No Defense for Afrikaners

About three weeks ago, Kallie Kriel, the CEO of AfriForum, visited the United States to warn Americans about South African farm murders and the impending seizure of farmland. AfriForum is a moderate Afrikaner NGO (non-governmental organization) that gets considerable media attention here. However, after Mr. Kriel’s return, he was subject to hysterical denunciations that show that even the slightest dissent from ANC dogma must be suppressed.

AfriForum was founded in 2006 in an attempt to give Afrikaners and other minorities a voice in public affairs. It fights corruption, supports environmental protection, and wants to preserve the culture and heritage of South Africa. It also protests the murders of white farmers and opposes the proposed policy of taking land without compensation.

Under Mr. Kriel, AfriForum has become what may be the most financially successful Afrikaner NGO. It runs a call center that recruits dues-paying members through telemarketing. It claims more than 200,000 members, which would give it at least one million dollars in monthly income. It gets additional revenue by cross-selling insurance and other products. It reportedly has a staff of four PR women who keep AfriForum constantly in the news and on the airwaves.

Kallie Kriel and his deputy, Ernst Roets, used to be campus activists at Afrikaans universities before they founded AfriForum, where they have perfected a cocktail of rhetoric that combines pro-Afrikaans and pro-white elements with mainstream liberal and centrist clichés. For example, AfriForum is not only opposed to the ANC regime’s anti-white racism; it is “against all racism” and calls itself a “civil rights organization.”

During their American tour, Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets met National Security Advisor John Bolton, spoke to officials with USAID, and met with staffers for Ted Cruz. Ernst Roets was interviewed by Tucker Carlson of Fox News, where he spoke about farm murders and land seizure. What happened after they came back to South Africa casts an illuminating light on what this country has become.

As I have long argued, South Africa has been completely out of step with the rest of the Western world for decades. After World War II, we were governed by the National Party, which was religious and conservative. Sixties decadence and leftism hardly touched our shores, except in pockets of upper-class, English-speaking suburbs of Johannesburg and Cape Town. While American and European young people were taking drugs and fornicating, young Afrikaner men in Pretoria were ridiculed for wearing moustaches and listening to country music.

The situation is now reversed, with South Africa shifting further and further to the left amid signs of nationalism in both the United States and Europe. Only Cuba or North Korea are now as far-left as South Africa. The ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) first conquered us by means of terrorism and propaganda — which Muslims are trying to do in Europe — and then managed to make communism acceptable simply by changing words, not policy. Marxist revolution has been renamed “transformation,” with the added connotation of replacing whites with blacks.

The latest phase of South Africa’s revolution is the nationalization of farms. In classical Soviet style, the land would belong to the state, and workers’ committees would run farms, with former owners kept on for a transitional period as advisers. One of the regime’s theoreticians is a white British Marxist living in Cape Town, Professor Ruth Hall. A product of Oxford University, she wants all whites off the land, and commercial farmers would be replaced by African peasant farmers under a system of state-controlled “land use.” Prof. Hall draws up policy documents for the ANC and attends party meetings on how to confiscate land.

The ANC regime nevertheless wants multinational companies to invest in South Africa, in a kind of Chinese-style “capitalism-under-communist-control.” Therefore it has eschewed the N-word (nationalization) in favor of “Expropriation Without Compensation.” The media abbreviate this as EWC to make it sound innocuous. Increasingly, there is talk that EWC will apply not just to farms, but to urban land held by whites. Once the process is underway, it is easy to imagine how it would spread to suburban homes owned by whites.

Incidentally, Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF party supports the ANC regime’s new initiative, despite the ruin that the confiscation of white-owned farms brought. Zimbabwe’s government seems to think it simply “waited too long” — until the economy was already collapsing — to grab farms. It thinks the solution is to expropriate white property while the going is still good.

Probably, AfriForum saw the writing on the wall, and Mr. Kriel and Mr Roets tried to alert the Trump administration and conservative US media to South Africa’s slide into a Soviet- or Zimbabwean-style agricultural experiment. They turned the tables on the ANC’s constant litany about “white theft of black land,” and called nationalization “racist theft” of white — mostly Afrikaner — property by a black government.

Whites are considered politically marginal in South Africa, and ANC potentates almost never lower themselves to comment on their views. However, I suspect they have a vague sense of the power of propaganda, given that they took power not by force, but simply by vilifying the previous white government. The ANC and SACP’s worst nightmare must be that they could lose power as a result of bad publicity, just as the old National Party did.

