Aug. 24, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:29:09
4175 The Crisis In South Africa | Ernst Roets and Stefan Molyneux
"Kill the Boer is a book about the brutal reality of farm attacks in South Africa and how the South African government is complicit to this crisis. It is argued that the South African government should be regarded as complicit due to a variety of reasons, including its deprioritising of the crisis despite the worsening thereof, negative stereotyping of white farmers in particular, romanticising of violence inflicted upon farmers, propagation of hatred from political platforms, as well as the scorning and ridiculing of the victims of these attacks. The book reveals accounts of the direct involvement of members of the ruling ANC, the South African government and the SAPS in particular with the planning and execution of these attacks. It is argued that a looming process of ethnic cleansing should be regarded as a serious threat and something to be prevented. The complicity of the South African media is also indicated by analysis of news reports which clearly indicate biased reporting, leading to vilification and negative stereotyping of white farmers in particular. A variety of reasons why farm attacks are unique and deserving to be treated as a priority crime are outlined. These include the unique frequency at which these attacks take place, the horrific levels of torture that often accompanies these crimes, the role that farmers should play in society and the unique circumstances that farmers are in."Ernst Roets is a lawyer and the Deputy CEO of AfriForum. AfriForum is a non-governmental organisation, registered as a non-profit company, with the aim of protecting the rights of minorities. While the organisation functions on the internationally recognized principle of the protection of minorities, AfriForum has a specific focus on the rights of Afrikaners as a community living on the southern tip of the continent.Order Ernst’s Book Now: http://www.fdrurl.com/ernst-roets-bookWebsite: https://www.afriforum.co.zaTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/ErnstRoetsYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. We're here with our friend Ernst Rutz.
Now, he's a lawyer, the deputy CEO of Afroforum and the author of a book I highly recommend, which we'll put a link to below.
It's called Kill the Boer, Government Complicity in South Africa's Brutal Farm Murders.
Now, Afroforum is a non-governmental organization registered as a nonprofit company with the aim of protecting the rights of minorities.
While the organization functions on the internationally recognized principle of the protection of minorities, Afroforum has a specific focus, for reasons we will get into over the course of this conversation, on the rights of Afrikaners as a community living on the southern tip of the continent.
It's afriforum, A-F-R-I forum,.co.za.
The book is killtheboerbook.com.
That's killtheboerbook.com.
And you can follow Ernst's excellent Twitter feed at twitter.com forward slash Ernst Roots, E-R-N-S-T-R-O-E-T-S, Ernst Roots.
Thanks for taking the time to come back on the show today.
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
So, you have made, I think, a very compelling case in the book that farm murderers are very specific, may have political motivations, may in fact have political backing, and should be prioritized in terms of crime fighting in South Africa.
I wonder if you could run through the case as to what makes them so unique in the rather bloody tapestry of South African crime.
Yes, thank you very much.
So there are, I would say, two main themes that I made in the book.
But my interest in this topic is not simply writing a book about it.
It's something that I've been involved with actively, basically on a full-time basis since 2012, where I've been running AfriForum's campaign against farm herders.
And the two main themes in the book, the first one is That farm attacks are not normal crime.
It's something that we frequently hear as an argument, especially in response to us saying that this should be dealt with as a priority and it should be a priority crime.
And then the response is, no, it's just normal crime.
And the second point, which is the much more alarming point in the book, is the complexity of the South African government, which we'll get into, I'm sure.
But in terms of why it's not normal crime, I'll briefly go over the four reasons and then we can dig into them if you want.
So there are four reasons which I highlight why you cannot say that this is just normal crime.
Firstly, the first reason is the extreme frequency at which these attacks take place.
So we know South Africa is one of the most violent societies on earth.
It's one of the countries with the highest murder ratio.
The murder ratio in South Africa, for example, the general murder ratio is 34 people per 100,000 that are murdered every year.
The world average, I think, is around six per 100,000.
So that's extremely high.
But then the ratio at which farmers are being targeted is much more than that.
And the calculation becomes an academic debate about how do you calculate the per 100,000 ratio.
But let's for now just say that the numbers are extremely high.
The second reason why farm murders are not normal crime is the extreme levels of brutality that we see with these attacks.
We took one year, we took 2017, and we counted, in terms of the people who were murdered during farm attacks, how many of them were also tortured?
And the ratio for that year was around 17% of those who were murdered were tortured to death, which is extremely high.
And we're not talking about beating people to death.
We're talking about tying people up behind vehicles and dragging them over dirt roads.
We're talking about Robert Lynn, for example, who's an Irish citizen and he and his wife, they were attacked, for example.
He was tied up to a chair and he was burnt with a blowtorch.
He was tortured for several hours.
We are talking about Nikki Simpson who lives just not too far from where I'm speaking to you now on a farm.
She was tied to a chair and then the attackers took electric drills and they started drilling holes through her hands and feet as she was tied up.
An interesting story about Nikki Simpson that It wasn't really part of the media because it's information that she withheld initially.
So they kept asking her for the safe.
They said to her they must give them the keys to the safe.
And she knew where the keys to the safe was, but she wasn't prepared to give it to them.
And the reason why she wasn't prepared to give it to them is because in the safe there was an angle grinder.
She would rather opt for the electric drill than give them the keys to the safe and potentially be tortured then with an angle grinder.
It's extreme. It's really extreme.
We can go into so many such stories, which are the most horrific stories you can think of.
The third reason why we are saying this isn't normal crime is because of the role that farmers play in society and have to play.
So the South African government, for example, want farmers to create a million jobs by the year 2030.
But these people are creators of food, and they are employers.
And these employers, the government keeps telling them they must create more jobs, but they are being murdered completely in disproportionate numbers.
And then the fourth reason, which is the least controversial and probably the most practical, is just simply the fact that farmers live in different circumstances.
They live far away from police stations.
They live far away from their neighbors.
So there's the example of Richard Stoffberg, which I tell in that chapter.
He was attacked on his farm.
He was tied up to the bed.
He was beaten severely and they trampled on him and so forth.
And he was then left there and they went out.
The attackers left the scene.
He soon realized that he wasn't able to free himself from the bonds.
He was struggling and eventually realized there's nothing that he could do.
He was tied up so tightly that he would just have to lie there and wait for someone to come to his aid.
And he was screaming, but his house is far away.
It's on a farm. And eventually he spent four nights lying there tied to the bed before someone finally came looking for him and found him there.
He was half dead already.
He said that he couldn't speak anymore.
He obviously was dehydrated.
He wasn't able to eat or drink anything.
This is just a story to prove the fact that if you are attacked in your house, you can scream and the neighbors will hear you.
Or you can push a panic button and there would probably be a police vehicle not too far away.
But on farms, unfortunately, that's not the case.
All right. Now, there's two things that struck me in terms of figuring out some of the motivations and causality behind these attacks.
Number one is that they really didn't occur until...
The ANC was legitimized.
The communist organization of the ANC was legitimized.
And secondly, there's a point in the book where you point out in 2010, during the World Cup soccer, farm murders ceased.
In other words, something happened somewhere.
Some command came down, something occurred, wherein at a time when the South African government was attempting to sell South Africa as a tourist destination, the farm murders ceased.
And this seems to me, if it was somehow endemic to theft, well, under apartheid, blacks were poor, so why weren't farmers being attacked?
