My Father Deserves to Be Remembered
A few days ago, I came across The White Cross Project, an initiative compiling and verifying the names of people murdered in farm attacks in South Africa.
I went to the 1998 register and looked for one name.
Gerald James Barrett.
My father.
His name was not there.
The project itself acknowledges that its register is incomplete and has asked families to come forward where someone has been omitted, so I have written to them and submitted my father's details.
But doing so brought me back to something I have rarely felt the need to speak about publicly.
In August 1998, my father was attacked and shot on his property at Pomona Estates in Kempton Park. He was taken to Arwyp Medical Centre, where he died from his wounds.
My mother survived the attack.
She was there.
Nothing was taken.
For our family, there has never been any doubt about what happened. This was a racially motivated murder.
That is not a political position. It is not something I arrived at after reading statistics, listening to politicians or choosing a side in the argument that has developed around farm murders in South Africa.
It is what happened to my family.
When a human life becomes an argument
Farm murders have become deeply politicised.
The subject has travelled far beyond South Africa. In May 2025, it reached the Oval Office, where President Donald Trump confronted President Cyril Ramaphosa with allegations that white South Africans, particularly farmers, were being systematically targeted. President Ramaphosa rejected the claim of genocide and argued that South Africa faces a much broader crisis of violent crime affecting people across racial and geographic lines.
People will continue to argue about that.
They will debate the numbers, the terminology, the motives, the politics and whether one group is disproportionately affected compared with another.
I am not writing this reflection to settle that argument.
I don't need to.
I can only tell you what happened in one home, to one family, in August 1998.
A man was shot.
His wife survived to tell what happened.
His children lost their father.
Nothing was stolen.
And almost twenty-eight years later, none of those facts changes according to which political interpretation happens to be in favour.
Fact is fact.
There is something troubling about reaching the point where the suffering of an individual human being has to survive a political argument before we are prepared simply to acknowledge it.
My father existed.
He lived a life. He had a name. He had a wife and children and people who loved him.
Then someone took his life.
Surely we should be able to acknowledge that without first asking which political narrative his death supports.
I chose not to carry the hatred forward
There is another part of this story that matters just as much to me.
I did not spend the years that followed cultivating hatred for the people who killed my father.
That did not happen immediately or easily. There was grief, anger and the completely human desire for justice. The perpetrators were never identified or brought to justice.
But somewhere along the way I understood that I had a choice about what happened next — inside me.
I wrote about this in Chapter 13 of The Sovereign Self — From Becoming to Being, page 131:
“Violence had taken much. It did not have to take the capacity to love.”
Choosing not to hate did not mean deciding that what happened was somehow acceptable. Forgiveness did not require me to rewrite the past, excuse the perpetrators or pretend that the motive for the attack did not matter.
In fact, I came to understand almost the opposite.
Peace does not require denial.
I could refuse to carry hatred forward and still tell the truth about what happened.
Those two things are not contradictory.
Perhaps that distinction matters particularly now.
We seem increasingly to believe that acknowledging one person's suffering somehow diminishes somebody else's. It does not.
South Africa has endured terrible violence across every community. Black families have buried loved ones. White families have buried loved ones. People living in townships, suburbs, cities, villages and on farms have all known the devastation that violent crime leaves behind.
There is room in the human heart to grieve for all of them.
And within that larger tragedy there is also room to acknowledge honestly that some crimes have been motivated by race.
My father's was one of them.
Acknowledging that does not require hatred of anyone.
It requires honesty.
His name was Gerald James Barrett
That is ultimately why I am writing this.
Not to reopen an old wound.
Not to recruit my father's death into somebody else's political campaign.
And certainly not to ask anyone to hate on my behalf.
I am writing because I saw a register of people murdered in farm attacks and discovered that my father's name was missing.
He deserves to be there.
So do the other men and women whose names may still be absent.
And their families deserve something extraordinarily simple from the rest of us: compassion.
A mother who watched her husband die should not have to defend her grief.
A son should not have to establish the political usefulness of his father's death before asking that he be remembered.
Perhaps we could begin there.
My father was Gerald James Barrett.
He was murdered in August 1998.
My mother survived.
Our family continued.
I chose, eventually, not to carry hatred with me.
But choosing peace never required me to deny what happened.
My father deserves to be remembered.
The Sovereign Self — From Becoming to Being explores this same journey: how we meet what life has done to us without allowing it to determine who we become, and how we return to our own inner authority without denying the truth of what we have lived.
If you would like to read it, you can download the ebook free here:
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