“I used to think that kidnappings only happened in movies. I never thought that one day I'd beg for my life while a man with a panga pointed to my neck stood over me.”

This is how Mpumalanga farmer worker Isaac Khoza described his six-day hostage ordeal at the hands of three balaclava-clad men who had kidnapped him along with two female colleagues from a farm near in Komatipoort near the Mozambican border last Sunday. For almost a week, Khoza would witness his colleagues being beaten with sticks on the buttocks, fed only with bread while handcuffed together with wires. ..