South African famers need to adopt the old “bywoner” policy of offering accommodation to needy Afrikaner families to assist them and also to boost farm security, the president of the International Afrikaner Society (IAS), TJ Ferreira, has said.

Mr Ferreira, a former mayor of Boksburg, the third largest city in South Africa, pointed out on his organization’s website that South African farmers are regularly assaulted, dehumanized and subjected to extreme forms of torture regularly by white-hating black criminals.

“Almost nothing is done to protect them, or change this state of affairs,” he said.

“This leaves them at the point where they need to take care of themselves—an impossible task as a single family.

“I wish to call on our farmers, to have a look at the past, the days of the “bywoner”, the days when farmers would allow other white families to live in a second dwelling on their farms,” Mr Ferreira said, referring to the time in the early twentieth century, when many Afrikaners, impoverished by the tribulations of the Second Anglo-Boer War and post-war anti-Afrikaner discrimination, were given refuge on agricultural holdings by fellow Afrikaners.

“We have thousands of poor whites living in hazardous conditions in squatter camps. Most of them will give anything for a place where they could live a normal life,” Mr Ferreira continued.

“Farmers need to give something in order to gain something—in this case their security and safety.

“Farmers must do what their forefathers did—invite some of those dispossessed families to join them on the farms.

“There, they can set up decent housing, and maybe even cut out an acre or two where they can do a little farming on their own,” he said.

“In return, this will go a long way to assisting the host farmer to creating a safer environment for himself. Numbers create safety, and with more bodies moving around on your homestead—people you know—the less the chance of surprise attacks and ambushes.

“In this way, farmers can help fellow Afrikaners and themselves at the same time. Ask yourself this: How many more farmers have to die before we wake up and protect ourselves?”

South African Farmers Need to Adopt “Bywoner” Policies for Security