to rewrite the constitution to redistribute land to black South Africans without compensation. The change, which deeply worries white farmers, would upend one of the basic principles of post-apartheid law.

There no certainty the change will go ahead. Even if the constitution is altered, President Cyril Ramaphosa may decide against appropriating white land. A parliamentary committee has been asked to report on the plan by August 30.

The underlying problem is a lot harder to fix: which is that 24 years of democracy has mostly failed to reduce rural and urban poverty or produce a less-unequal society. With little access to capital or formal training, many black farmers struggle to manage properties bought from whites by the state. The new owners often resort to subsidence plots.

One study found that recipients of farmland remain poor 17 years after being given land. Most are unable to generate a livelihood from agriculture and depend on state grants for survival. They often blame their failures on the government for a lack of “support”.

“Beneficiaries were able to rejoice at having their land back, but they have been unable to escape poverty,” says Ben Cousins, a professor of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. “Realistically, land and agrarian reform is unlikely to reduce the poverty of most rural people.”

Tribal chiefs

Land has powerful cultural connotations in South Africa. Even though only 14 per cent of the nation is arable, there is huge political pressure to increase blacks’ ownership of farmland, which official estimates put somewhere between 4 and 27 per cent.

Complicating the problem is that areas of farmland inhabited by 17 million blacks are owned or controlled by politically powerful tribal chiefs, who are reluctant to give it up. The Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, condemned an official recommendation in November that the trust which controls land in the former Zulu homeland be dissolved. Zwelithini is the custodian of the trust, giving him wide powers to allocate land use, according to Reuters.

Among political watchers, there seems to be an assumption that Ramaphosa would be unlikely to mimic Zimbabwe, where the seizure of white farms triggered an economic collapse. Two weeks ago Ramaphosa warned against farm invasions, although there is a little he can do in a practical sense in a country wracked by crime, most of which affects the black majority.

Socialist agenda

The stakes are high. South Africa feeds itself and is Africa’s largest corn producer and the world’s second-biggest exporter of citrus fruits.

A two-thirds majority is needed to change the constitution, which the ANC could do with the support of Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters party. Even though it only has 6 per cent of the seats in parliament, proportional voting gives Malema’s party an outsize influence in tight votes.

In most developed democracies, its socialist agenda to nationalise large parts of the economy would be on the political fringes. In South Africa, Malema taps into the resentment among millions of poor black South Africans through racially charged language, such as “We are accountable to our people not to whiteness”.

Right-wing media outlets such as the Daily Mail Online use his comments to stir up outrage among white people outside South Africa. An ex-One Nation senator from Queensland, Fraser Anning, recently said the white South African farmers were at “the start of a genocide”.

Unconventional refugees

Police statistics publicised by a South African politician, Pieter Groenewald, say there were 638 attacks on farms and 74 murders in 2016-17, which was higher than the previous year although lower than some earlier years, according to The Guardian. The figures were not broken down by race.

Although the public debate is focused on farmers, the Australian-South African community would like the government to make it easier for their families to emigrate regardless of their occupations.

The competition is great. Middle-class white English speakers aren’t conventional refugees, and there are millions already queued up.

More than farmers

Arno Nel, whose parents were tortured in Pretoria, says farmers deserve compassionate treatment by the Australian government, and so do other South Africans. “We’re asking for this to be expedited,” he says.

He is sensitive to claims the South Africans are seeking special treatment because of their skin colour. “When I say ‘please assist the farmers in South Africa’, ‘don’t assist people from other countries’ is not what we are saying,” he says.

Next Sunday several hundred South African immigrants plan to march through central Perth to draw attention to the circumstances facing farmers at home. Organisers have urged them only to fly the post-apartheid era national flag. “We don’t want the world to think we’re racists,” one of the organisers says.