Kill the Boer

by Ernst Roets

  On top of that, these farmers are told that they are criminals and that they should be treated as such. They are told that they are racist, brutal oppressors, who exploit their workers and who are merely murdered because of labour disputes, or because people are taking revenge on them for all the evil things that they have done. This, despite the fact that all the available research proves the opposite.

  Yet these farmers persist. They continue to farm. They continue to produce food for a country that clearly regards them as expendable. They continue to employ, to care for and to develop the very people whom these political leaders claim to represent. They continue to develop their land, despite threats that their land will be taken from them without compensation.

  The question is then, what should we make of the evidence? We have seen repeatedly that these attacks are not only romanticised by the South African government, but in some cases, that members of the South African government, including the SAPS, appear to be actively involved with these crimes. We find that government employees who publicly state that white people must be dealt with in the same way in which Hitler dealt with the Jews, and senior members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) who call for the eyes and tongues of white people to be cut out, are simply slapped on the wrist and asked not to do it again. On the other hand we find that people who have no political influence and who are not known to society at large are aggressively persecuted by the media, heavily fined and even sent to prison when they say things that may be regarded as offensive.

  We have seen that many in the media have become active roleplayers in this regard, particularly through their tenacious reporting of isolated incidents in which white farmers are the perpetrators as if these incidents constitute trends (of farm murders), and their persistent disregard of the actual trends, as if they do not exist. We have seen this especially in the state broadcaster. While we are grateful for the excellent journalists who still operate within South Africa, we find that the media elites have largely succeeded in creating a narrative where those who call for the murders to stop are ridiculed and regarded as racists who are exaggerating and who are ‘just longing for the past’.

  We have also seen that the history of South Africa – and the history of land ownership in particular – has become so distorted by political and media elites that the mainstream narrative has become an extraordinary distortion of history. A distortion that serves those who seek justification for the persecution of minorities in South Africa, and of white farmers in particular.

  All of this has created a perfect storm. It has created a climate in which these attacks are more, rather than less, likely to occur. Despite this, the elites have persisted in this, even upping the ante, long after the most horrific effects have become public knowledge. This suggests intent.

  I have found that there are at least ten different ways in which the South African government should be regarded as complicit to the farm murders crisis. These include:

  The deprioritising of SAPS response, despite an increase in attacks.

  Scorning and ridiculing victims who call for a focused counterstrategy.

  Negligent police investigations and violation of victims’ rights.

  The negative stereotyping of white farmers in particular.

  The double standards and a hierarchy of recognition with regard to victims.

  The encouragement of hate speech against white farmers.

  The continued romanticising of violence against white farmers.

  The shieling of criminals and of those who encourage genocide.

  The justification of murders.

  Direct involvement.

  While I agree that genocide is not taking place in South Africa, I (unlike our political and media elites) have taken note of the concerns expressed by Genocide Watch. In writing this book, I have also reached the disturbing conclusion that a systematic process of ethnic cleansing has become a looming threat to minorities in South Africa, but to white farmers in particular.

  I think of my own brother who was attacked, my friends who were murdered, my father’s cousin who had a garden fork pierced through her head, my mother-in-law who was alone on the farm when her window was broken by two men wearing informal clothes who – once they had been caught – claimed to be police officers only doing a routine check.

  I drove to my home town of Tzaneen, to the farm where I grew up – in one of the so-called farm murder hotspots – and I asked my uncle why he persisted. ‘They want to take the land that has been in our family for generations. Why do you persist?’

  He said to me that in order to be a successful farmer in South Africa, you are required to pretend that you are politically ignorant. ‘It sounds terrible, but you can’t base your future in agriculture on these things. If you do that you will lose your focus.’ He said to me that farmers are forced to put these things in the cupboard, close it and lock it. ‘You need to say to yourself: I am here. I’m here to stay. I will stay here. These things will not affect me. I need to focus on the right things in business to be cost efficient. All these things – put your focus on that. Live your passion, because if your passion becomes to try and get answers to these political threats, I’m sorry, eventually you will disappear. And maybe it would happen that you disappear long before they’ve taken your land.’

  LOOKING BACK

  The blinds covering my living room window were only slightly open, but Henk Greyling kept staring at them, squinting his eyes and moving his head up and down ever so slightly as if to see if perhaps someone was creeping around in my garden. We sat down to talk about what exactly happened that night when he miraculously survived a farm attack and how it changed his life.

  The attack on his family happened almost ten years ago. I have known him for two years and only when I told him that I was writing a book on farm murders did he tell me that he was also a victim. He then showed me the massive scar beneath his lower jaw, and the scars left by the bullet holes.

  Telling me his story for the first time, Greyling became visibly emotional. ‘I’m not myself anymore. I haven’t been since the attack,’ he told me. ‘When people see me, they think I’m happy, but I’m really not. I’m only pretending to be happy.’ He was still in his twenties, slightly brawny and in good physical shape. Yet he seemed surprisingly vulnerable – vulnerable in a way that I had never seen him before.

  ‘My aunt died several years later,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t take the stress anymore.’

