Her son managed to get up
and sprint off into the darkness when the men were confused by the flashlight.
But Du Plessis was not so lucky. The intruders opened fire at once,
shooting him six times through the throat, lungs and abdomen. As he writhed on
the ground in agony, the men ran off into the night leaving empty bullet
cartridges littering the yard. In the darkness, Laura attempted heart massage
on her husband, who could still talk despite his appalling injuries, but to no
avail. When I arrived at the farm on Thursday and was invited in by Mrs du
Plessis, I found her with blood still caked under her fingernails after she’d
cradled her dying husband.
‘He was shot through the
lungs and I was doing CPR,’ she told me, between huge sobs. ‘He said “please go
and fetch the car and take me to hospital”. But he was too badly hurt and he
died in my arms.’ In the morning, when white
friends from neighbouring farms followed the trail of the raiders, they
discovered the men had carefully cut through fences and skirted areas with
security patrols — suggesting how closely they had planned their route of
attack. ‘It is definitely coming down to a race thing,’ Laura du Plessis told
me as she was comforted by her family. ‘They hate white people. We have never
had a fight with any black people. I always stop and give others a lift. We
employ black people.
‘My husband fought for me.
I am grateful that he wasn’t tied up and forced to watch me being raped before
he was killed. He was an amazing man. He was my life.’
A friend of the family, who
asked not to be named, told me he was certain that the killings are part of a
sinister, systematic bid to drive white people — and, in particular, farmers —
out of South Africa. ‘If this was happening in any other country, the military
would be deployed to protect us,’ said the friend. ‘There are gangs moving
around the country targeting white people.’
Of course the violence and
privations South Africa’s blacks faced under apartheid were just as
unforgiveable. Certainly, there would have been more bloodletting after the
white government fell in the Nineties were it not for Mandela’s message of
reconciliation. But now, as he nears death, fears are growing that a wave of
violence will be unleashed against the white population. The statistics — and
the savagery of the killings — appear to support claims by these residents that
white people, and farmers in particular, are being targeted by black criminals.
Little wonder that what unfolded on the Du Plessis homestead has sent tremors
of fear through the three-million-strong white community.
Last month alone there were
25 murders of white landowners, and more than 100 attacks, while Afrikaner
protest groups claim that more than 4,000 have been killed since Mandela came
to power — twice as many as the number of policemen who have died. It is not
just the death toll, but the extreme violence that is often brought to bear,
that causes the greatest fear in the white community. Documented cases of farm
killings make for gruesome reading, with children murdered along with their
parents, one family suffocated with plastic bags and countless brutal rapes of
elderly women and young children. These horrors have prompted Genocide Watch —
a respected American organisation which monitors violence around the world — to
claim that the murders of ‘Afrikaner farmers and other whites is organised by
racist communists determined to drive whites out of South Africa, nationalise
farms and mines, and bring on all the horrors of a communist state’.
Indeed, a disturbing number
of whites are terrified that Mandela’s passing will lead to an outpouring of
violence from black South Africans, no longer contained by the sheer power of
the great man’s presence, which endures today even though he stood down as
president in 1999. For its part, the ruling ANC party dismisses claims that
such murders are part of any sinister agenda, pointing out that South Africans
of all colours suffer violent crime, and that wealthy whites are simply more
likely to be targeted. Perhaps. But white nerves have not been soothed by the
disturbing behaviour of Jacob Zuma, the ANC’s leader and the country’s third
black president since Mandela.
At a centenary gathering of
the African National Congress last year, Zuma was filmed singing a so-called
‘struggle song’ called Kill The Boer (the old name for much of the white
Afrikaner population). As fellow senior ANC members clapped along, Zuma sang:
‘We are going to shoot them, they are going to run, Shoot the Boer, shoot them,
they are going to run, Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going
to run, the Cabinet will shoot them, with the machine-gun, the Cabinet will
shoot them, with the machine-gun . . .’ Alongside him was a notorious character
called Julius ‘Juju’ Malema, a former leader of the ANC youth league, who is
now Zuma’s bitter enemy and is reportedly planning to launch a new political
party after Mandela’s death. A bogeyman to white South Africans, Malema is
popular among young blacks, and has also been an enthusiastic singer of Kill
The Boer and another song called Bring Me My Machine-Gun.
