Killings of S. Africa farmers a toxic apartheid legacy

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By ReutersERMELO, South Africa -- In a country cursed by one of the world's highest murder rates, being a white farmer makes a violent death an even higher risk.

Whether attacks have been motivated by race or robbery, a rising death rate from rural homicides is drawing attention to the lack of change on South Africa's farms nearly two decades after the end of apartheid -- and to the tensions burgeoning over enduring racial inequality.

Some of South Africa's predominantly white commercial farmers go as far as to brand the farm killings a genocide.

'Potentially explosive' issue

On the other side of the divide, populists are seizing on the discontent among the black majority to demand a forced redistribution of white-owned farms along the lines of neighboring Zimbabwe.

NBCNews