  Ever since the attack, he has been working as a security guard, preferring to work night duty. ‘When I go to bed during the day, I get nightmares, but when I go to bed at night, the nightmares are even worse, so I prefer not to sleep at all.’ Greyling now sleeps about three hours a day, preferably during daytime. When he dreams, he keeps dreaming of that night, playing out different scenarios of what else could have happened, what could have been different.

  He stared at the window for a while.

  ‘I’m too scared to go to sleep,’ he murmured, then staring down at his feet stretched out in front of him, his hands clutched together in his lap.

  After a moment of silence, he stared at the window again, but this time only in a gaze. The vigilance that filled his eyes only a few minutes before was gone.

  ‘I lost everything. I even lost my fiancée. After the farm attack, I wasn’t myself anymore. She said to me that she cannot remain with me if I’m like that ... My personality changed. I chased away many of my friends. I don’t even go out for a beer anymore. I know for a fact that if I go out and the place is crowded, I lose my head.’

  After the attack, Greyling took up martial arts, Taekwondo, Kickboxing and lessons in Close Combat. ‘I’ve never used what I’ve learned in martial arts, but I know one day I will.’

  ‘When I go to a farm now, I carry two firearms with me and sometimes even a bulletproof vest. I sleep with my firearms with me in bed.’

  Years after the attack, he opened fire on some teenagers who shot at hi
m from a vehicle with a paintball gun. They approached him slowly, late at night with the lights off, opened the window slightly, stuck the barrel of the gun out of the window and fired at him, striking him three times. He immediately thought that they had fired with live ammunition and he fired back, hitting the vehicle five times. Luckily he was aiming for the wheels and so no one was hurt.

  Suddenly, his voice turned from sorrow and bitterness to bitter anger: ‘When I heard the EFF singing “Kill the Boer” I called my brother and asked him to bring my 7x57 mm rifle. I will take them out if I have to,’ he said.

  ‘I’m trying to put all of this in the past behind me, but the past catches up with you,’ he said. On the other hand, he said, ‘I don’t want to lose that memory. It’s a memory that I will keep and it’s a memory that will help my family. I will go to the farm again. If this happens again, I will be more vigilant.’

  …

  Looking back, Robert Lynn said that he clearly went through different phases of grief. ‘The one I can’t get away from is anger. Sue was nearly 65. She had to end her life in a ditch. She ended up on a mortuary table, mutilated. I couldn’t even bury her properly. She had to be cremated.

  ‘I now know the weight of my wife’s brain. I know the weight of her heart. And her kidneys. They didn’t want to give me the post mortem report, so I had to get it through the backdoor from the British consulate.’

  …

  Baby AJ was born five days after his father’s funeral. Even as a baby, he looks just like his dad.

  Dealing with Johann’s passing was excruciating. For a while, Mieke resented Mariandra. First because she had just left him there where the attackers were when they drove off. Then she said that Mariandra should have gone downstairs to get her dad something to fight the intruders off with. Fortunately it only lasted for six months, says Mariandra. She understands now.

  Her love for her children is clearly noticeable. ‘It had an impact on me, but I understood where it was coming from. Mieke was a broken, broken, broken little person last year. She was scared of the dark. She refused to sleep. She even refused to look at pictures of her dad. Eventually, in one of her trauma sessions, Mieke told Mariandra that whenever she saw pictures of her dad, she saw the eyes of the man who killed him. Looking at pictures made her sad.

  Mariandra and her children moved to an apartment in Centurion. When Mariandra finishes work, she picks up the children from the school’s day-care facilities. Then they all go home, do their chores, eat dinner, wash up and go to bed. It was a massive change to move from the farmhouse to an apartment.

  There are also the triggers. ‘We are all triggered by loud noises and banging sounds. Sometimes, when Mieke gets triggered, her screams take me back to that night and then I get triggered as well. Then we cannot help each other. Then we just go and sit on the kitchen floor.’ Mariandra laughed.

  ‘I was very smart,’ Mieke told her. ‘I ran up and down.’ Mieke explained that she had heard Jesus’s voice, telling her that she had to run up and down so that the intruders would miss her when they tried to shoot her. She keeps asking why it happened. ‘One day, when I go to Heaven, I will speak to God. I know He can explain to me why they killed daddy,’ she told her mother.

  As if the trauma was not enough, dealing with the SAPS made matters worse.

  ‘The investigating officer was very kind, but extremely insensitive,’ said Mariandra. ‘One day he came in here and he started slapping our file on the table.’ I said to him “To you this is just a file. Please consider that to me, it is my whole life that you are holding in your hands. It’s not ‘the deceased’. It’s Johann. He had a name. He was the father of my children. It’s not ‘the residence’. It was my home.” He then gave me a look and asked me if what had happened to Johann made me hate black people like him.’

  ‘One day he came in here with the post mortem report. He didn’t tell me what it was and then he just opened that file in front of me and started showing me the pictures indicating where my husband had been shot, telling me where the blood stains were and so forth. I was horrified.’

