Ilda Jacobs and Justin Arenstein An underground organisation of racist South African exiles is using the Internet to recruit supporters and plan for the return of “civilised” white rule to South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The London-based Springbok Club slams “gutless” white liberals for betraying their race by “toadying” up to the African National Congress, and calls for the recolonisation of Africa by white supremacists.
Stressing that the organisation does not plan to take up arms against the ANC, Springbok Club chair Alan Harvey told the Mail & Guardian that the Springbok Club was instead setting up a shadow government to prepare for the day that South Africa “disintegrates under barbarian rule”.
“We don’t need to help this disintegration. It’s already happening all on its own and we’re simply organising exiled South Africans to be ready to go back and pick up the pieces after the collapse,” he said.
Harvey boasts on the club’s Internet site that exiled South Africans and Rhodesians have already established branches in three British counties and are recruiting members in Australia, the United States and Sweden.
Harvey insisted the club’s membership lists and figures are secret to prevent ANC retaliation, but photos of organisation gatherings published on the Internet show crowds of up to 100 supporters meeting in pubs. “What is happening in South Africa is really quite tragic, but the whites have only themselves to blame for the gutless way they allowed the treacherous handover to happen. And what is even more disgusting is the way many of them are now helping to keep the regime in power by fawning and toadying up to their new rulers.”
Parroting the hate speech on the site, Harvey said: “We see ourselves as the nucleus of the South African resistance movement in exile. We are aggressively recruiting and organising others who share our basic aim to work towards the return of civilised rule to the whole of Southern Africa.”
The organisation, which is allied to the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party and right-wing European figures, claims it is also lobbying the British government to tackle what it sees as anarchy in Africa by restoring colonial rule in key centres such as South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The British high commission undertook on Thursday to investigate the club’s activities and warned: “The British government is firmly committed to building a racially tolerant society where the spread of hate literature such as appears to exist on the Springbok Club website has no place.”
High commission representative Michael Doig said the UK had laws to tackle racially motivated crimes, including incitement to racial hatred.
“Unfortunately, Internet crime is a difficult area to police but the UK is looking carefully at how we can tackle the problem and where possible bring perpetrators to book,” he said.
Harvey is British-born but immigrated to South Africa in 1976 and worked as a computer programmer until he was sacked as “one of the first victims of affirmative action” in 1990.
“Although a computer programmer with 20 years’ experience, I found I could not find any full-time employment in South Africa after [FW] de Klerk’s notorious sell-out. So I returned to the UK, where I found massive lies being told about the country,” said Harvey.
“Sell-outs were specifically lying about the conditions and treatment of non-whites, who I discovered on the whole to be very happy and contented, and not in the slightest oppressed.”
Harvey admitted he was a right-wing activist while living in South Africa, and was founding editor of the Herstigte Nasionale Party’s Patriot newspaper in 1980.
Harvey relaunched the publication in the UK as the Patriot-in-Exile in the 1990s and helped build the Springbok Club by spearheading the 1996 amalgamation of the White Rhino Club and Rhodesian Forum. The White Rhino Club was established in Durban as a right-wing club in the early 1980s but later remarketed itself as a social club for expatriates in the UK. The Springbok Club elected its first executive committee on January 23 last year.
The Patriot-in-Exile, which has its own linked Internet site, boasts a militant white fist holding the apartheid-era South African flag on its masthead.
The newspaper, which is also still published as a tabloid in London, helps raise funds for the Springbok Club by selling “real” South African flags and has advertised for volunteer “couriers” to smuggle batches of the newspaper and other propaganda into South Africa as part of the “New Struggle”.
“The real flag will be readopted when a white government picks up the pieces in South Africa. The present ‘underpants’ flag is an abomination and is purely a party-political flag of the ANC regime,” said Harvey. “The old flag was inclusive and was respected by all sectors of the population.”
Springbok Club supporters are so attached to the old flag they have adopted it as their logo, planted triumphantly on a map of Africa and guarded by two springbok.
Both the Springbok Club and Patriot-in-Exile dedicate considerable space to attacking former president Nelson Mandela.
He is described as a terrorist, “a liar and a bigot … he simply played along to sell this falsehood of a hero and a martyr to the world. … Mandela is a murderer and a liar. He only lived in poverty when it suited him. There is only one word to describe an individual who is prepared to engage in acts of savagery such as bombing and terrorism and that is evil.”
Both websites include reports from expatriates who revisit South Africa, as well as a grudging admission by Tom Vorster, who said a six-week visit indicated “most whites seem to be surviving and indeed thriving in many cases. There seems to be a most encouraging upsurge in the white birth rate, [but] most whites still seem to be determined to leave the disintegrating country as soon as they can.”
Harvey is adamant South Africa faces anarchy, “with law and order broken down, public health in chaos, and the economy on the verge of collapse.
“Many more innocent people are going to suffer both non-whites and whites, but the majority of whites have only themselves to blame, however. They voted for [constitutional negotiations] in 1990,” said Harvey.
He also lashes out at Afrikaners for supposedly betraying their heritage and history by identifying themselves as Africans and agreeing to cooperate with black majority rule.
The Springbok Club joined forces with other right-wing British white
supremacist bodies in June under the banner of the Patriotic Forum as part of a movement to re-establish the British Empire and colonial rule.
“Our long-term policy is basically neo-colonialist and have found a wellspring of public support for the movement in the UK,” said Harvey.
Club supporters are, he said, active Conservative Party members who enjoy close relations with the right-wing London Swinton Circle lobby group and subscribe to the neo-colonial Right Now! publication.
The club’s organisers in Australia, the US and Sweden are Ferdi Fourie, Nick Maine and Lars Karnestam.
Karnestam insisted white rule in Africa was “biologically right” and said the club was also considering recruiting exiled Hong Kong expatriates following the fall of “yet another area of enlightened white rule”.
South African Human Rights commissioner Charlotte McClain said Harvey’s rhetoric undermined reconciliation in South Africa but did not constitute hate speech because it did not incite violence or hate based on race.
“It might be offensive but we have to be tolerant of divergent views. I am, however, concerned about the possibly defamatory statements about [Mandela]. These people are outside our jurisdiction, but it does appear to violate his human dignity,” she said.