There is a fashion right now in South Africa: hunting and plucking porcupines, and taking their sharp quills to make bags and skirts. A silly, savage fashion in a land where silliness and savagery have always been popular — but usually when applied to human beings.
There is another creature, once feared and respected for its sting, which is also being hunted. This is the Afrikaner. The once-mighty tribe that moulded South Africa in its own image is being stripped of its defences by new rulers, whose turn it now is to do as the Afrikaners did.
And, so, for the first time since the great change of 1994, Afrikaners are all over the place: in power and out of power, some in denial, some in despair; others in pretty good nick — and a few are into high-explosives. A new Afrikaans angry brigade, shadowy, shy and furtive, has taken to placing bombs in townships and temples, and taking lives. Late last year a blast killed a woman in a township, a second damaged a mosque, and a third exploded in a Buddhist temple. Why would anyone wish to blow up a Buddhist temple? But then, why would anyone torture porcupines? Because violence has always been seeded in successful power politics in South Africa. Because the political terrain is home to more crazies than anywhere south of the equator. And, though you’d be castigated for saying so, folks are rather proud of it.
Never have the Afrikaners been so divided, or so interesting. A portion of the old master race is now running the country again. This time, in partnership with that section of South Africa they once stripped naked and pushed into the wilderness. This liaison between the New National Party and the African National Congress is a form of sadomasochistic bondage so perverse it may be indulged in only by consenting politicians, thoroughly hooked on the pornography of power.
But there it is. This band of brothers, what one might call the adaptable end of the Afrikaner tribe, is back where it believes it belongs, in the pound seats. It might be said of them that not only have they promised to sell their mothers for a taste of the catnip of power — they have delivered.
At the far right end of the spectrum are the men who set bombs that kill sleeping women in Soweto, or blast a religious temple. They call themselves the Boeremag and they go on trial in South Africa’s first post-apartheid treason case on Monday.
The Boeremag is given to issuing confusing statements of dispiriting familiarity about the wickedness of the black government and the wrath to come. I met someone from this obscure group not long ago. To talk to them, you need to wander about quite a bit because ever since those bombs exploded, dozens of extremists have been arrested and the South African secret service has quizzed anybody remotely connected to dreams of Afrikaner self-determination, and the hunt is by no means over. It means travelling north of Pretoria and waiting around, and making and taking phone calls from distant places, till someone says that if you will ride in the back of a bakkie wearing a blindfold, he will take you to someone who will talk to you about the Boeremag.
That is what I did. After an hour in the bakkie the blindfold was removed and I was in the middle of nowhere. The man I met would not say he belonged to a terrorist band, he would only say he spoke ”for its interests”. He looked like any other farmer might look, but his Afrikaans was formal and pointed to the singular difference between these Afrikaner rebels and others I’ve met. These are not the downtrodden poor and inarticulate Afrikaners who have suffered most from the policies of affirmative action of the new South Africa. These people are professionals and their ideals are middle class: they want to take back from the usurpers the banks and the universities, the high places of power.
However, if my man in the middle of nowhere is anything to go by, they are also very seriously disturbed. Their politics, the setting of bombs, and the promised destruction of the hated ANC enemy, is interlarded with the strange yet familiar gobbledegook that extreme Afrikaner republicans have been prone to since they lost power 10 years ago. Why had they bombed a Buddhist temple, I wanted to know. The answer I got was simple: ”Because we are against false gods.”
That rang a bell. Years ago I used to frequent a group of religious Afrikaners who had transplanted themselves to a tiny Karoo town. They whiled away their days playing some mean guitar and drawing up elaborate family trees, proving they were the real lost tribe of Israel, that the ”other” Jews were shameless imposters, and prophesying that soon the ”true” chosen tribe would rise up against the heathen infidel in a holy war. It was pathetic, it was embarrassing.
But then all that was before fundamentalism had a future, before Osama bin Laden and George W Bush, before a politician could tell his compatriots that they are the best, most powerful and most virtuous nation under heaven, win votes by doing so, and lead them into war, bolstered by visions of their divine exclusivity.