  She managed to find out how they got into the house. On the second floor, there were little aluminium windows. The clip on one of the windows was broken, allowing the intruders to open it from the outside and fit through. The only way for them to get there was with a ladder. ‘I have no idea how they could’ve known that, but they did. When they arrived at our house, they took a ladder and they went straight for that window.

  ‘One day the police called me and asked me to go to an identification parade. I identified one of the attackers and they said that they also believed that it was him. A few months later, I asked them what had happened and they said that they had failed to charge him within 48 hours, so they had to let him go.

  ‘They keep trying to involve Mieke in the whole affair. As far as Mieke knows, those people are already in prison. I will not allow them to drag my daughter into this.’

  Before the funeral, Mariandra was able to do a viewing of Johann’s body. ‘I sat next to him for a very long time and I just spoke to him. The children painted his coffin and pressed their painted hands on it.

  Almost immediately after the attack, I decided that they have taken my husband from me, but I will not allow them to destroy my children’s lives any further. It’s only me that can ensure this. I will carry the cross. They don’t need to. They must have happy lives.’

  …

  When Greyling walked out the door, I realised for the first time that the friend that I had known for two years was in fact a broken man. I understood for the first time the pain that my friend was still going through and I realised that there are more than 10 000 people like my friend who are struggling to cope with the reality of what had happened to them on South Africa’s farms – each one with a different story.

  I now understood the expression of taut resentment on Corrie Nel’s face when he told me how his daughter, Venessa Stafleu, had been murdered in front of her five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter and how his grandchildren had had to run across the farm in the middle of the night, crying for help.

  I understood the look in Robert Lynn’s eyes when he said to me that at least he still had the dogs that his wife had loved so dearly and that their presence reminded him of her.

  I understood the tear running down Marianda Heunis’s cheek when she told me that leaving Johann’s body as she fled with their three little girls was the hardest decision that she had ever made in her life.

  I have accepted that I cannot comfort even my friends who have experienced this. I cannot erase the pain. If there was something that I could do to reverse what had happened, I would have done it. If there was something I could have said to ease the pain, to help them get through it, I would have said it. If those deeds or those words exist, I have yet to find them.

  I sent Mariandra a text message: If I feel that there are no words to describe what had happened to you, I cannot imagine what it must feel like to you.

  I said to her that Johann had saved their lives. The attackers had gone there to kill. They had seven bullets. The first shot was fired at his daughter. Then he took five bullets, the first of which was later pulled from his heart. When Johann heard his murderers tried to pull his wife downstairs, when he heard his daughter plead for them to take her piggy bank, a miracle happened. He stood up and he walked towards them. In doing so, he managed to take the last bullet as well – a bullet that would undoubtedly have been fired at his pregnant wife or his daughter.

  I have never experienced anything remotely close to the horror experienced by the people who shared their experiences with me. We have done the research, we have analysed the data, we have organised protest marches, we have been to court, we have been shoved out of the headquarters of the ANC and of the SAPS, we have spoken at the United Nations and in several countries about this crisis. And now I wrote a book. We will continue to do all of these things, and we will do so with even more compassion and
vigour. I am determined that this fight is not over. In fact, I know that it has only just begun.

  But for a moment, all of that became irrelevant. In that moment, if only for a brief moment, I understood.

  NOTES

  PREFACE AND EDITOR’S NOTES

  1. Maroela Media. (1 June 2016). Vlieënier op Muldersdrift-kleinhoewe oorval.

  2. Oom can be directly translated into English to mean uncle. It is however a word that Afrikaans people generally use when addressing men who are a generation or more older than they are. The word tannie can be translated to mean aunt, but is also generally used by Afrikaans people when addressing older women.

  3. Hermann, D, Van Zyl, C and Nieuwoudt, I (compilers). (2013). Treurgrond: Die realiteit van plaasaanvalle, 1990–2012. Centurion: Kraal Uitgewers. p. 192.

  4. AfriForum. (26 June 2016). The reality of farm tortures in South Africa.

  5. Hermann, D, Van Zyl, C and Nieuwoudt, I (compilers). (2013). Treurgrond: Die realiteit van plaasaanvalle, 1990–2012. Centurion: Kraal Uitgewers. p. 242.

  6. See also News24. (10 May 2015). Killer gets two life sentences.

  7. Hermann, D. (9 February 2011). My uncle has just become another statistic. In Politicsweb.

  8. Maroela Media. (7 June 2012). Rowers skiet Centurion-vrou voor haar ouers.

  9. Potchefstroom Herald. (4 November 2016). Vrou met tuinvurk vermoor. Also Lentswe.web (undated). Farmers help SAPS to catch killer.

  10. Netwerk24. (12 July 2017). 3 vas weens moord op Elsa Erasmus.

  11. Video clip on YouTube. (22 November 2017). Johnny & Dalene Muller – Plaasaanvalslagoffers. (Available at https://youtu.be/BLUMJ99t-78).

  12. Netwerk24. (20 November 2017). Hoedspruit-boer voor sy dogter doodgeskiet.