Polls this week showed a
huge surge in support among young black South Africans for his policies, which
he says will ignore reconciliation, and fight for social justice in an
‘onslaught against [the] white male monopoly’. With chilling echoes of
neighbouring Zimbabwe, where dictator Robert Mugabe launched a murderous
campaign to drive white farmers off the land in 2000, Malema wants all
white-owned land to be seized without compensation, along with nationalisation
of the country’s lucrative mines. Ominously, Malema, 32, who wears a trademark
beret and has a fondness for Rolex watches, this month promised his new party
will take the land from white people without recompense and give it to blacks.
‘We need the land that was taken from our people, and we are not going to pay
for it,’ he said. ‘We need a party that will say those who were victims of
apartheid stand to benefit unashamedly, and those who perpetuated apartheid
must show remorse and behave in a manner that says they regret their conduct.’
Enthusiastically backed by
Winnie Mandela, Nelson’s second wife — who is still hugely popular in South
Africa despite her suspected role in several murders — Malema is a charismatic
figure who once threw a BBC correspondent out of a press conference for asking
about his wealthy lifestyle. His words have done nothing to allay the fears of
white communities, some of which have taken extreme measures to protect
themselves. This week I visited Kleinfontein in Pretoria, a white-only
community of 1,000 men, women and children who live behind high fences, with a
gatehouse manned by men in military fatigues, who also carry out regular
patrols of the grounds to prevent black intruders entering. Anyone without an
appointment with an official resident is refused entry. If they are black, they
will not get in at all. Inside, there is a shopping mall, while the town has
its own water supply and sewage system. All manual work is carried out by white
residents.
There is a rugby pitch,
opulent homes overlooking miles of open countryside where antelope and zebra
roam, and a hospital for the elderly residents. Most crucially of all, in a
country with 60 murders a day, there is no armed robbery, murder or rape in
Kleinfontein. ‘An old lady can draw money here without any fear,’ says Marisa
Haasbroek, a resident, mother of two teenage girls, and my guide for the morning.
‘It’s safe, quiet and
peaceful. It’s not racist — it is about protecting our Afrikaner cultural
identity.’ Like all the residents, she is descended from the first Afrikaners,
the Dutch settlers who came to South Africa and were driven into the African
interior on the famous Great Trek during the war with the British from 1899 to
1902. Kleinfontein has been in existence since Mandela’s first presidency in
1994 — but its existence remained largely unknown until reports last year that
black police officers had been barred from entry to the property.
To get round race laws,
Kleinfontein insists its criteria for entry are not based on skin colour. It
claims to exist to protect distinct Afrikaans-speaking people and culture, and
that English-speaking white people are also banned, so the community is
non-racist. The Afrikaners, of course, were those who devised and presided over
apartheid, a gruesome social experiment that did so much to divide the nation
and subjugate the black population. With Mandela on a life support machine, the
founders of this community in the so-called ‘Rainbow Nation’ were this week
being inundated with requests by other whites to join them. ‘I think there will
be trouble,’ Anna, an elderly lady tending her garden inside the all-white
compound, tells me.
‘There may be tribal
warfare first between the black races. Then they might turn on us.’ ,Standing
near a sign written in Afrikaans stating ‘ons is hier om te bly’ (we are here
to stay), Marike, another resident, was convinced that there is a sinister plot
to kill all whites. ‘You don’t attack farms and rape 80-year-old women with
broken bottles and kill their husbands for a mobile phone,’ Marike says.
‘People say it’s not genocide — but it is.’
Such uncertainty about the
future has been given added credence by the tawdry, shameful scenes surrounding
Mandela’s death bed — where his family were last night continuing to squabble
over where he should be buried and who should get the most loot from tourists
visiting the grave. Despite all the arguments about the future direction of the
country, the truth is that only one thing has stayed the same in South Africa
before and after Mandela’s presidency: the mutual fear and distrust between
some blacks and whites, particularly in rural areas away from the cosmopolitan
cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town. Yet as one acquaintance of mine, a black
security guard named Pietor, told me yesterday: ‘The whites said they would be
slaughtered when Mandela came to power, and thought they’d be killed when he
stood down as President. 'Now, they’re saying they will be slaughtered when
Mandela dies. Black people just want jobs and a decent life, not killing.’
Nelson Mandela dreamed of a South Africa that was at peace with itself — and
warned that the black population taking vengeance on whites would only deepen
old enmities. Whether the black leaders who are following him can muster an
ounce of his authority or humanity remains to be seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment