The phenomenon of farmers being murdered is a running sore in South Africa's body politic, poisoning relations between the predominantly white farming community and the mainly black African National Congress-led government.
Unless it is checked the poison will eventually permeate throughout the new South Africa, with disastrous implications for the brave new world that was born with the inauguration of Mr Nelson Mandela as the nation's first democratically-elected president on May 10th, 1994.
Figures collated by the South African Agricultural Union show more than 550 farmers and members of their families have been murdered in 2,355 attacks between January 1994 - the year in which the ANC came to power - and the end of last month. Statistically that means that not a day passes without a farm being attacked and that one member of the small farming community is slain every three days.
Two further points emerge on close examination of the statistics: first, they coincide almost totally with those garnered by the police; second, the victims are almost exclusively white and the attackers nearly always black. They provide the pillars for a broader conclusion: while the figures cannot be dismissed as misinformation disseminated by the white-controlled agricultural union, they impact negatively on race relations.
Not even Mr Mandela's 80th birthday and wedding celebrations last month escaped unscathed. One of his birthday/ wedding gestures was to release 9,000 prisoners across the country. Within hours of the release two freed prisoners attacked and murdered and an elderly farming couple, Flippie and Martie Greeff, near the Eastern Cape farming town of Hanover.
An ANC parliamentarian, Mr Limpo Hani, charged that "white journalists and white politicians" had sensationalised a complicated situation. Mr Fred Greeff, son of the murdered couple, retorted: "While the president and his family celebrated his birthday eating cake, these men walked free. Now my family is in mourning."
Since then the situation has been aggravated by controversy over a police report into the killings.
The report dismisses conjecture in the farming community that there is an underlying political motive behind the attacks, that they are prompted by an undeclared agenda to drive whites off the land.
After noting that there is no proof of an organised conspiracy to attack farmers and their kin, it concludes that "possibly the most influential factor" behind the onslaught is common-law crime.
Mr Mandela has used the report to once again voice his conviction that the government has been unfairly blamed for the attacks and unjustifiably criticised for "doing nothing" to halt them. Though Mr Mandela does not say so specifically, an implicit assumption behind the criticism is that the ANC-led government is either unable or, more ominously, unwilling to take effective action to stop the murderous assault on farmers.
His statements to the ANC's 50th national conference last December and, more recently, the National Council of Provinces, articulate his belief that his rightwing political foes are using criminal attacks on farmers to assail and discredit his government.
He predicts that the police report and a pending updating report - due to be released soon - will put paid to "propaganda and falsifications which have punctuated certain political campaigns".
Farmers, however, are unimpressed. The president of the Agricultural Union, Mr Chris du Toit, charges that the situation in the rural areas is "totally out of control and heading for total anarchy".
Mr Graham McIntosh, president of the union's provincial branch in KwaZulu-Natal, has threatened to launch a tax boycott by farmers to compel the government to take more decisive action, a threat which has been endorsed by Freedom Front leader, Gen Constand Viljoen, himself a farmer.
Whatever the precise causes of rural violence - and one astute observer has pondered whether South Africa is not witnessing the first phases of "the civil war" which did not take place in the early 1990s - its influence is noxious and potentially deadly.