“Staging a farm murder: the imagined black perpetrator in Karin Brynard’s Weeping waters”

Reading Karin Brynard’s Weeping Waters, this paper focuses on the figuration of the imagined Black perpetrator. In this paper I argue that while murders on farms are a reality of the rampant violence across South Africa, the racialization of these murders as ‘Black on white’ racist attacks with intent of genocide, and the political campaign attached to it is part of a longstanding racial machination to ascertain white ownership of the land and to project Black people as an invasive threat. I consider how Brynard utilizes the red herring motif to expose the prevailing antiblackness that informs the farm murders rhetoric. I read the farm murders as akin to the back peril campaigns of the twentieth century.