Presented as a thrilling piece of narrative non-fiction, ‘These are not gentle people’ tells the contrasting versions of what transpired the day Samuel Tjixa and Simon Jubeba were beaten to death on a plot outside Parys on January 2016 - dividing the Parys community in very much the same way that Coligny residents in North West were divided following the death of 16-year old Matlhomola Mosweu. He was accused of stealing sunflowers in 2017.

While justice is perceived to have been served in the Coligny case, with the North West High Court finding the accused in the matter, Phillip Schutte and Pieter Doorewaard,  guilty of Mosweu’s murder and sentencing them to 23 and 18 years in prison respectively in 2019, the same cannot be said for the 2016 Parys case. 

Harding’s book traces how Tjixa and Jubeba were accosted by a network of roughly 40 farm owners and beaten to death. This was after they got into a volatile altercation with elderly farm owner, Loedie Van Der Westhuizen on 6 January 2016, the motive of which remains unclear. He tells OFM News the case grabbed his attention like many other South Africans in 2016, and he realised there was more to the story than just “another farm attack”.

For one, some reports alleged the duo were would-be robbers, whilst others said the deceased were at Van der Westhuizen’s property that day, to demand their unpaid wages. It remains unknown what their exact intentions were. Harding leaves it open ended for the reader to make up their mind.

Loedie’s son Boeta was Tjixa’s former employer, and ended up being accused number one in the trial. In May of this year, the Free State High Court found Gert Van der Westhuizen, Anton Loggenberg, Lodewikus Van der Westhuizen, Cornelius Loggenberg and Gert Van Vuuren guilty of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm and defeating the ends of justice.

Boeta walked away scot-free from the entire incident.

Harding tells OFM News, the sentencing thereof is yet to take place. He says the trial wrapped-up over a year ago, and Judge Corne Van Zyl “was supposed to have delivered the summary verdict within three months, but it took more than a year for her to deliver a very rushed summary judgment during lockdown. She hasn’t delivered the full judgment and as a result the sentencing process has been delayed”, reveals the BBC correspondent.

He hopes that those reading the book will get a sense of what happened that fateful day and what should have happened in court as a result. He says the prosecution fully intends on appealing the judgement.

The initial working title of the book, was ‘Crater’s Edge’ - because the two deaths at the heart of the book took place on the eastern rim of the Vredefort Dome – a meteorite site.  However, it was one of the characters in the story – specifically Boeta’s wife Rikka – who ended up saying “these are not gentle people” in reference to the family members that turned state witness against her husband in the trial.

Harding says the title is in fact a very racialised one, and represents how residents in that area view one another as "those people".

OFM News