However, the bombers of the Boeremag are only the coda to this tale of angry dreamers. Because what is new is that the real case for the Afrikaner is not being made by the violent fundamentalists, though their bloodletting is sometimes rather opportunistically invoked as a symptom of the disaffection within the heart of Afrikanerdom. Rather, it is being made by academics and writers who have formed themselves into a pacific and thoughtful entity called (no one seems quite sure why) the Group of 63. It has got them into trouble. The ANC attacked them, and those Afrikaners in bed with the government threw their pinafores over their heads in a display of surprising prudishness. It is all very odd. Because what distinguishes the Group of 63 is its reasonableness.
The new Afrikaners have discovered a most surprising weapon: the language of moderation, of devolution, and they are calling on the ANC government to protect the minority rights of Afrikaners, as it is committed to do under United Nations conventions. These Afrikaners are not galloping into the veld to confront the old oppressor, they are beating their swords into software. Modernity, minority rights, self-reliance — these astonishing words you hear again and again. What the world went to war for in the Balkans is good enough for these new Boers.
Consider the little settlement of Orania. When I last visited the town 10 years ago, it was nothing more than a tiny refuge for bitter no-hopers who seemed intent on fighting the Anglo-Boer South African War all over again. Orania still gets a bad press: exclusivist, racist, backward, unpatriotic, unconstructive and plain silly. But I’d say the town is coming along nicely. Whites do the work, they do the planning, the farming; work the fields and swab out the privies.
Professor Carel Boshoff, a founder of the town, says simply that Orania wants to pull itself up by its own bootstraps — it is not that its people have turned their backs on South Africa, and they don’t begrudge the new black rulers of the ANC the right to favour their own; just as Afrikaners did when they took power. It isn’t the politics of isolation they seek, but the politics of recognition, says Boshoff’s son, Carel, the sitting MP for the Freedom Front, the Afrikaner party working for an independent homeland.
Orania is less about segregation these days and more about self-sufficiency, about sustainable energy, and earth-sparing farming. It is about making in a dry and remote region a sustainable place in the sun. The citizens of Orania have two unexpected models: the Israelis and the Amish. Orania mixes a residue of sectarian aloofness with a passion for science and technology. The aim is to create, in miniature, an Afrikaans haven, which the brave, or foolhardy, believe might one day grow into an Afrikaans homeland.
The government has promised to look favourably on this dream of an Afrikaans homeland but no one had seen any proof that it plans to let it happen. This isn’t surprising. The Afrikaners, when they ran South Africa, did about as much damage to the word ”homeland” as the Nazis did to ”fatherland”. But, in the meantime, more people are settling there and Orania is getting on with things.
Striking though the modernity of some of Orania’s ideas may be, the citizens continue to look both ways. Some still hanker back to Hendrik Verwoerd, the man who exalted racial separation into a religion. People still remember the Anglo-Boer South African War, waged by British imperialists in the names of peace and democracy, but which was really about the theft of diamond and gold fields.
Orania sits, as it happens, in the middle of these battlefields and the veld here is studded with graves. Not far away is Orange River Station, one of the first concentration camps set up by the British, in 1901. It was presided over by a British commandant and guards of imperturbable bestiality. Boer women and children were transported here, imprisoned behind barbed wire and died in their scores from hunger, diseases and heartbreak.
If there is a link between the bombers of the Boeremag and the citizens of Orania, it is the feeling that Afrikaners again face ruin. Colonisation is a word used. Anglicisation is another. The language will be lost, along with an identity. The British empire tried it — the new South Africans will finish the job. What has changed, however, is that Afrikaners no longer wish to go to war to preserve these things. What they want is judicial protection. The ANC makes reassuring noises, but Afrikaners are looking north, to Zimbabwe, where promises have been worthless.
So their dilemma continues — but anger, this time, is lightened by unexpected felicities. Afrikaners, at least some, are riding the wave, exhibiting a pleasant vivacity, a cool tenacity and a politics no longer black and white, but green. A revolutionary modesty that might carry them further than all the bombs in creation.— Â