Public discourse about South African farm violence on Facebook

Abstract

Farm attacks have become highly politicised in South Africa. According to certain groups, the attacks are racially motivated, constituting hate crimes, whereas others sense they represent a larger crime predicament in the country and do not deserve special treatment. Research on farm violence in South Africa approached it from a criminological, sociological, and psychological angle. In these studies, farm violence is explored as a crime category and as part of the larger concern of settler colonial rhetoric. The psychological effects are explored in psychology. Dissertation-level publications directing this topic as critical discourse analysis are in media studies and not linguistics. These studies allude to linguistic elements, complimentary to the overarching theme of how information is shared about farm violence online. One of these studies addressed some of the specific lexical items used to address farm attacks on Facebook; however, these items were explored within a framework of encoding and decoding, and the intention of their exploration was to observe how audiences read and interpret media content. Neither of these studies specifically addressed the emotive language of farm violence. The research conducted in this study therefore adopted a different approach to farm violence discourse by employing evaluative theory. This study is substantiated in systemic functional linguistics and explores South African farm violence discourse on a semantic level by focusing on evaluative language. It investigated the evaluative language across three Facebook pages with polarised stances on farm violence. The two major stances identified are 1) farm violence is a part of the larger crime problem in South Africa and is not racially motivated, and 2) farm violence is racially motivated, indicating a White genocide in the country. Two instances of farm violence were explored, indicating the Senekal and the Mkhondo incident. In the Senekal incident, the victim of the farm violence was White. In the Mkhondo matter, the victims were Black. The study adopted an adapted evaluative framework to explore the evaluation parameters within these texts. Evaluative theory was chosen as a research method, allowing for the tackling of the finer, especially emotive, nuances of meaning in language, which is crucial when exploring online language. As expected, across the posts, the GOOD-BAD parameter was utilised the most at 54.63% in total, followed by the IMPORTANCE parameter at 20.37%, the CERTAINTY parameter at 17.13%, and the EXPECTEDNESS parameter at 7.87%. As expected, across the comment sections, the GOOD-BAD parameter was also utilised the most at 41.19% in total, followed by the CERTAINTY parameter at 24.75%, the IMPORTANCE parameter at 17.31%, and the EXPECTEDNESS parameter at 16.74%.Two main themes were explored, indicating ethnicity and role players. The subthemes involve hate, fear, and a call to defend the ‘greater good’. As evidenced by the hostile comments towards individuals with differing stances, the discourse about South African farm violence on Facebook is emotional, racial, and polarised and calls for violence towards the other side. Within these stances, larger South African issues, such as land reform and identity, are discussed. The Facebook page adopting the stance that farm violence is a sign of a larger crime problem in the country, implicated the farmers and the legacy of apartheid as the cause of farm violence. The Facebook page adopting the stance that farm violence is racially motivated implicates the government and the Economic Freedom Fighters as the cause of farm violence.