A sun-dappled morning breaks over Braam Pretorius street, a picture of leafy serenity, and the white-only staff of Radio Pretoria turn on the microphones for another day of vocal resistance to the new South Africa.
”There is a storm out there. Our culture is under attack. We’re expected to speak only bloody English. Things are going to have to change,” said the station manager, Jaap Diedericks.
With its Boer flags and portraits of victories over the Zulus the studio resembles an Afrikaner museum, but Diedericks believes Radio Pretoria is about the politics of the future, not nostalgia.
A regime of black ”racialists” is uprooting the language, the wealth and the freedom of those who found empty veld and built a first world country, he said. Everything they and their ancestors worked for risks being blown away in the rainbow nation.
In such times it is right that each day’s broadcast starts with Christian prayer. God will provide, one day, but meantime the Afrikaner must defend himself as best he can. Eight years after history’s lid closed over apartheid the dreams and fears of the Boers are back on South Africa’s political agenda. A spate of bombings has been blamed on militant whites who allegedly want to stir a race war and overthrow the government.
The police have found several arms caches and a dozen suspected ringleaders are due to go on trial next year, but many think the terror is just starting. Last weekend a bomb exploded in a hangar full of police aircraft.
Security analysts put the odds of a successful coup as zero, the state being too strong, the plotters too weak, but mayhem and racial tension are possibilities.
Deepening the unease is the sense that the bombers, however few and isolated, are drawing on a well of Afrikaner resentment shared by farmers, liberal intellectuals and business executives.
While the police try to anticipate the next attack, President Thabo Mbeki and his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, have recently sat down with rightwing white politicians to ask, with a sense of urgency, what do Boers want?
Tuning into 104.2 FM provides some answers. The Afrikaner-language Radio Pretoria has an official listenership of 110 000 but claims the real figure is six times higher. It aims to nourish the striving for freedom and self-determination by promoting a Christian-Protestant European heritage.
When the apartheid-era version of the national anthem, Die Stem, fades the newsreaders, chat-show hosts and phone-in listeners talk of persecution by the democratically elected ”regime”. Namibia is often referred to as South West Africa and Zimbabwe as Rhodesia.
Their own country throws up questions: is Aids the solution to black population growth? Should farmers keep illegal guns to deter robbers? Where is the safest place to ramble with the kids? How do you get a visa to emigrate to Australia?
Seldom do you hear that since 1994 whites have retained the vast bulk of the country’s wealth and that ”black empowerment” schemes to balance the ownership of resources have faltered.
”We don’t want to go back to apartheid, we want more say in a real, new South Africa that accommodates all our differences. We’re the people with experience in running a modern state but the government just milks us as taxpayers,” said Diedericks.
Hankering for lost status was part of the resentment, he admitted, but most came from the erosion of the Afrikaans language in schools and public life, the deterioration of hospitals and services, the affirmative action which denied jobs to whites, and the crime.
The solution was a 10th province for whites only in the old Transvaal and Free State republics. The constitution allowed for self-determination so peaceful pressure, such as economic sanctions, would hopefully be enough, said Diedericks.
Many listeners sympathised with the alleged coup plotters but considered their strategy ridiculous and counter-productive, he added. ”The black leaders waiting to take over from Mbeki and Mandela are more radical. Violence against whites will increase because the blacks aren’t controlling their racial feelings whereas we are controlling ours.
”Even so, we weathered the English storm and we will weather this one. We are the most successful white tribe in Africa,” said the station manager.
For the first time since the 1930s, it is now common to see whites begging at road junctions. After a rocky start Orania, an Afrikaner enclave on the rim of the Karoo desert, is reporting a surge in applications of people wanting to move there.
Boer intellectuals also warn of alienation. Liberal academics recently formed a new organisation, the Group of 63, to promote Afrikaner culture and involvement in public life. Despite rejecting violence some of the academics were named by the alleged coup plotters as potential cabinet ministers, according to police.
A draft copy of a report to be published this week by the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies suggests the new militants are very different from the redneck bluster of Eugene Terre’Blanche’s AWB, a force in the early 1990s.
”The new guys are middle class and intellectuals. They are doctors, engineers, senior military officers,” said Henri Boshoff, one of the report’s co-authors. ”They are not personally losing out in the new South Africa but have grievances over what they see as an attack on their language, culture and identity. In that sense I would compare them to the terrorists of Eta in Spain.”
They may number less than 1 200 and will not overthrow the state but have the military training and organisation to commit atrocities. ”I reckon they will be around for at least a few years.” – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001