Land reform and ‘Boerehaat’

roodt_dan_wikiby Dan Roodt

Proletarian internationalism has never really inspired the so-called “silent majority” in South Africa, so it must count as one of the failures of the Left that they never actually persuaded “the masses” to wave hammer-and-sickle flags and demand instant collectivism.

However, most of what passes in SA for leftist politics is ethnic politics. Behind the so-called “land issue” is the land owners, the majority of whom happen to be Afrikaners. Now, those are the people the Left loves to hate, as in “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer”, “dubula ibhunu” and the other versions in ten official languages, except Afrikaans. Although, given that the editor of Beeld has now succumbed to vilifying the university-age children of his own readers as “Nazis”, there might be some official Afrikaans version of “skiet die Boer vrek, ons soek sy grond” quite soon.

Surprisingly little has been written about the phenomenon of Boerehaat or “hatred of the Boers” as it exists in South Africa, Britain, Australia and many other Commonwealth countries. It is at least as pervasive as anti-Semitism and is characterised by:

  • denying that Afrikaners exist as a nation or ethnic group,
  • considering them to be inferior or less intelligent than other white nations (especially the English);
  • seeing Afrikaners as “in-bred” or “parochial” and not cosmopolitan enough;
  • seeing Afrikaners as “inherently evil” and therefore without any legal claim to land or other property in South Africa;
  • considering Afrikaans to be a “mixture of languages” or a bastardised Creole without any cultural, literary or aesthetic value (whereas linguistically Afrikaans is perhaps the purest of all the Germanic languages).
A slew of Boerehaat photographers seek out "ugly" subjects as representative of Afrikaners, such as this photo by American Roger Ballen
A slew of Boerehaat photographers seek out “ugly” subjects as representative of Afrikaners, such as this photo by American Roger Ballen

The Boerehaat game has now been going on for so long that everyone in South Africa is very comfortable playing it. Just about everything has been taken from Afrikaners except their very lives and a few family-owned farms that still produce what South Africans buy in the supermarkets. However, the supermarkets and especially the dairy companies have squeezed the farmers to such an extent that milk is actually produced at a loss so that soon all milk will be imported, laced with imported powdered milk which may or may not contain all kinds of other substances.

The destructive rage of the South African Left compares very well with that of the Soviet revolutionaries whom Solzhenitsyn accused of killing 63 million Russians or Mao’s Red Guards or Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge who also desired a “big transformation”.

 Most of what passes for SA history these days is a Marxist fairytale of the class struggle, which has been conveniently racialised to fit in with American race ideology that sees whites as inherently evil (being “racists”) and blacks as innocent victims of such congenital white evil.

Who really knows what happened in 1913 when the so-called Land Act was passed? Once you throw out the Deeds Office in your red fervour, you are left with competing “land claims” which will be decided by whom will get the most hysterical in denouncing the evil of his adversary. Now, the South African Left are also terrorists, as we know. If we define terrorism of the Church Street or Amanzimtoti bomb variety as “talking with the megaphone of amputated limbs”, we can already predict that a group of diffident farmers quietly appealing to economic rationality will lose the shouting match even before it begins. In fact, they have already lost it. So we know what is coming and it will be ugly for all concerned. More radicalism, more farm murders, more sadistic violence which will eventually tear down the vestiges of Roman-Dutch or “colonial law” that remain in this agonising society.

The Marxists feel cheated out of the second phase of the revolution and then the evils of apartheid get bigger and bigger the further we move away from it in time.  So the Boerehaat is constantly rising and the propaganda just keeps coming. The beast and its bloodlust have not been sated yet.

Most Afrikaners now believe that some kind of violent upheaval or civil war or apocalypse in South Africa is inevitable. You just have to read all the underground novels that mainstream publishers won’t touch and that outsiders do not even know about, Afrikaans having been declared officially dead, especially now that it is being extirpated at the tertiary level.

I find it ironic that the radio journalist Stephen Grootes should mention Robespierre in his article Land reform: Still caught up in politics, as I have often thought that the years since the mid-1980s will in future Afrikaner history be known as The Terror or “La terreur”. We are already in it and there seems to be no end in sight. Every day brings news of new atrocities being committed in the countryside.

