A South African farm worker has delivered harrowing testimony in court, claiming he was forced by his employer to help dispose of two murdered women by feeding their bodies to pigs in a bid to destroy evidence.
According to BBC, Adrian De Wet, 21, told the Polokwane High Court that he had acted under orders from his boss, farm owner Zachariah Johannes Olivier, after the fatal shooting of Maria Makgato, 45, and Lucia Ndlovu, 34, on a farm near Polokwane, Limpopo Province, in August last year.
According to De Wet, he and Olivier had armed themselves with hunting rifles and lay in wait for what they described as "trespassers" on the night of 17 August 2024.
"After about 30 minutes, we heard voices. We opened fire. I heard someone scream," he told the court.
They returned to the area the following morning and discovered the body of a woman. De Wet testified that Olivier then instructed him to drag the body into a pig enclosure.
"He told me to throw her in. When pigs are hungry enough, they'll eat anything," De Wet said.
A second body was found roughly 25 metres away the next day and, according to De Wet, was also placed in the same pigsty, where between eight and ten adult pigs were kept.
When they checked the enclosure days later, he said, large parts of the victims’ bodies, including flesh from their faces, shoulders, thighs and buttocks, had been eaten. Graphic photographs presented in court confirmed extensive mutilation consistent with animal consumption.
De Wet further told the court that Olivier dismantled the hunting rifles using an angle grinder, burned the wooden stocks, and discarded the metal parts and spent cartridges down a borehole in an attempt to eliminate evidence.
It was said that De Wet himself was initially charged with murder but turned state witness after prosecutors accepted his claim that he acted under duress. He is now the key witness against Olivier, 60, and another accused, 50-year-old farmhand William Musora, both of whom deny murder.
The son of one of the victims, Makgato, broke down repeatedly as the gruesome details were heard, while Olivier was seen wiping away tears during De Wet’s testimony.
State prosecutor Advocate George Sekhukhune pressed De Wet on the motive for using the pig enclosure. "We were disposing of evidence. Because when pigs are hungry enough, they'll eat anything," De Wet replied.
The case has provoked national outrage and reignited fraught debates over race, land ownership and violence in rural South Africa.
Despite the formal end of apartheid three decades ago, tensions remain high in farming communities, where white farm owners retain vast landholdings and black labourers often live in poverty.
Many black South Africans have condemned the act as a dehumanising echo of apartheid-era brutality, while white farming groups say they fear a surge in retaliatory attacks.
Cross-examination of Olivier and Musora is expected to begin next Wednesday, as the country watches a case now seen as a grim symbol of South Africa’s unresolved racial trauma.
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