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RE: Apartheid and I
Both of these articles seem to show the same conclusion that it's more of a criminal category dispute than a dispute over whether or not people are being murdered. The property must be "involved in agriculture" to be deemed a farm and there is no legal definition of a "farm murder". This does not mean that there isn't a grave danger for people who are living in rather rural environments which is what most farms are.
Farmers aren't being murdered at a higher rate than people in townships or suburbs, their isolation makes them easier to target but in context of all murder stats there's nothing special or "endemic" about farm murders.
that is my view from where I am sitting
Is there anything special about the manner that the murders are being carried out? The sheer brutal nature of the murders and the torture that the victims endure as well as the sexual violence would seem to suggest there is more hatred of the victims than just murder for robbery as opposed to murders that take place in townships or suburbs.
Robbers/burglars are generally sadistic and if you couple that with the isolation that a farm affords, which gives a perpetrator time, then you would get instances of torture etc.
However, there is some degree of animosity towards white farmers in particular, probably due in some part to the way in which they treat black workers which is well documented and has been for decades. If you read Sol Plaatjie's book 'Native Life in South Africa' (it's free online on Project Guttenberg and was published in the 1916) in which he details the unjust manner in which farmland was taken from Native South Africans (through the natives land act) as well as the barbaric manner in which workers were treated thereafter, you'll probably get a sense of where the animosity stems. That speaks to the nature of SOME of the killings and isnt a bigger factor than the burglars just having time but overall, there's no evidence of a 'white genocide' or a larger number of killings than anywhere else.