Last night someone contacted me from Richards Bay where a young Afrikaner girl of 16 had been kidnapped by two black men and sexually molested by them, although by some miracle she was not raped. There is no police protection worth mentioning as the police are also black and therefore often sympathetic to criminals and not to their white victims. So the girl and her single mother had to look for help on Facebook. Fortunately people responded to their plight but they have fled their home and are hiding elsewhere. The girl has to write matric this year, while she cowers in someone else’s house, wondering when her “liberators” will be back.

This is what South Africa has come to: a country where law and order are increasingly falling by the wayside. But our zealous leftists want more revolution, stirring up more hatred every day.

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Deconstructing the Boerehaat outburst

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by Dan Roodt

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We have a unique English population in South Africa. On the one hand, they are the most politically radical. On the other, some are partially Afrikanerised and bilingual. Just today I was listening to one of them speaking fluent Afrikaans on RadioSonderGrense, just about perfect, with a soupçon of an English accent. At least fifty percent of English-speakers in South Africa have a knowledge of Afrikaans, the highest figure for any anglophone population in the world. A much smaller percentage of them speak French in bilingual Canada and a much smaller proportion of Britons speak any of the other languages of the European Union to which they belong.

Somewhere in 2000 Régis Débray, the French essayist and philosopher and one-time chronicler of Ché Guevara visited South Africa. We immediately hit it off and he was absolutely fascinated by some of my theories on Africanism, the return to the origin, as well as a short introduction to Afrikaner thinking. I remember the local French Institute getting irritated as he was falling behind schedule as a result of our lengthy discussion.

One of the things he said I remember to this day: that no “Anglo-Saxon society” had ever succumbed to totalitarian ideas. Unlike Germany, Italy, Russia and much of Eastern Europe of course. He ascribed it to something that Orwell also wrote about: the common sense of the Englishman, his disdain for complex philosophical or ideological systems. In Orwell’s words:

Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this.

However, I think I must write to Débray that he and Orwell were wrong, at least in some respects. The Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the local English-speaking population divides into both a good-natured, polite, hospitable, outdoorsy type (like Afrikaners) and a more sinister, scheming, obsessive, greedy bunch oozing bad faith and hatred. I have experience of both kinds. Suffice it to say that the Mr. Hyde-style English person has caused us untold suffering; he or she is usually in the forefront of inciting hatreds of all kinds, advocating war or terrorism, social engineering on a vast scale, collective punishment and, last but not least, Boerehaat.

Ironically, while abjuring ethnicity, race and any form of patriotism, considered “fascist”, the leftist kind of Englishman reacts ethnically, viscerally to any form of “other” on the horizon. I have seen it many times, including over the past week with a motley collection of silly scribes and armchair activists lashing out at the Red October protest and campaign.

It bears repeating: the South African anti-racist is the biggest racist of them all! Their compulsive rejection of the (white) other is so fanatical, so obsessive, so pathological even that it borders on the insane. Not only do they hate Afrikaners, but also Southern Americans, Scots, French (the “Frogs”), Germans (the “Krauts”), the Dutch who are by definition “dumb”, Italians, Greeks, etc. While embracing political radicalism, Marxism (espcially the “vulgar” kind), egalitarian extremism, they still subscribe to nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon supremacism. Albert Brenner recently reminded us of Cecil John Rhodes’s famous statement:

I contend that we British are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…

However, as an old Boer who participated in the first Anglo-Boer said: “I have seen the colour of the English flag and it is white.” The mythical victory of Wellington over Napoleon at Waterloo was largely won with German mercenaries. Hence the form of the ongoing low-intensity conflict between the English radical and the Afrikaner in this country: Besides placing bombs in public places or Wimpy restaurants, terrorism being the method of the coward, his main form of combat is in the propaganda department, a job which is also eminently suitable for women.

I could go into the vile history of the so-called “armed blacks” of the Anglo-Boer when the invading English army introduced interracial rape as a weapon of war into our pristine land, and you will get an understanding of English “warfare” which resembles the atrocities of a Charles Taylor or some Congolese warlord avenging himself on defenceless women and children. The point is that the English radical does the incitement and the “psy ops” but lets others do the fighting, or even the protesting.

