Posted on 05/19/2004 3:42:30 PM PDT by Eurotwit
White farmers are taking courses in survival after hundreds of murders
LAURA DE JONGE admits that she does not like guns. But screwing up her face in anticipation of the recoil from her pistol the 15-year-old schoolgirl knows she must come to terms with her demons. “My parents wanted me to come on this course,” she said. “We have guns at home. But you need to know what you’re doing. There are so many attacks on white farmers these days, you have to be prepared for the worst.”
Gathered on a remote farm in Limpopo, close to the Botswana-Zimbabwe border, Laura is one of 40 Afrikaners who signed up for this month’s farm attack survival course, designed to protect the white farming community from what they call “the second genocide”. More than 1,600 white farmers have been murdered on their farms since the end of apartheid a decade ago.
The participants, aged from 10 to 70, pay 285 rands (£25) for the three-day course, bring their own firearms and 100 rounds of ammunition and receive the best training that farm attack survival instructors can offer.
“We teach everything you need to know to defend yourself,” Annette Kennealy, 35, a mother of two who helps to organise the course said. “From the laws regulating firearms, firing at an attacker while driving, and how to read the signs of an impending farm attack,” she added.
Mrs Kennealy, a farmer’s wife from Makhado, formerly the town of Louis Trichardt, never goes anywhere without her 9mm pistol and .22 magnum. She is convinced that the Afrikaner people are being deliberately and systematically targeted by radical black activists who are determined to drive white people off the land.
“The attacks are politically motivated,” Mrs Kennealy said. “In many cases, nothing is stolen. The attacks are often brutal and barbaric. There is a force driving it. It makes sense to put fear into the hearts of the white farmers, to drive them from the land.”
A government inquiry into farm murders found that the motive was overwhelmingly criminal. But its findings have been dismissed by the Afrikaner community which sees the attacks as the worst assault on their people since Britain rounded them up in concentration camps during the 1899-1902 Boer War.
Many white farmers face claims against their properties by the descendants of black people who say they were forcibly removed from their lands during the colonial and apartheid eras. The farmers fear that the attacks are aimed at breaking their determination to hold on to the land.
Lectures on first aid, firearms and the law, and how to use an assortment of weapons from AK47s, shotguns and South African Defence Force-issue R3 and R4 assault rifles go on until midnight on the first day of the course after which everything stops for prayers, dinner and a few beers around the camp fire.
Feeling betrayed by the Government for failing to stem the attacks, the Afrikaners — the farmers, their wives and children — have begun to arm themselves. They are organising into support circles, in which neighbouring farmers can come to another’s rescue at a moment’s notice. More than 700 people have attended the farm attack survival course since it was launched a year ago.
“The security structure aims to link all the farming families together,” Mrs Kennealy said. “One group responds to help another in a crisis situation. Someone will be responsible for closing the roads, another for looking after the traumatised victims. Someone else will alert the police.
“Generally it’s families that come on the course. There are a lot of women, and the children usually start around 10. During a farm attack, the family has to operate as a unit if it is to survive. Rather than waiting until what happened in Zimbabwe happens here, we are putting everything in place now,” she added.
Recalling the death of Martiens Steyn, 78, a farmer who was murdered a few miles from here in April by two men, two women and two children from a nearby squatter camp, Mrs Kennealy said: “The farmer was milking his cows when he was attacked. They tied him up, and hit him repeatedly with a shovel before strangling him.
“I have two little girls,” she added. “I’m often on the farm on my own because my husband is away. I have to protect myself and my children. “My girls are 7 and 9. They have both been bought pellet guns, and are being taught how to use them.
“We have no alternative but to protect ourselves. The Government is not doing it for us.”
Bertus Otto, 26, one of the course’s 20 instructors specialising in self-defence, said: “We hope to make people more confident in fending off attacks. If farmers take what we tell them seriously, they can defend themselves effectively. We are not some right-wing organisation. We are just trying to help people to defend their lives and their property.”
Louise Kruger, 40, a potato farmer and a mother of four, began the course struggling to put the rounds of ammunition into her magazine. By the end, she was doing it like a professional. “I’m here to learn how to defend my children, my loved ones,” she said. “Black people want to take our land. They are attacking us. There is a real risk out there. This course helps me to face it.”
I love it.
They are a decade too late to save themselves. We are little more than a decade away from where they are.
It's a lost cause, but it is worth fighting for. The Afrikaaners will take a lot of criminals down with them.
It's never too late, and I don't think USA is in the same predicament.
ping
Give up your farms, form an army, and fight to the death. There is no alternative as long as the attacks continue.
Are the attackers Muslims, Communists or what?
ANC=communists
The essence of the US 2nd Amendment.
Yep.
bump
Tell that to Israel.
300 spartins held off 1 million persians
A belligerent South African government, communist or Islamic is a threat to the entire world. South Africa holds the keys to unimaginable wealth; gold, diamonds, and strategic metals found few other places on the planet. Majority rule should have had many more strings attached or reserved entirely for a future time to be determined by a higher degree of social and cultural maturity. I fear the minority white farmers will be systematical victimized like they were in Zimbabwe and now in Namibia.
1 million is a bit of an exageration. And all those Spartans died. Though i do love the story about the spartan king who, upon seeing the vast numbers of bowmen the persians had drawn up, announced "We will fight in the shade!"
Good article. I wonder how long it will be before the government brand them as vigilantes, and ban the training activities.
Get tips from the US government about 'gun control' perhaps... let's hope not.
Domination of the Draka ping!
that is a bad-a** looking gun.
John, I'm afraid the odds against the Boers are even worse. They have the whole world against them. But they will give a good account of themselves, and they will be tougher to destroy than the farmers in Zimbabwe, who were outnumbered even more severely.
To think South Africa was once a proud, self-sufficient, nuclear power.
Now it is ruled by an immigrant rabble mob with ties of less than two centuries to the land.
The blacks are a "majority" in South Africa in the same way the Hispanics are a majority in much of California. They invaded the country and have overrun it.
The original inhabitants were the Bushmen and Hottentots. When the Afrikaners arrived, the ancestors of Mandela where still hanging out in the Congo.
How about Pizzaro and 180 Spaniards taking down the Incan empire?
Christian Bernard recounts in his book that he once treated a Boer farm wife who unarmed killed a leopard that had the temerity to enter her kitchen.
She scissored to to death.
She needed over 100 sutures.
Tough people indeed!
molon labe....my favorite quote
course they all died.
South Africa is lost already....sadly. The demographics will destroy the producers white, black and colored.
And yes....it may happen here if we do not control immigration.
A little quick advice to the Afrikaners.
Stock up on ammo.
Make sure to have at least 1000 rounds ammunition for each firearm you have. Minimum.
Stock up. Way up.
If it all crashes down, you'll be glad to have it all.
that's just wrong.
although it was the case 15 years ago...
This is demonstrably false. Look at the records of Portuguese and Swahili traders in the region. It's quite clear that there were Nguni-speaking people in (today's) SA in the 17th century and much earlier.
Oh, I don't think so. Maybe you are confusing the handful of tribes like the Swazis, Zulus and Xhosas along the coast south of Mozambique with the current population of Kaapland, Transvaal and Orangefreistaat, the Afkrianner homeland.
There is a fairly good standard history here:
http://countrystudies.us/south-africa/46.htm
Note the Zulus were not east of the Tugela River, nor the Xhosas east of the Sunday River until a coupel of hundred years after the arrival of the Afrikanners. The Ndebele are newcomers to the northern Traansvaal of less than 200 years, having moved there from the coast south of Mozambique.
Kaapland and Orangefreistaat were empty except for Bushmen and Hottentots. Traansval had a scattering of Bantus.
The "handful of tribes" you mention count approximately 20 million people, by the count of the website you listed.
If the Ndebele are newcomers to the Transvaal and Oranje Vrystadt regions, they are less "new" than the Afrikaners. The Great Trek began in the 1830s, after Shaka expanded a unified Nguni state north to the present Zimbabwe/Zambia border area.
Jo'burg didn't exist 120 years ago, but apartheid apologists seem to think that van Riebeeck's 17th century colony at the Cape somehow makes them able to claim that Afrikaners had "centuries-old" tied to the land on the Rand. Afrikaners were at the Cape before Italian immigrants moved to San Francisco, but that doesn't give them any reasonable claim to land in California. Plainly put (it's also plainly put in the website you gave me), there were poeple farming the land in the Transvaal and Oranje Vrystadt BEFORE the Afrikaners came, so if Afrikaners claim an attachment to the land, the Nguni-speaking people who were there before them can trump that specious claim.
Saying that the Zulu were not east (you sure mean "west" though) of the Thukela River and Xhosa west of the Fish River "until a coupel of hundred years after the arrival of the Afrikanners" is clearly a lie. Afrikaners didn't push into the Thukela River region until AFTER Shaka's death put them in a better position to encroach on the Zulu state. "A coupel of hundred years after the arival of the Afrikanners" means that the Zulus are JUST NOW moving into KwaZulu-Natal and (the Xhosa to the Ciskei) for the first time. Obviously this is not true.
If De Kaap and Oranje Vrystadt were empty except for Bushmen and Hottentots, they weren't empty.
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