So, when the AfriForum duo set foot back on home soil, they walked into a storm of criticism. Normally, a minister would never take notice of a lowly white-run organization lobbying for mercy, but Foreign Minister Lindiwe Sisulu (official title: Minister of International Relations and Cooperation) felt compelled to speak:

What we find very offensive, is when they exaggerate the situation… We have over and over indicated that the issue of land is in the Constitution. . .  The horror stories about what is going on in South Africa [are] blatantly false. . . . We condemn what they’re doing there and we ask them to stop.

The principal of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, Adam Habib, who is Muslim-Indian, was especially incensed over the meeting with John Bolton. He blasted AfriForum “for seeing a fascist” and posting a photo of the meeting: “[F]ascists destroy the world. He [Kallie Kriel] might as well have gone to the KKK, take a photograph with them and said check me out.”

The media fell into line against Mr. Kriel, who was more or less crucified on both the nation-wide Afrikaans radio, RSG, and on the Johannesburg-based left-wing talk-radio station, 702. On Afrikaans radio his attacker was Pieter du Toit, editor of the South African Huffington Post. Although an Afrikaner, Mr. Du Toit is soaked in white guilt and actively supports regime policy, especially confiscation.

The media had a fine time spreading skepticism about AfriForum’s statistics. The George Soros-funded NGO, Africa-Check, for example, routinely casts doubt on figures for farm murders and other crimes. Even when the Left admits that 4,000 white farmers have been killed since the beginning of black rule, the farmers are merely “normal victims of crime.” The notion that murder, rape, and robbery will somehow disappear once we have entered the bliss of true Marxist egalitarianism is now ingrained in South Africa.

On 702 Talk Radio the host was a Coloured (mixed-race) announcer named Eusebius McKaiser. One of his books is a kind of call to arms against whites called Run, Racist, Run! Not content with a one-on-one confrontation with Mr. Kriel, he made it three against one by inviting two other critics onto the program. Towards the end of the debate he asked Mr. Kriel whether “apartheid was a crime against humanity.” Mr. Kriel replied: “I don’t think it was a crime against humanity, but it was wrong.”

That was the sound bite the Left needed. All over the South African media — in print, online and over the airwaves — there were gasps of horror. A central tenet of ANC-SACP ideology is that whites committed a kind of holocaust against blacks from 1948 to 1994.

I pointed out some years ago that during the entire period of so-called “apartheid rule” in South Africa, fewer than 600 blacks were killed by police or security forces, either during riots or because they were attacking the police. This is the official figure established by the ANC’s own “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in an official report, after Nelson Mandela took power. At the end of colonial rule in Algeria and Kenya, the metropolitan countries’ police and military killed tens of thousands of Arabs and blacks. This has never been designated a crime against humanity.

Compared to the communists’ mass murders during the 20th century, of course, we treated rioting and looting blacks with kid gloves. This was despite the great capacity for violence of our black population — something most Western police forces would have found hard to handle. An ex-policeman who had worked with British, Belgian, and American law enforcement on public-order policing assured me that South Africa was in a category of its own when it came to the intensity of violence and destruction during riots and unrest.

For protecting private and public property — as well as black lives — we have been found guilty of a “crime against humanity” by means of a 1973 United Nations General Assembly resolution proposed by the USSR and Guinea. Crimes against humanity can be charged and tried in domestic and international courts, but no South African leader nor even a police or military officer has ever been charged with the “crime of apartheid.” But since we have never been informed of the details of the charge, it is impossible to prove our innocence. The usefulness of our alleged “crime against humanity” is therefore to justify the crimes committed against whites, including the confiscation of their property.

There is talk that once our new German-style “hate speech law” comes into effect, it will be a crime to deny that South African whites were guilty of a “crime against humanity.” White liberals and black elites were suitably outraged by Mr. Kriel’s blasphemy, including the idea that white farming families should not simply hand over their only asset, often cared for over several generations. As one black woman tweeted during the Eusebius McKaiser interview:

@Eusebius Afriforum is a racist organisation that is hellbent on preserving minority white privilege. The reason they feel like juju is a racist is because for former oppressors who are used to privilege, restorative justice feels like oppression to them. Eg Land and race issues

— Lerato Eseu (@Lerry_Eseu) May 14, 2018

“Juju” is the nickname of Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party, which wants everything to be nationalized and controlled by the party, as in the Soviet Union. As Miss Eseu explains, handing over your property is “restorative justice.” So is handing over your country. Why shouldn’t we just get it over with and hand over our lives?