Posted on 12/09/2013 2:01:02 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Lettie Nel’s face told a story. She’d been repeatedly pistol-whiped with a Magnum revolver, then punched in the face and then hit over the back of the head as she lay on her floor, wrists tightly bound by electrical cable. You can pick out the individual finger and knuckle marks in the photographs on the old lady’s cheeks.
Lettie Nel is an 86-years-old widow who lives alone on the 1,800 hectare family cattle farm she still manages – with the help of a few local farm hands. She was attacked in her own home early on Tuesday 11 November, when intruders burst in as she powered off her eight-foot-high electric perimiter fence.
“They threw me down on the ground and they tried to pull my pants down and I started screaming and the next thing, they took out their knife and put it next to my throat,” she told me. “When I screamed, the one hit me on my face and they hit me with a revolver on my head.
“They told me they were going to kill me. I was sure it was going to happen. I knew they would do it because they would do it with other people without any reason whatever.”
“They” certainly have. Across South Africa, more than 10 farms are attacked every week. Afrikaner farmers are being killed at four times the national murder rate - which is already one of the highest in the world. Over the two decades since Nelson Mandela was elected this country’s first black preseident, around 3,500 have been killed. On the very day he died, an 84-year-old Afrikaner woman was murdered in her own home, held down and drowned in her bath.
He can’t control the people any more’
Now that Nelson Mandela’s dead too, many Afrikaners fear a Boer bloodbath.
I asked Lettie Nel whether she felt less safe since his passing. “Definitely,” she said. ”He had contol over the whole country,” she explained, “and people respected him. And now he’s not there, he can’t contol the people any more.”
About a million whites are said to have upped and left South Africa for good over the past two decades, many believing the country was going to the dogs. About 4.5 million remain, just over half of them Afrikaners.
Today, they feel about as unloved and vulnerable as their voortrekker ancestors must have done in the mid-19th century. At the vast monument to the voortrekker “heroes” built with black labour by the apartheid regime just outside Pretoria, I met a man who believes farm attacks are an orchestrated, racially motivated attempt to drive whites from the land.
Like many Afrikaners I’ve talked to, Willie Cloete uses terms like “genocide” and “extinction” - but offers no evidence at all that there are any dastardly plans afoot to dispatch the Boers. Last weekend Mr Cloete set up a new party, the Front Nationaal, which already claims 66,000 members. They want to address Afrikaner concerns constitutionally and get MPs into parliament.
The FN’s manifesto is predicated on apartheid of a new-old variety: they want to establish a separate Boer republic so they can live in peace. “Would black people be allowed to live there?” I asked. “They’d be welcome,” he said. “We are not racists.”
Isolated farmsteads
But the fears articulated by Afrikaner conservatives are not borne out by the facts. Independent studies have concluded that 90 per cent of attacks on white farms are just robberies.
Dr Johan Burger, of Pretoria’s Institute of Security Studies, is South Africa’s former commissioner of police. An Afrikaner himself, he disparages any notion that racism underpins the attacks on white farms. Isolated farmsteads are soft targets and offer rich pickings for thieves, he says, and because the vast majority of South Africa’s 32,000 commercial farmers are white, that’s why they’re the victims.
He says that when you delve deeper, it turns out that most of the victims of violence and rape are actually the black farm workers themselves.
“People are murdered and families destroyed,” Dr Burger says. “A lot of emotions are invoked and this creates the opportunity for those who wish to project for political purposes.”
Resentment runs deep
Among those accused of the sort of incendiary rhetoric which fuels the perception that the Afrikaners are under attack is Julius Malema, a firebrand populist politician who was expelled from the ruling African National Congress. Today, his Economic Freedom Fighters advocate the sorts of land repossession, redistribution and nationalisation policies advocated by his self-proclaimed hero, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
One of his policy strategists is the radical writer Andile Mngxitama, who says resentment of rich whites runs deep among those who believe they’re entitled to reclaim what was stolen from them in the first place. He laughs when I tell him that Afrikaners fear genocide.
“There has been genocide and violence against black people, created by white people,” he says. ”South Africa was created on blood, mass murder, and dispossesion of farms or of mines.
“You are going to have to go back to the original programme: land redistribution, nationalisation of the mineral resources, democratisation of the economy. You have to take from white people to distribute to the black majority.”
I said he sounded like Robert Mugabe.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Robert Mugabe is a great example of what you must do, with some lessons of course.
With South Africa’s Great Reconciliator, Nelson Mandela, now gone, there are those who say the honeymoon’s over for South Africa’s Afrikaners. Today racial fault-lines lie exposed again, but the spectre of a Mugabe-style future is actually the stuff of both black and white nightmares.
I know someone who married a guy working in the Caymans. He had settled there years ago because he said “whites have no future in SA.”
If you are outnumbered ten to one, and the majority wants you dead, why are you hanging around to be killed. Sell everything and leave. The Jews in Europe ignored the signs and they died. If whites in South Africa sense the anger and impending holocaust, wake up and leave. Believe it or not Mozambique wants whites to manage their farms and agriculture.
Afrikaners, does the name “Custer” mean anything to you?
They also feared it before and during Mandela
If there is a bloodbath, then that is part of Mandela’s legacy too. His job, frankly, was to create a situation where this sort of thing simply isn’t possible.
Afrikaners, get out now.
Come to the US. We could use your talents and civilized behavior here.
Memphis, Philly, Newark, Baltimore, Camden. Kinda shared feeling.
One of my former employees is married to a guy from from SA, and his wealthy family is still there in a heavily protected and guarded 5,000ac estate. They are wealthy and well-armed and protected. He’s been trying to get his family to move asap, but they refuse to leave their ancestral homeland.
The horror stories he told me are blood curdling. Why all 5.5 million White Boers haven’t left is a mystery to me, but he says they still “feel secure”. I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it, now.
And it happened:
Think Obama's going to let more than a bare minimum quota come in?
bump
And to think there were no blacks in SA when the Portuguese discovered it. Only a few Bushmen and Hottentots.
Then in the early 1800s Shaka began to send his impis south driving the tribes out and into SA.
Now they have taken over.
My bet is in 100 years the major language spoken in SA will be...Chinese.
Then there is the Rio Grande here...
Time to Lager, or as we say in the US, CIRCLE THE WAGONS!
It’s going to be bad.
so its a bit like the Palestinians
Get out or circle the wagons. It ain’t going to be pretty.
***Afrikaners, does the name “Custer” mean anything to you?***
Think Isandwana. Or the movie Zulu Dawn.
It is their ancestral homeland along with the Bushmen who were there long before the POS black tribes even came near the place. The land that was originally SA was not populated by black tribes, at least south of the Limpopo and Orange rivers. Black tribes were allowed in from central africa by the English when they took control of SA, along with the genocidal incursions of various Zulu chiefs from the central parts of africa. They opened up a floodgate of tribal conflicts and brought in tribes who had no real claim to the area. That said, the old Boers should probably leave, alive. How about if we trade them 1:1 for parts of our population who believe that they are "african"; let them be real africans.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.