A few months ago I observed this at close quarters outside the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. There were a few English radicals outside the court, speaking on cellphones, summoning their rented black crowd who duly arrived to toyi-toyi about “racism” in Afrikaans schools. A lone Afrikaner armed only with a camera, I confronted the black crowd and asked them why they weren’t singing “Dubula iBunu” (Shoot the Boer) because I was in attendance. But apparently that was not on the programme, to my great disappointment.

The Englishman and -woman, being cowards, would never confront us directly. They would always summon some or other rent-a-crowd or bused-in mob to protest or sometimes commit some horrible sadistic act, such as an intimidatory necklace murder. “Kill one, scare a thousand,” said Mao and of course the English radical has embraced this principle to the hilt.

Despite her surname, Gillian Schutte is as English and as radical as they come. Echoing the South African Communist Party, she has delivered the latest screaming denunciation of the Red October protest, aptly entitled Seeing Red. As confessions of Boerehaat go, it demonstrates a few things. The lack of culture and intellectualism that Orwell routinely ascribed to his countrymen, would be one of them. In fact, when the new, radical government took over in 1994, one of the first things that Kader Asmal, a miserable Indian and zombie warlord of the British Empire, did was to confiscate the classical-music instruments at Afrikaans schools. That vindictive, philistine act was surely not only his idea, but must have been decided by some English committee somewhere. No doubt the committee must have been consumed with envy and hatred at seeing our beautiful children singing in choirs and operettas, as naturally “musical as Italians or Germans” (see Orwell quote above) and playing their instruments with that quiet seriousness which is so characteristic of the Afrikaner child, as opposed to the ill-discipline, the boisterous and disrespectful, often drug-ridden anomie of the modern “English” child.

Many English bands build a career on about three guitar chords, as opposed to our famous pianists who perform Chopin or Beethoven the world over. The annual Unisa international piano competition is the highlight of the Afrikaner social calendar in Pretoria. However, English music, like English food, is loud and repetitive. Gillian Schutte does not have three chords. She only has one, strident, false note: “racism”. Karl Marx turned Hegel “on his head” in order to give us the class struggle, but even that simple idea is too complex for our local Rooinek Reds. (“Aanstap Rooies, die pad is lank en swaar…” goes the Afrikaans folk song, the existence of folk songs being another sign of our innate “fascism”.) Their natural inclination is to a kind of Spanish-Inquisition denunciation of the heretic. I think I have already pointed out the resemblance between the primitive and literal South African witch-hunt during which the offending man or usually woman is “sniffed out” by a sangoma and current attempts to identify and isolate dissidents or “racists” in order to publicly pillory or perhaps even physically harm them.

Gillian Schutte is the sangoma of the Johannesburg Left. According to her, the “Red October (campaign is).. becoming their own worst enemies as they buy into the construct of an imaginary genocide and declare a hate-filled discursive war against the entire black population”.

In essence, Schutte is calling for a black mob or impi to come and “sort out” the white, Afrikaner racists.

“But where is the outrage?” she laments. She claims that someone had called President Jacob Zuma (whose strongly Zulu identity most Afrikaners actually approve of, as being in keeping with their own ideas about acceding to modernity through one’s own culture and not a foreign one) a “Kaffer dog”. It is obvious that hordes of English “cyber warriors” in the form of agents provocateurs will try to frame Afrikaner dissidents by posting “racist” statements all over Facebook in the next few weeks, so that Schutte and her fellow racial cheerleaders may appeal to black racial identity which they keep in a wounded, rancorous state through endlessly harping on “apartheid”, “our dark past” and similar Gothic tales that are mostly fiction, interspersed with a few half-truths here and there.

To the “progressive English white”, blacks are but dogs to do his bidding, in taking the fight to the enemy: the patriotic Afrikaner who refuses to leave or disappear, or to wither away and die. At the end of the Anglo-Boer war, the British high command was flooded with letters from irate Natalians and Capetonians who did not want Britain to stop but to “cleanse the country for England” and proceed to a complete genocide of the Boer population, man, woman and child. In the concentration camps there was a concerted attempt to stamp out the Afrikaans language and identity. As E.B. Sargent wrote to Lord Milner in 1903:

We must appeal to England and the brothers and sisters of those who have fought for the Empire, asking them to come over to carry out that part of the work which their kinsmen were not able to complete. Our military operations have resulted in the greater part of the boys now remaining in the camps, and I am convinced that we have no better opportunity than now to make them all English-speaking next year … What we now require here are women, highly capable teachers with strong patriotism who would be willing to come hither and face the hardships of the camp life, in order to teach the children of the burghers our language and our ideals. Gradually these children should also be taught our great Imperial ideals.

Chris Louw overheard Alistair Sparks on an aeroplane, saying something similar, that Britain had made a singular mistake in not killing all Afrikaners when she had had the opportunity. Underlying the anti-racist discourse of the anglophone Left are the most archaic prejudices against the “European”, the non-English, as well as the Afrikaner – speaking his “guttural tongue” as it has been dubbed in so many trashy English novels written in this country.

In South Africa the colonial genocide of the nineteenth century meets the “progressive” genocides of the twentieth and they intermingle, eclectically, syncretistically. The British camp commander and rapist of Boer girls in their early teens meets Winnie Mandela with her box of matches and together they dance around the bonfire screaming their Rwandan chant from La Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines: “Kill the cockroaches!” Is it pure coincidence that Natal, source of all those genocidal letters, also has a “Valley of a Thousand Hills”? Cue in Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao’s Red Guards and you have the picture. I have always maintained that South Africa is a dumping ground for worn-out but dangerous ideologies from the rest of the world, such as communism or, in this case, American race ideology with its anti-white bias.

No-one in the petty-minded phalanx of the South African Left understands what the term “deconstruction” actually means, yet it has become one of those buzz-words circulating like a rumour or a piece of gossip. Let me not enlighten the benighted necklacists of Wits or UCT in their postcolonial trance.

Except, perhaps, for pointing out or performing one small piece of Abbau. Haha, it almost sounds like the Khoi loanword in Afrikaans and the name of Swedish pop group, “abba”.

Race, we are told by the leftist mob, is a social construct. Yet in their response to Afrikaner dissidence and protest in being led to the slaughterhouse – no longer are we lambs – the Left appeals very strongly to race and racial identity.

“Where is the outrage?” screams Gillian Schutte, meaning the outrage of blacks who should respond to her clarion call of race and a deep, biological identity. Jonathan Jansen, whom I call the clown of Bloemfontein, has published a collection of clichés called “Knowledge in the blood”. Yet, the Left, with its internationalist-Marxist, globalist, deculturated, we-are-all-the-same bombast, is actually appealing to the most basic of instincts: blood and racial rage.

Will the black hordes assemble for the witches’ sabbath of the white feminists? Are the Bantu that stupid?

That anyone should risk the future of South Africa in proving a point to a few Afrikaner protestors with red balloons is, of course, another indication of just how certifiably insane Ms. Hyde has become. Are we on our way to a Rwanda, a Katyn Wood, a Khmer Rouge Cambodia, a Maoist Cultural Revolution?

The sinister South African Left has always craved corpses in the streets, which it had after the Church Street bomb, as well as its ill-fated march on Bisho. The cold-blooded murder of the three AWB men in Bophutatswana by a black policeman is still relished as the crowning glory of its achievement.

To see a white man begging for his life before an armed black (or a mob), represents the ultimate English-leftist fantasy. Farm murders, as well as the shooting of Afrikaner children like Kayla Rawsthorne, Danielle Esterhuizen, Willemien Potgieter, Alyssa Botha and others by roaming young black “freedom fighters” sates, at least for a few moments, the bloodlust of the colonial “Reds” in this part of the world.

Afrikaners (and moderate whites generally) should keep cool heads, but also be aware that even the continued existence of Afrikaans government schools inspires an ethnic reaction which can become dangerous if left unchecked. We have already seen at Heidelberg, Fochville and other places how seemingly placid communities may be swept up through racial and ethnic rhetoric, disguised as “anti-racism”.

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