Dragging death farmer gets 25 years

A white farmer in South Africa has been jailed for 25 years for brutally killing a black employee.

A court in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal province, heard that in January 1997, Eicker Henning had first whipped and kicked the farmworker, Ndelwa Kepisi Mgaga, before giving him electric shocks from a cattle prod.

Henning then tied a rope around Mr Mgaga's neck and dragged him 500 metres (yards) to his death along a gravel road behind a pick-up truck.

Mr Mgaga had apparently admitted stealing farm equipment.

The prosecution said Henning, 41, had shown no remorse but the case did not warrant a life sentence.

Judge Percival McLaren, however, said Henning had become very emotional when he talked about leaving the body beside the road, and that he took that to be remorse.

Murderous brother

Henning is not alone in his family to have been convicted of lethal brutality towards blacks.

His brother, Pieter, a former soldier in the South African army, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in June 1999 for killing two black farmworkers in KwaZulu-Natal in 1996.

Abelina Ntjantja, whose husband Mosoko Rampuru was murdered in a separate incident

Their headless bodies were exhumed and they were found to have been shot and driven over before being buried.

Pieter Henning had been convicted the previous year of strangling another black labourer on a separate occasion in 1996.

The father of the two men also faces charges of conspiracy to murder the investigating officer and witnesses in Pieter Henning's case.

In August of this year another white farmer, Piet Odendaal, was charged with the killing of a black employee, Mosoko Rampuru, who had been dragged to his death behind a pick-up for several kilometres.

That case, which occured in Sasolburg in Free State province, is continuing.