The softest whispers are often the loudest. The meagre turn-out at the last official Day of the Vow commemorations was a thunderous condemnation of the state of the rightwing, reports Jan Taljaard
AT the end of a year of turmoil, trauma and intimations of volkstaat born from apocalyptical destruction, all that remained on December 16 were a handful of rather despondent gatherings scattered around the country.
The Freedom Front’s senator, Tienie Groenewald, speaking at Newcastle, perhaps summarised it best when he stated: “Our people, especially those in the Transvaal, are no longer cheerful and filled with courage.”
The AWB’s celebrations at Middelburg in the Transvaal marked the organisation’s return to casual comedy when a few horsemen waited in vain for a leader deposited at the wrong airfield.
At Rooihuiskraal outside Pretoria the HNP’s die-hard, Jaap Marais, managed to gather 300 people, but that was hardly more than those who attended the HNP’s annual congress in May.
Showing a bit of the fiery belligerence that characterised the far right before the elections, Conservative Party leader Ferdie Hartzenberg turned up in Vanderbijlpark the next day to unveil a memorial and to tell supporters that they ought not to pay tax until a volkstaat is established. Less than a hundred people were there to listen to the message.
The above was a far cry from December 16 1993 when tens of thousands of rightwingers gathered around the Voortrekker monument in Pretoria to reaffirm the vow in expectation of the establishment of the volkstaat.
But all that changed during the next few months with perhaps no other single incident bringing the realities home as much as the sheer horror of three wounded rightwingers being gunned down next to their car on Friday, March 11.
The ill-fated attempt by the rightwing to prop up the teetering Bophuthatswana in March was the true turning point and the beginning of the decline, that would later become a free fall, of the rightwing. Those who still had hope that a volkstaat could be resurrected from the ashes of Bophuthatswana, lost that hope when Constand Viljoen turned around a few days later to establish the Freedom Front.
The preceding year had seen a build up of rightwing forces and an unprecedented cohesion among these forces under the guidance of Viljoen and the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF).
Although many observers now like to say that the rightwing had never been a real threat to start with and the threat itself nothing more than hype and rhetoric, bits and pieces of information that had filtered down since suggest otherwise.
With a large part of rural Afrikaners militarised and radicalised at the beginning of the year, any conflict would have been bloody if it had ever come to it.
But too much had come to hinge around the person of Viljoen and the spontaneous following he initially generated. To many he had become the great white hope, the Moses come to lead them to the promised land. He was the only person who could conceivably cause a split in the ranks of the security forces and arguably the only rightwinger who could lead more than a 100 people into open rebellion.
When rightwing bombs eventually exploded during election week, it hardly caused a panic as Viljoen was no longer part of it.
Even now, Viljoen is adamant that a volkstaat could have been taken by force. In a written explanation to supporters shortly after the Bop debacle he was nevertheless just as certain that the rightwing would not have been able to hold on to such a territory:
“… It would be easy to annex or conquer a volkstaat, but holding on to what you had conquered — not only on a military level, but also on financial and other levels — is something that has to be considered carefully. Many members of the controlling structures had come to differ with me regarding our advice and were feeling that the time had come for us to use our military power to gain that which we could not attain on the political front. Even though we are strong on the military level, it is necessary that this strength be exercised as a last resort and that cognisance be taken of the misery that could be the result of military violence, as was the case in Bophuthatswana.”
When Viljoen stated in the same explanation that “it is quite possible that people on grassroots level will not always understand why I hold certain points of view, and hold them strongly, even when knowing that these views will not be very popular among our people …”, he himself could not have foreseen the very level of dislike, even hatred, that the hard right would come to harbour against him.
This feeling for Viljoen is now the one unifying factor among the acerbic squabbles of the rightwing. This does not bode well for Viljoen and the FF who need to gather more Afrikaners behind them in their statutory quest for a volkstaat.
The way in which the ANC, and especially President Nelson Mandela, have managed to allay white fears since coming to power — even to the extent of risking alienation form its own powerbase — has also played an integral role in the dissipation of rightwing radicalism.
Perhaps the last words should belong to two lesser known right-wingers who have both, knowingly or unknowingly, been seduced by the fact that the sky did not actually fall in on their heads after April 1994.
The first one, from Pretoria, was active as an organiser in the AVF and later in the FF. A few months after virtually being on his way to war he said: “At last we now have a president that we can have some respect for.”
The other guy, a real hardliner from Warmbaths who had been involved in some of the AWB’s earlier attempts to uproot squatters, was even more succinct in his comment: “Fuck politics, I’m going to make some money now.”