And in 2010, if it was just a crime motivated by poverty, well, it wasn't like in 2010, all black poverty ceased in South Africa.
So what do you think this tells people about what might be going on behind the scenes?
Yeah, that's very important.
So let me first... Let's first deal with the pre-1990 issue and then with the 2010 World Cup and what happened there.
So firstly there's a cartoon that was drawn about the book and it's two panels.
The one panel says critics about the book and then it's pictures of people burning things and protesting and writing and then the second panel says critics who have read the book and then it's just blank.
So the book has been described as being controversial.
I don't think the book is controversial because I made deliberate effort to quote sources for everything.
There's literally more than a thousand source references in the book.
The only thing I do in the book is I quote credible sources and I ask questions based on those sources.
When I speculate, I make it clearly that that is what I'm doing.
One of the things that's regarded as a very controversial issue or point that I raised in the book is the issue of how this started.
Before 1990, Apartheid basically ended in 1990, not 1994.
So in 1990, the prohibition of all communist organizations was rescinded.
The ANC was declared an illegal organization before that because of its communist views.
The same with the South African Communist Party and so forth.
And in 1990, That was rescinded.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but would it be fair to say that it was not just communist ideology, but at least in certain elements, a commitment to violence as the means of achieving its political ends?
Yes, that's certainly, and that's one of the also controversial things about the release of Nelson Mandela was that he was told by President P.W. Boerthau that If he denounces violence, then they would release him.
And of course, he wasn't prepared to do that.
And then there's a whole debate.
That's not a secret, but the debate is in was it the right thing to do?
Of course, that's the debate in South Africa.
But so, yes, also, it's about the commitment to communism, but also the commitment to use violence.
And that's particularly important because I've spoken with General Sapirwen Yanda, who was a general and commander of the military wing of the ANC, about farmers.
And he explicitly said to me, and we made a documentary film about this, called Tainted Heroes.
He explicitly said to me that it was ANC policy, number one, that they do not need to differentiate between hard and soft targets.
In other words, if you kill civilians, it's okay.
And it sounds extreme to say this, but those were his words.
It's on record. It's recorded.
And it was in writing as well.
They took that decision in 1985 in Kabwe.
So that's the one thing.
The second thing was he said they particularly took a decision that farmers should be regarded as the enemy, as legitimate targets.
Those were his words. And then he went further.
He said that not only the farmers, but also their families, also their wives and their children.
And then he said, yes, I know it was a controversial decision, but We decided that they were the enemy and so we decided that basically we can go out and kill them.
Well, and to put this in historical context, as I'm sure you're aware, when the communists entered into Ukraine after the Russian Revolution of 1917, they also began torturing and murdering the Ukrainian farmers in the Holodomor, which resulted in massive starvation, which of course is one of the goals of trying to avoid that in South Africa.
But communists do seem to have a special fetish for the killing of wealthy and competent farmers, as has occurred through many communist revolutions throughout human history.
Yes, exactly. And of course, those people are regarded as heroes by the ANC. We can talk about that as well.
They regard Joseph Stalin and even Mao Zedong they regard as a hero.
We can talk about that as well. But just to finish the puzzle, the first piece is their commitment not only to violence and their view that soft targets and particularly farmers can be targeted.
But then there's another piece of the puzzle which is Even more controversial, and it's well documented.
It's documented by Amnesty International, among others, that the ANC had camps.
When they were still an illegal organization, they had a bunch of military camps, as they called it, across Africa.
And one of them was Quatro. Quatro wasn't the only one, but Quatro was the most notorious one, where their victims or their prisoners were tortured.
Many of them were tortured to death.
In the early 1990s, Amnesty International and two other organizations thoroughly investigated that and they spoke with some of the survivors and they wrote comprehensive reports about what happened in those camps.
And then there's also a list of methods they used to torture those people.
And the scary thing is if you read that, it's the same ways in which farmers are being tortured today.
So, for example, they would tie people up and they would burn them with melted plastic.
That's something that happens, unfortunately, quite regularly in South Africa on farms.
They would strip people naked, and then they would tie them to objects, and then they would beat them with whips.
That's something that happens on farms.
They would have people lie down, and then they would jump on them, or they would trample them with military boots.
That's also happening. All of those examples are...
I mentioned examples of where that happened in South Africa.
So there's a whole list of that.
Then, what happened?
In 1990, The ANC, the abolishment or the prohibition of the ANC was rescinded.
Those people who were committing those atrocities came to South Africa, about 10,000 to 13,000 MK soldiers, as they called it, and Contabuses was the military wing of the ANC, came back to South Africa.
And that's when the farm murder started.
It started in 1990.
I can't think of a better explanation.
And maybe there is a better explanation.
No, there isn't. No, no, there isn't.
Look, as you know, when you have an organization that explicitly has said, we're going to target this group of people, and then their illegal status is revoked, the warriors come in, and the targeting of those people commences, it's not the most improbable explanation to say that these are the dominoes that started falling.
Maybe to add to that, so what they did before 1990 was a couple of things.
They said, farmers are the enemy.
Farmers are oppressors.
They should be blamed for everything.
White people in general, but white farmers in particular.
They sang songs about killing farmers, and they said to their supporters, go and kill farmers.
Then 1990 happened.
The ANC became a legal organization, of course, and then in 1994, they became the ruling party.
So all of that still happens today, except they are not actively calling on people to murder farmers.
So they still say that farmers are the cause of everything that's wrong.
Everything that's wrong with you should be blamed on white people in general, but white farmers in particular.
They still sing songs about killing farmers.
They still blame farmers for everything that's wrong in South Africa.
The only thing, they've never said, listen, our previous policy, we've disbanded that.
That's not our view anymore. They don't really say that.
They just don't say, go and kill farmers.
That's basically the difference.
But we know farmers are being killed in numbers much higher than they were before 1990.
Well, one thing that you also point out in the book that I think is well worth highlighting is the increase in farm murders that occurs right after an incendiary anti-white speech made by various members of the ruling class seems pretty causal to me based on the numbers you provide.
Yes, and that's one of the arguments about complicity.
Earlier, the ANC might have argued, 10 or 20 years ago, they might have argued, no, there's no link.
When we sing, kill the boor, kill the farmer, the word boor, of course, is a term that means farmer, but it also refers to the Afrikaner community or the boor community, of course.
So it has a bit of a dual meaning.
But they might have tried arguing, when we sing this, it doesn't lead to an increase.
We now know it leads to an increase, but they keep singing it.
One famous example is Peter Mukaba in 1993, who was the president of the ANC Youth League, who, by the way, is described by Julius Malema, who's very active in South African politics today, as his role model.
He repeatedly sang the song, Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.
It's more a chant than a song.
It's not really a song with a melody.
It's just a chant and then they imitate the sounds of a machine gun.
He was asked about that by the media, and he said, what I meant was shoot to kill.
That's what he said. That's how he explained it.
And he said, this is our culture, and we're not afraid.
We don't shy away from this.
And if you look at what happened in the month following on when he started singing this song, there was an increase in farm murders by about more than 100%, if I recall.
So what I did, or what we did in the research for the book, is we took five high-profile such cases.
So the one is Peter McCarver singing Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.
One is former president Jacob Zuma at the centenary gathering of the ANC, publicly and on cameras, it was broadcast singing about shooting farmers and how cabinet is going to shoot the farmers.
The other one is Julius Malema, who is very active, as I said, in South African politics today, is the leader of the so-called economic freedom fighters, who repeatedly sang a song called Dubula Ibunu, which is in Zulu, if you translate it, it means shoot the burr.
And then Julius Malema also making a speech about where he, among others, said, we are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now.
And then the fifth one was Ronald Lamola, who was president of the ANC Youth League after Malema, who said that South Africans need to prepare for war and they are going to take the land by force.
And he then said, we can no longer guarantee the safety of Mr.
Van Tonder and Mr. Van de Merwe if they don't hand over their property.
Of course, those are two very well-known Afrikaner surnames.
So in those five cases, on average, farm murders increased by 74% in the months that followed on that, which clearly says to us, it's hard to prove that a particular murder was committed as a direct result of a particular incident of hate speech or of singing these songs.
In the Western world or in North America, there's a big debate about hate speech.
But if they want to know what hate speech really is, they must come and look in South Africa.
Well, I would say that a direct incitement to violence would have fall under incitement to rioting, incitement to violence.
Those seem to me entirely separate from hate speech laws, which seem to be around people being upset or offended.
But if you directly call for the murder of an ethnicity or even of an individual, well, that is illegal, I think, under any rational speech law.
Yeah, I agree. I think that's what hate speech is supposed to be, is when you actively call for violence committed on people based on their identity, for example.
And it's not only singing about killing people, it's a chant in the first place, which is more enticing than a song.
And it's also imitating with your hands, making gestures, imitating, pretending that you are holding a machine gun or a pistol, and then imitating the sounds of a machine gun.
And then also you sing this song, Immediately after you gave a speech in which you said, for example, all white people are criminals and they should be treated as criminals, or if a white person owns a piece of land, it's because he stole it from you.
So they would make this speech, and then they would sing the song, and then the people are being murdered.
That's unfortunately the crux of the matter.
So let's talk a little bit about the definition, the frequency and the brutality of these kinds of murderers.
And sorry, just before we do that, though, I did want to point out that the question of The whites owning the land, stolen from the blacks, genocide of the blacks, and so on.
Well, we talked about this previously, and we'll link to our last interview below.
But there has been, since the early 90s, an attempt to bring land back to any blacks wherein it could be reasonably proven that it was unjustly stolen.
But what was it? 93% of the blacks, even if their claims are verified, choose not to farm, but instead just take the money and let the farm either continue with its existing ownership or it ends up becoming a migrant camp or lying fallow or just becoming subsistence farming that doesn't really add to the economy as a whole.
And so just let's talk about that and then let's talk about how frequent they are and how brutal these murders are.
Yes. So in terms of owning the land, I think that's Not I think.
I'm convinced that that's the biggest fallacy of our time in South Africa is the notion, whites stole the land.
It's a buzzword.
It's a sentence you hear all the time made by politicians.
And the fact of the matter is that, I mean, there are millions of white people in South Africa.
Some white people did atrocious things in South Africa.
Some black people also did atrocious things.
But the fact that some white people did acrocious things doesn't give you the right to or doesn't justify making a sweeping statement.
By the same logic, we can say black people are murderers because some black people are murderers.
Some white people are murderers.
So in terms of how the land was acquired, it's a very long and complicated history.
And I tried to sum it up in the book in two chapters.
But broadly speaking, there were three ways in which white people obtained land before apartheid.
The first was empty land.
And there are people who say, no, that's a myth.
There was no empty land in South Africa.
Well, there are many reasons, many ways to prove that there was empty land.
The one is it was very well documented.
It's documented by white and black historians.
Before the Great Track, when the white, the Afrikaners, as they are known today, moved up from Cape Town to the northern parts of South Africa, they actually sent in what was known as the commission track.
So they sent in scouts to investigate, is there land for us?
And they found that there were vast open spaces of land.
And we can talk about the empty land a lot.
But just to give you one example, South Africa is actually a very dry country.
And it's been found that if you don't have the technology to dig a borehole, you can only survive on 30% of South Africa's surface.
And there weren't boreholes back then.
So that's enough to prove that there was a lot of empty land.
So that's the first way.
The second way in which land was acquired was through treaties.
And there were dozens upon dozens of treaties.
And it was written down. Just recently, the King of Swaziland also agreed.
He said that he knows in Swazi history, the Swazi King negotiated with the Fuatrakas, as they were known, or the Boers, and he gave them a big piece of land in exchange for services they rendered to him.
So that happened, and the evidence still exists.
The treaties are still there.
And then the third one is the most controversial, and that's conquest.
So you can say, oh, you see, they came in and they fought wars and they just took the land.
Firstly, the first thing is that was general practice in South Africa at the time among the black tribes, especially among the Zulus and the Zutus and so forth.
The Zulus fully recognized the right of conquest, which seems kind of tough to complain when it's another race that does it.
Exactly. And that's the point.
And I quoted people in the book as well.
I quoted, for example, the king of the Sloobis.
I interviewed him and he said, yes, that's regarded as a legitimate way of obtaining land.
You attack people and you take their land.
But that happened in terms of white people obtaining land in that way.
It really was the exception.
And the biggest example of that was when they drove out Msilikatsi, who was responsible for the Mifekane.
He had a big land expansion campaign, which resulted in the deaths of between one and two million black people.
And people were driven off their land, and he just took land.
Basically, Msilikatsi and King Shaka, who's better known today, At this campaign, and then the Boers drove Msilikazi out, and they drove him into what is known as Zimbabwe today.
And then they took that land.
And then afterwards, some of the black tribes came to the Boers and said, well, we used to live here.
And then they gave that land back.
And they said, well, fine, if you live here, you can take the land back on which you used to live.
So the fact of the matter is all of that happened before apartheid.
Yes, there were discriminatory laws by the apartheid government.
It was implemented largely on pieces of land that was already acquired in a way that was legitimate.
But the fact that there were discriminatory laws is now used as an argument as to why we need to, quote unquote, take back the land.
And it's a complete fallacy.
So how often are these farmers being tortured and murdered in this way?
Yes. There's been many attempts to calculate the ratio.
As I said, the murder rate in South Africa is 34 per 100,000.
The rate at which police officers in South Africa are killed has been calculated to be around 55 per 100,000.
And there's been several attempts to calculate the rate at which farmers are being murdered, stretching between 98 per 100,000 to 156 per 100,000, somewhere between there.
Now, consider this.
If you live in the United Kingdom, the murder rate is 1 per 100,000.
So in other words, Literally, you need to multiply it by whatever amount.
So if the ratio in South Africa is 34 per 100,000, it means for every one person murdered in England, 34 were murdered in South Africa.
And that's just the general ratio.
So in terms of the numbers, it becomes difficult because it's hard to determine the ratio because you need to determine how many of the people who were murdered were actually farmers.
And then you need to say, how many farmers are there?
So the problem is I can be the victim of a farm murder despite the fact that I don't live on a farm.
So it becomes hard to calculate.
But we are busy with a new study at the moment to try to get closer to the exact number.
And I think one thing that people forget, let's say for the sake of the argument that the farm murder rate is 100 per 100,000, which is much lower than some estimates, which you could criticize.
But let's, for the sake of the argument, say that you cannot even only compare it to the average South African murder rate, which is 34.
So you cannot say your chances is three times as high because Farm murders, by definition, are not social fabric crimes.
If a husband kills his wife on a farm, by definition, that's not a farm murder.
A farm murder is people coming from outside and attacking the farm.
And that's about 80% of murders in South Africa.
So what you need to do is you need to strip out the social fabric crimes from the general murder rate, and then you get to a murder rate which is close to 5 or 10 per 100,000.
And then you need to compare that to 100 per 100,000, for example.
So, it's extremely high.
One number I use in the book is police statistics, which I've indicated in the book is lower than the actual amount.
But according to official government statistics, in South Africa, to give you an idea, over the last two decades, there's been, on average, two farm attacks every day and two farm murders every week over a period of two decades.
That's basically where we are in South Africa.
In the attacks, as you've pointed out, Ernst, the level of brutality is Almost incomprehensible.
It is like a window into hell itself.
Because these are not simple thefts.
I mean, most people, if you wave a gun in their face, they'll give you their money and say, go away.
So if it was simple... And of course, there's lots of easier places to steal from than a farm.
Because of course, the farms have...
The people are well-armed.
They have guard dogs. They have various levels of protection.
Because they're aware of the danger that they're being subjected to.
So what has gone on...
In these houses and on these properties that people just aren't aware of because it's so underreported.
Exactly. And to give you an example of how horrible it is, there's been quite a few cases, I mentioned some in the book, where the attackers actually pause the torture for a moment to go and make lunch.
They eat lunch, then they go back and continue with the torturing.
If you pack a lunchbox to go and rob someone's house, because that's what the police and many commentators say, no, it's just robbery.
If you pack a lunchbox, not only under the pretense of robbing, but then actually torturing someone for several hours, then going out having lunch, then coming back and continuing with the torture, There's clearly something else going on, and that's what's happening.
So, I mean, there's been the most horrible stories.
Let's use last year as an example, just 2017.
I mentioned the story of Robert Lynn, who was tortured with a blowtorch.
That happened last year.
I mentioned the story of Nicky Simpson, who was tortured with an electric drill.
That happened last year. There was a farmer in KwaZulu-Natal last year.
He was attacked on his farm.
He was severely beaten.
The attackers literally drove through one of the walls in his house with a tractor.
They tied him to a chair.
They started shocking him with cables, electric wires.
And then they started torturing him with pliers, you know, cutting holes through his flesh.
And eventually they murdered him by pouring jick through his throat.
They opened his mouth and they just poured a bottle of jick in there.
What is that? It's a cleaning fabric.
It's like a type of soap, which is of course very poisonous as well.
So that happened just the other day.
There was a farmer just the other day in South Africa who was burned to death.
He was tied up in his vehicle.
We don't know exactly what happened.
He was burned to death in his car on his farm.
There was a couple the other day who had their toenails, their nails pulled out.
An elderly couple, I think they were in their 80s, if I remember.
They were tied up, their nails were literally pulled out as they sat there.
There was a couple the other day who was tied up and beaten repeatedly.
They were then shot executioner style.
But then there were some really, really shocking cases, especially the ones that involved children.
And those are the most horrific stories.
So one of the well-known cases, and the book is, I've spoken with the family, the Potgitter family, and they agreed for me to write the book in the memory of Wilmin Potgitter, who was a two-year-old girl.
So what happened there was the Potgitter family, it was Wilmin, two years old, and her father, Atti, and her mother, Wilna.
They came back. It was their wedding anniversary.
They came back from town.
When they stopped outside the house, They were attacked by three attackers.
Ati was immediately attacked and he fought back, but they were armed and he wasn't.
So they were armed with, the one was armed with a guard and fork, the one with a knife and the other one with a machete, which is something we call a panga in South Africa.
And they were fighting and struggling all around the house.
Afterwards, you could literally see, according to the police reports, there was blood stains all around the house as they were fighting.
And eventually, Ati collapsed at the back door.
He was bleeding there and then he died.
So they stabbed him, the autopsy revealed, they stabbed him 151 times in full view of his wife and his two-year-old little girl who had to witness.
The post-mortem and the investigation on the scene found that little Wilmin, who was two years old, her feet were covered in her father's blood and you could literally see her footsteps.
Bloodied footsteps around his dead body and you could see in his blood there were little footprints as well.
So then what happened after that happened?
They took the little girl, they shot her through the head and they threw her in a box and they shoved the box into a storage room outside.
Then Vilna, and I imagine this, she just saw this happening to her husband.
Then they saw this happening to her two-year-old girl.
They then dragged her into the house.
She gave them the keys to the safe after all of this happened.
They asked her for the keys to the safe, I assume afterwards.
And then they took the keys and then they had her kneel and they shot her executioner style.
They then went to go back to the storage room.
They took little Wilmin. They picked her body up.
They know she was in the box because the box was literally filled, or full at least, with her blood.
Her little body was then just dumped on her mother.
Then they wrote a sign.
They took a piece of cardboard and they wrote a sign in Sepedi, which is a local language, and they wrote the words, we have killed them and we are coming back.
And they put that up on the front gate of the farm.
They were eventually caught and they were found guilty of murder and they are currently in prison.
But one of the strangest things about this was in court, the judge found that their motive was simply to steal.
And we've had repeated cases like that.
There was another case, a guy called Knowledge Polis Mandlazi.
He's also in prison. He committed five farm murders.
He murdered five farmers.
So he was a serial farm killer.
He was caught. And he said in court, and I quote, he said, my hateful whites made me do it.
Then he said, for me, killing white farmers is like going to work.
And he was then found guilty.
And the court said they couldn't find any racial motive in these attacks.
But there were other examples of, for example, the Vienna family, just south of Johannesburg.
It was not a farm, it was a smallholding.
Tony was the father's name.
I'm trying to remember the mother's name now, his wife's name.
And then Amaru was their son.
He was 12 years old. They basically kidnapped or had the three there in the house.
They then took them to different rooms and the first thing they did was they raped the mother so that her son and her husband could hear this happening as they were locked up in other rooms.
Then they killed her.
They shot her through the head.
Then they went and they shot Tony as well.
So then Amaru, a 12-year-old boy, had just heard them raping his mother.
They heard them murdering his mother.
Then he heard them murdering his father.
Then what they did was they filled the The bathtub with boiling water.
They tied Amaru up and they shoved him headfirst into the boiling water.
And they testified about this in court.
They said, yes, that's what happened.
We tied him up and then they said that they particularly talked about how they could remember him crying as they were tying him up as he knew that he was about to be shoved into this.
It's the most atrocious thing you can think of.
And then afterwards, just to wrap it all up, they went to the family dog and they sliced open the dog completely.
They sliced open his stomach.
And I'm sitting in Pretoria talking to you now.
Johannesburg is not far from here.
So let's say about an hour's drive from where I'm sitting now.
That's where that happened. And I can go on.
There's an entire chapter just with stories about how people have been tortured.
It's extreme. You can't imagine people thinking up these cruel methods of torturing people.
And the targeting of children is, I mean, there can't possibly be a political motivation other than the terrorization of a general community to target children, in particular, in this kind of way.
Yes, exactly. And it's not only happening on the farms, it's mostly happening on the farms, but in Dalmas, which is a town also not too far from here, maybe three quarters of an hour's drive, a few years ago, 2012, I remember there was an attack where they literally came in, There was a little baby.
He was eight months old. He was lying in the crib.
And I think they just stole from the house.
I can't remember if they killed anyone else.
Then they went to the baby and they just strangled him to death and they left him there.
I can go on about these stories.
It's the most horrific things.
A friend of mine, I start the book in the preface.
It's called This is Personal.
And then I just mention The people I knew who've been murdered.
I mean, that's where the situation is.
You can mention the people you knew who have been murdered.
And either that or the people I know who had people who were very close to them who've been murdered.
One was a boy who went to school with me, Joseph Freeland, just after high school.
He was 19 years old.
He was sleeping on a farm.
They came in, they just shot him through the head.
So he went to sleep one night.
He just never woke up because he was shot in the head.
My father's cousin, family member of mine, was attacked on a farm.
She was stoned by her attackers.
We assume from what we could gather from the news reports that there was some argument between them, and then they started stoning her.
Then she was still alive, and then they stepped on her, and as she was lying on the floor, they then pierced a garden fork through her head.
I mean, that's a family member of mine with whom that happened.
My own brother was attacked on a farm two years ago, on a small holding at least.
And I think one of the reasons they didn't physically hurt him was because he's a professional hunter, but he had a camouflage jacket that was lying on the desk and the attackers thought that he was a member of the army.
They asked him that halfway through and they just ransacked the house and then they left him there.
And it turns out the people were caught.
They were sentenced, I think, to 130 years imprisonment.
And it turns out my brother was the only one of their victims who was not...
They were also serial farm attackers.
He was the only one of their victims who was not murdered or physically harmed.
And I mean, it's just a miracle as far as we are concerned that he survived that.
And you also mentioned, was it a friend of your sister when you were celebrating a birthday?
Yes. And that's also something that had a very big impact on me personally.
And I can exactly remember the date.
It was the 5th of June 2012.
And there were three things that happened on that day.
The first thing that happened on that day was that was the day on which I became a father.
So my oldest boy is six years old.
He was born on the 5th of June 2012.
And I mean, obviously, that's not a day that you would forget.
So, he was born in the morning.
Then, as is custom, you send out messages to all your friends and family, and you say to them, listen, this happened, he's a healthy boy, and we are very proud, and you send out pictures.
Then, a few hours after he was born, there was a press conference.
I mentioned it earlier.
There was a press conference by Ronald Lamola, who was president of the ANC Youth League, very close to where we live, actually.
And he said that people must prepare for war, and they cannot guarantee the safety of white farmers.
And then a few hours after that, a friend of mine, a friend of mine's family at least, were attacked, also just a few kilometers from where we live on a smallholding.
And Arina Miller, my friend's sister, was murdered.
So she was basically just gunned down point blank.
She came home from the gym.
She's in her early 20s.
They just gunned her down and then they left.
What was particularly striking about that for me was I didn't, obviously, you only find out afterwards.
So we sent out messages and we said, you know, I just became a father.
And one of my friends replied and she just said, Johannes' sister was murdered today.
And there are so many such cases.
I think, I can't remember the number now, it's probably close to 15 people that I mentioned just in the preface of the book of people who I either knew who have been attacked or killed.
Or people who, as I said, who have been murdered, who are very close to people who are very close to me.
And I think this is true for most of the people that I've spoken to from South Africa, that it is not a distant problem.
It is not a problem that you only read about in the newspaper, that it has a very visceral personal impact for anyone who, maybe not just those who live in the center of the cities, but anybody who has any kind of rural connections, has these kinds of bloodstains on the family tree or the social tree.
Exactly. And let me give you another example of this.
So I spent some time in high school living on a farm.
And there was a lady working on the farm and her grandparents were murdered, also on a different farm.
And it was one of the really brutal murders.
They were tied up, they were stabbed, they were dragged around the house up and down.
So they were literally, the whole house was soaked in blood because as they were being stabbed, they were dragged up and down.
And it was John and Bina Cross, their names.
And so eventually they took a shower nozzle and they opened up the warm tap until the water was as hot as it can be.
They then forced the shower nozzle down John's throat.
And I'm not sure at which stage did he die, but so they did that.
They then threw him in, again, a bathtub filled with boiling water.
And eventually, they finished it all off by taking a shotgun and putting it up to his head and then basically blowing his head off.
And what was particularly striking about that is Carte Blanche is a very well-named current affairs TV show in South Africa.
And I remember in 2003, they did a A program about farm murders.
I think it was the first real documentary in the mainstream media about this, at least that I know of.
And we were all watching this.
And this lady as well, who was working on the farm, whose grandparents have been murdered.
And then she saw, she didn't expect that it would be on the show.
But on that program, they actually went to the house.
They showed video footage of the crime scene.
And so she saw the The hallways and everything just soaked in her grandparents' blood.
In South Africa, if you talk to farmers, it's become almost like a natural cause of death, where people talk about, oh yes, you remember John?
Oh yes, John was murdered a few years ago.
That's just how you refer to people.
It's extremely alarming that this is such a serious crisis, and it's not regarded as a serious crisis by By the authorities in South Africa.
Well, I was struck in the book, Ernst, where you talk about your conversation with the man you pseudonym as John.
I wonder if you could tell people a little bit about that.
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I said that the South African government is complicit.
In the final chapter, I went back before publishing and when we were doing the editing and I counted how many arguments are there for the complicity of the South African government and I counted 10.
And one of them It's direct involvement.
I'll tell the story of John.
I received a phone call a few years ago.
Actually, as I was busy writing the book, I just started writing and I received a phone call.
It was someone who said to me, he's in a prison.
He gave me the name of the prison and he said he urgently needs to speak to me about farm murders.
I asked him who he was and he gave me his name, which I changed for the book.
And he said to me that he had murdered a farmer.
He's in prison for committing a farm murder and he needs to speak to me.
So I went there with a colleague of mine who used to be a police officer and a detective.
We went to see him.
And this is basically the story he told us.
So he said to us that he is a member of Mkantui Si's Way, which, as I said, is the military wing of the ANC. He gave us the details of the farmer he murdered, which we verified and his details, you know, Seemed to be correct in terms of what actually happened.
He then said that the reason why he murdered that farmer was because he's a member of the ANC, which is the ruling party, and the ANC told him to go and murder that farmer.
And then we were suspicious and we said to him, but why are you telling us this?
What's the point if you are a member of this party?
Why are you telling us that they told you to murder him?
And he said the reason why he's telling us is because he was caught And then they pretended that they didn't know who he was.
So he found that he was stabbed in the back once he was caught.
Then he went further and he gave us a telephone number that was written on a piece of paper.
And he said, this is the number from which they have dialed him, from which they call him to give him instructions and so forth.
And we afterwards, we were able to follow that up.
And we actually found that that number was a telephone number in the ANC's headquarters.
That's what we found afterwards.
And we then said to him that we don't know if we can believe you.
We will believe you if you can put this in a sworn affidavit.
And he said, it's fine.
We'll put it in a sworn affidavit.
And we said, fine, we'll come back and we can do that.
So we went back about a week later and he said to us that he has some demands before he makes the sworn affidavit.
And then he said that he wants us to buy him a house when he comes out for his protection.
And he wants to go and study, and we should pay for his studies.
And I immediately said to him, there's no way that we are going to buy a house for a farm murderer while one of our main campaigns is fighting against farm murders.
And he then wasn't prepared to make the sworn affidavit.
So the point that I make then in the book as well, and this is important, is it might be true that he was lying.
He might have been telling the truth.
He might have been lying. He might have made the whole thing up.
The information he told us was correct.
That farmer was murdered on the date and the place where he said.
The number he gave us on a little piece of paper actually was a number, not the reception number, it was a number in Le Tule House, which is the NC's headquarters.
But I think the more important thing here is that there are many such stories in South Africa at the moment.
And they all point to the same thing.
And I think the important thing or the appropriate thing for the ruling party or the government to do is to say, well, we need to have a thorough investigation into the reasons of why this is happening.
And of course, they don't want to do that.
So another very high profile story I mentioned in the book that links to this is another program I mentioned, Carte Blanche, the current affairs show.
So they just last year, they had a program on about farm murders, and they played an audio clip That was obtained apparently through a national intelligence officer who interviewed a member of the 28th prison gang in South Africa.
Not a member, a general of the prison gang.
And he said, and the audio clip is available, it's on the internet.
He said that Julius Malema, who's the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is a very radical, so-called progressive movement, came to see them in prison.
And he said to them that if they want to kill farmers, they must come out and speak to him about getting guns.
Again, it might be that he was lying.
He might have just made the whole thing up, and my inclination is to think that he was probably lying.
But there are so many such stories during the rounds, and the fact that there wasn't even an investigation into this.
Now imagine in the European, or let's say in the American context, the leader of a major...
Okay, the US only has two main political parties, but The leader of the third biggest political party in the country is claimed by a general of a prison gang to have spoken with them about providing them with guns so that they can murder people.
And it's not even investigated by the police.
I mean, it's shocking to really, when you put all these pieces together, it really is a massive concern in South Africa.
Well, and these kinds of investigations would be somewhat comprehensible if even the local police could investigate these murders properly.
But a lot of the evidence that you provide about, you know, chain of custody being broken, about things not being taken into evidence, about a lack of forensics, a lack of investigation, doesn't seem to be a very strong will to get to the bottom of these murders, even if we just take them at face value as robberies.
Yes, exactly. And that's the shocking thing about this is There are so many stories that I can answer all of your questions by referring to a story of something that happened.
And to answer about police investigations, there are many stories, but one that really struck me was the murder of David Hall near Foghwell.
Dave Palm is actually on the border of Gauteng and the Northwest Province, which also resulted in major problems within the police because no one wanted to investigate.
The two police stations who both had jurisdiction both argued that the other one should investigate this.
But what happened there was David and Benedette Hall were attacked on their dairy farm.
And Benedette was tied up with cables and wires and beaten.
And then David was murdered outside in the yard.
So Benedette was in the house, I think in the kitchen, if I recall, she was tied up.
He was murdered.
The attackers left. The neighbors and the community, the local community safety network arrived.
And the police as usually arrives last.
So what happened there was the police were there.
They took some statements.
And then as they were about to leave the scene, the local farmers called them back and said, what are you doing?
All the forensic evidence is still lying on the scene.
So there were cigarette buds that was apparently smoked by the attackers.
There was a jacket, or no jacket, a blanket that was covered in blood.
The wires that the people were tied up with.
All of the evidence was just lying on the scene.
And the people called them back and said, you need to confiscate this evidence.
You need to use it in court.
So they came back. They took all the evidence and they went out.
Eventually, they caught two of the attackers and they called Benedette, who is an amazing woman, by the way.
She just decided that this is not going to affect the farm.
She just immediately kept farming there.
She wanted to make a statement that this is not going to disrupt the farming activities.
So she's currently still farming there.
But what happened then, they caught two of the attackers.
They called Benedette for an identification parade.
She went there. She saw the people.
Remember, she saw them at their house.
She saw them tying her up.
She saw them beating her.
She heard them murder her husband.
She identified them. She said, those are the people who murdered my husband.
I saw them. The matter then went to court.
And then what happened in court was there was no evidence.
All of the evidence just seemed to have disappeared.
And of course, there's the double jeopardy principle.
So they've been charged and there wasn't any evidence against them.
So the judge found that they were not guilty.
Now, you cannot charge someone twice for the same crime.
So even if the police now shows up with the evidence, then There's no use because they've already been found not guilty.
What makes it worse now is that Benedette has seen them in the neighbourhood after this whole story.
She said to me recently that when she drives around the farm now and she sees people walking next to the road, she doesn't want to look at them.
She doesn't want to look at their faces because she knows it might be the people who murdered her husband.
There are many such stories.
There's a farmer For example, he was attacked with his own farming equipment.
I think it was also a garden fork and a machete.
And he was soaked in blood, but he survived.
And then the police came to the scene.
His jacket was completely soaked in blood.
They confiscated that eventually.
And then two weeks after, the police came back to follow up.
And when they were about to leave, he saw his bloodied jacket still lying on the back seat of the police vehicle.
So it's just been lying there for two weeks.
I mean, I can go on about stories about how atrocious some of these investigations have been.
Maybe to give you another example, Mariandra Yenes, who the court case is this week, by the way.
I mean, her story is she's an incredibly inspiring woman.
What happened there was, maybe if you would allow me just to explain what happened there.
They were attacked in October 2016.
So just to tell the story, she's one of the main characters in the book as well.
They had three children, three little girls.
Two of them were basically still babies.
The eldest was six years old and she was 36 weeks pregnant.
So they had a farmhouse, a two-story house, and the whole family was watching TV on the top, the second floor, and they fell asleep there in front of the TV. She then carried the youngest two downstairs, she put them in bed, and the eldest one, little Mika, was asleep on a little mattress in front of the TV, so she decided she was going to leave her there.
She then went back to sleep, and she woke up sometime during the night, and she thought, no, the first thing was she heard dogs barking.
She woke her husband up, and he was very tired, so he was sort of half asleep, and he said to her, she must just check, but he thinks it's a cat.
She went out, she checked all the windows, so their house was already locked up like a prison, basically.
And she figured the dogs weren't really that frantic, so it probably is just a cat.
One dog was sitting at the front door, and they were barking, but they weren't, as I said, frantic.
So she went back to bed.
She then was just half asleep and then she heard another noise, but she wasn't sure if...
Oh no, she heard something and she thought it was the youngest or the second youngest coming upstairs to them.
And she looked over the railing and she didn't see anything.
And then she figured that she knows the house is locked up.
She's checked everything. So she went back to sleep.
She then heard a noise again.
And that was when two people were standing in front of her with a pistol in her face.
She started screaming. So it was her and her husband, Johan, and their little girl, Mika, who were there on the first floor where the attackers were.
And her husband, Johan, he...
Well, Johan kept lying on the couch.
He wanted to show to them that he's not a threat.
So he literally was sort of lying on his arm like this, and he started talking to them very casually.
And he said to them that they can take anything they want.
He said to them that they must just not hurt his family.
They indicated where all the valuables are and he explained everything and then the one attacker said no and he pointed to the other attacker and he said this man is a killer and we came here to kill you and then they opened fire so the first shot was at Mika so they turned around and they shot the girl but they missed her so she was running up and down in the room already by that time and then they missed they they fired and they missed They then shot Johan five times, close range.
They were standing next to him as he was lying on the couch.
The first bullet went into his heart and then they shot him in the arms and legs and the hips and so forth.
And then they grabbed Mariandra and they were arguing with her and they wanted to pull her downstairs.
And she was arguing and so the little girl Mika, initially she couldn't run to her mother after the shooting happened because the killers were between her and her mother.
Eventually she was able to But then she was sitting on the floor.
I think she went to sit on the mattress.
And as they were trying to pull Marehandra downstairs, little Mika, literally, she was sat on the floor and she raised her hand as if she was in a classroom.
And she wanted to speak to the attackers.
And she said to them in Afrikaans, she basically wanted to negotiate with them, to leave her mom alone.
And she said, I have money.
You can take my money.
I have a sparbacy.
Sparbacy is the Afrikaans word for a piggy bank.
So she wanted to offer her piggy bank so that they can just leave her mom alone.
And when Johan heard that, he was still alive.
He was then lying on the floor.
He was already shot five times.
He was shot through the heart.
When he heard that, he stood up and he walked towards them.
And what they didn't know at the time was the attackers had one bullet left.
They came with seven bullets.
The first one went to Mika.
They then shot Johan five times.
Johan walked towards them and he was only able to say one word.
He said to them, please. And he gave about two steps and then the one attacker again said to the other one, just kill him, brother.
So they walked towards him and they shot him in the head.
And then of course, eventually, then they started arguing with Maria Ondra again.
Then all of a sudden, they just casually walked out.
They just walked out of the house.
They walked downstairs. They opened the lock of the front door from the inside and they walked out and they disappeared.
And of course, you can imagine what's going through Mariandra's head and how she has to deal with this.
So fast forward that story to how the matter was investigated.
So for example, the investigating officer at one stage walked into, by the way, she was a stay at home mom at the time.
So she had to get a job.
The first job she could find was at a funeral parlor.
The funeral company who was burying her husband offered her a job and she's still working for them.
So the investigating officer came and they wanted to discuss the matter and they had the docket there with the pictures and they started opening the file in front of her and she said she was extremely alarmed with the pictures of how her husband was shot and they started discussing it with her and At one stage, they kept using these very strict police terms.
They spoke about the deceased and the seen and so forth.
And she said to the investigating officer, please understand.
It's not the deceased.
It's my husband. He was my husband.
He was the father of my children.
It's not the residence.
It's my house. And she asked him to just please be a little bit more cautious in terms of how they speak with the victims.
He then looked at her and he then said to her, I assume you now hate all black people.
He, of course, was a black investigating officer.
And so just in terms of how this happened, how these cases are investigated.
And I have to say many of these cases are very well investigated.
I think there are some police officers who are good and they are doing their job.
They really want to make the country a better place.
But then there are some and they tend to be more towards the top.
top, they tend to be more senior, and then especially some on ground level, who seem to be so corrupt that they either don't care about investigating, or there has to be something else.
Right.
Regarding the question of racism in South Africa, you quoted a poll that said almost 72% of the respondents indicated they'd never personally experienced racism.
Racism. And it is really striking to me, and it's something that I've experienced in my own personal life, that racism is constantly portrayed as the great scourge of the world.
And yet, when I talk to people or sort of thinking about my own existence, I mean, I've certainly experienced some anti-white racism, but that mostly comes from ideologues and leftists and people who are just trying to race bait and divide people against each other.
But the fact that the majority of people Are not racist, don't seem to harbor any racist sentiments, means to me that the great tragedy of the Rainbow Nation, if not diversity as a whole, is that it's impossible to know whether this experiment could work, of racists trying to live under the same legal system, because there are so many people sowing so many seeds of division and hostility and hatred between the races that it remains an experiment that It's not a blank slate.
It's an experiment that's been heavily tinkered with by people seeking to set people against each other, I assume, for the sake of political power.
But the fact that most South Africans have not experienced racism, don't seem to harbor racism, is one of the greatest tragedies to me.
I think South Africa, in that sense, is maybe a few steps ahead of what's happening in the rest of the Western world, especially.
So there's this perception that Everyone at each other's throats.
We're on the brink of a race war in South Africa.
Whites hate blacks and blacks hate whites.
And the problem is that the debate, the public debate, has been hijacked by the extremists.
Those who are most vocal are the ones who have the most extreme views and they don't represent the majority of people in this country.
And that's the strange thing.
And there's actually been many polls and opinion surveys about racism in South Africa, and they always find the same thing.
It's always around 72%, 75%, 73% of people, white and black people in South Africa, who say they have never personally experienced racism.
And there are many other polls.
So, for example, there was a poll by the Institute of Race Relations, a recent one, where they asked people, what are the biggest unresolved problems in South Africa?
And the majority of people opted for the education system and crime.
I think crime was on top. And bad political leadership and so forth.
And the amount of people who said that they regard racism as South Africa's biggest unresolved problem was 4.7%.
And so I didn't just point out, because there's this huge conversation about land reform, which is basically just a euphemism for stealing people's land.
But you said the IRR surveying South Africans, what should be done to improve your lives?
1% said they believe that land reform would improve their lives.
It's not even that it was the most important thing to improve their lives, 1%.
And so the divide between the ideologues and the people, it's sort of like in the West, the divide between the people who say diversity is just this mindless strength and the people who are very concerned with mass immigration from the third world.
There's a massive divide between what's going on politically and ideologically and what are actually the problems being faced by the people.
Yes, it's exactly the case.
So I regard myself as an African.
I've been to Europe and I've been to Australia and I've been to the United States and it didn't feel to me like I went home.
But I also regard myself as a Westerner in terms of my value system.
And I think I, living in South Africa, we are very concerned looking at what's happening in the Western world today.
And it's very sad that people aren't looking to South Africa to learn from the mistakes that's happening and that have been made in South Africa and to hear people And then again, it's sad that South Africa is not looking to Zimbabwe and Venezuela, because we're not Zimbabwe and we're not Venezuela, but we have leaders in government who think Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez were heroes.
So it seems like we're not learning from each other, but it's a trend worldwide, and I think it's especially true in South Africa, that the majority of people are not racist, but the debate has been hijacked by the ideologues, as you say.
And they are creating the impression that we are on the verge of a civil war or something like that when I think it's only people on the fringes who are interested in some form of a civil war.
Well, let's talk about the economics of the farm.
And it feels odd just to be perfectly upfront.
It feels odd to go from these horrifying stories to talking about the economics.
But I think the economics are important, not just for South Africa, but for Europe, I think, particularly as a whole.
You point out in the book that each farm It feeds an average of 3000 people.
That is an astonishing number.
If it turns out that Russia takes in 15,000 farmers, that's 30 million people who will be without food.
What are they going to do? Well, they're going to beg the West for aid.
They're going to try and get into Europe.
This is not a problem confined To South Africa and you have a huge population growth, I think, largely as a result of Western agricultural technology and free market principles and so on.
That massive growth of the population, what was it, 800% under apartheid, can only be sustained if Farming competence continues and given that most blacks in South Africa want to live in the cities and very few of them want to become farmers, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of people lining up to replace the boers and the farmers and what is going to happen to the population when the food production begins to crash?
Yes. So firstly, it's a worldwide trend that very few people have the privilege to use the buzzword to go to university.
In South Africa, of course, there are many policies to help black children who do not have the funding and so forth to go to university.
But in South Africa, of all the university students, less than 3% of them, which is already a small group, less than 3% of them are actually studying agriculture or something similar.
So, which again, there are many, many ways to indicate that the vast majority of people, and it's more so for black people than white people, the vast majority do not want to farm.
They don't want to be farmed. And they don't want to live on farms.
They want to live in the cities.
So then we have a situation where, and it's been said across the world that South Africa has some of the best farmers in the world in terms of their abilities, in terms of The land that they have and how they are able to use it.
And that's where the word Boer comes from.
It refers to farmer.
And that's why the Africana community, we as a community are so linked to the idea of farming that our tribe, to use that term, are called Boers, which means farmers.
Well, and just to point out to the American audience in particular, I'll put this in perspective.
Many of the Boer families have been farming the land for longer than America has even been a country.
Yes, yes. That's an important point.
So people tend to think, oh, you know, the whites came here just the other day and then they just took everything over.
We've been in South Africa, as you said, for I think it was 124 years before the USA was even founded.
That's how long we've been in this country.
So to get back to your previous question, there are a lot of threats in terms of what's happening on South Africa's farms.
I'm not an economist.
I'm very interested in economics.
But I have to say, And this is not tapping myself on the shoulder.
It's more a compliment to the people I've been working with.
I think that the chapter in the book about the economics of farm attacks is the best piece that's been written on the subject so far because it's a subject that most economists don't want to touch because it's very complicated to try to make a simple conclusion about what's in the financial terms, what are the consequences of a farm murder?
Because there are so many variables that you have to throw in.
I used all the best research and I did some interviews and I put that up in one chapter, but one of the points I make there is what we call the triple challenge.
The triple challenge is the three main things that are a major challenge to South African farmers.
The one is macro challenges, which is something that's a challenge to all farmers everywhere across the world.
I think it includes droughts and natural issues, but it also includes policy issues that might be a problem for them.
And then the second one is property rights, which of course, as we know in South Africa, there's a big push for expropriation of land without compensation.
And if you aren't certain that your property is safe, you're not going to invest in it.
And so that's a major problem in South Africa at the moment.
And then the third one is safety.
And that goes back to the numbers.
I mentioned earlier that we're doing a new study.
So one of the things we want to do is to work out the hypothetical twin brother scenario.
Instead of just comparing it to the national average, what we want to do is we want to take a particular farming community and say, what is the farm murder ratio within this community?
And then to say, if a farmer lives there and he has a twin brother who lives in the nearby town, what is his chances of being murdered as opposed to his brother's chances of being murdered?
And then, I mean, I can tell you now, you will see there's a massive gap.
But the point is, all of these threats, there are very serious threats to food security in South Africa.
I mean, we've seen we've seen what happened with land reform policies about expropriation combined with violence.
And again, it's the farmers are I mean, if you are murdered, that's the worst thing that could happen to you.
But those who won't be murdered, many of them will still be able to leave the country.
The people who will suffer the most would be poor, unemployed black people.
And I mean, Zimbabwe has an unemployment rate of 90 percent at the moment.
So nine in 10 people are unemployed.
That's the situation. In South Africa, it depends on which measure you use.
It's about 35% or 25%.
There are different ways to calculate.
Let's say in South Africa, one in four people are unemployed.
This could be if this increases to one in two we will have a major crisis in South Africa already well The international community can do a lot as we know from the international communities and the artistic communities focus on the ending of apartheid in the 90s well, I guess throughout the 80s and the 90s and the cat is the catastrophe that will occur within South Africa if The white land is stolen by the government is almost beyond imagining.
I mean, it would be such a violation of property rights and basic governmental norms that foreign investment would dry up.
There would be a catastrophic increase in unemployment.
There would be a complete crash.
In the food supply, as this happened, of course, in Ukraine, as we talked about earlier, which is called the breadbasket of Europe, and food production crashed as when the farms were collectivized, and also in China when the farms were collectivized.
When you socialize this kind of stuff, You know what happens.
You just hand out the land to all of your political friends who don't know the first thing about farming.
The food production collapses, and it will be a complete disaster.
And there's a lot of pressure that can be put on the government to not pursue such a disastrous course, even though it's announced that that is its goal.
You can, of course, threaten to boycott.
You can threaten to withhold foreign aid.
There's lots of things that can be done.
And I really just wonder, for those who are not really focusing on this at the moment, How many disasters it will take for us to act proactively to prevent them rather than attempt to mop them up after they've started?
Yeah. That's one of the big debates or issues that people ask is to what extent Can we rely on international support?
And I think there's a lot that the international community can do.
The question is whether they would do that.
And of course, we've been campaigning for that.
So we went to the USA recently.
We spoke to a lot of people there.
We went to other countries as well.
We'll probably go back to the USA. Hopefully, we'll also go to Canada as well to speak with as many people as we can and to speak with global influences.
So I think in terms of realistically speaking, We do know that the ANC, which is the ruling party, they've always been regarded as the party of peace and the party of freedom and the party of Nelson Mandela.
And they've been sort of riding this way for quite some time.
And we do know as a result, they've been getting a free pass to a large extent.
And we do know that they are very sensitive to criticism, international criticism.
Because it's something that's strange to them, because they are used to the international community just, you know, praising them.
So we've seen, for example, when we went to, when me and Kali Kril, our CEO, when we went to the United States recently to raise awareness about farm murders, the President of South Africa in Parliament made a speech in which he called on us to come back to South Africa, which clearly shows to us that they do take it seriously.
So even that, in terms of the balance of forces, as the ANC calls it, already helps.
I think we need much more international pressure.
We need foreign governments to take a stance about this.
And we need people in the United Nations to take a stance about this.
We're not expecting any other country to come and solve our problems.
And we're not expecting the United Nations to solve our problems.
We know the United Nations don't have a very good track record when it comes to preventing these things.
But just speaking out about this, or just when you are in a conversation with some government representative, for example, Confront them about this.
If you are working at the United Nations at some committee or if you are a diplomat for some government, just ask them, listen, what's happening with the farmers?
Why are they being attacked and killed?
But other than that, I think people, members of the public can really have a major impact.
And that's, I think, largely how and why the ANC's international campaign in the 1980s and early 90s was so successful, because they succeeded in reaching the hearts and minds of normal people across the world.
We started organizing Free Mandela protests and so forth.
And it was that which resulted in their governments and their leaders taking a stance.
So I really think we shouldn't underestimate what people watching this video can do to raise awareness.
I certainly agree with that, although I will say, to be perfectly frank, that the cynic in me thinks that the pro-leftist, pro-socialist, pro-communist media pumped up the cause of the ANC because they wished to undermine free market institutions within South Africa.
But that perhaps is a conversation for another time.
And let's close off by talking about something that you go into the book in a fair amount of detail.
Which is the media.
The media complicity.
As I sort of become more and more of a public figure, I begin to see that the media is preventing rational discussions of issues by constant escalations of hysterica and hateful rhetoric.
Where is the media in South Africa or even in non-South African countries regarding this huge problem?
Yeah. So we did quite a comprehensive study on that.
So we wanted to... We've always been...
Talking about the double standards in the media and we've been complaining about that and we've been writing articles and making videos and things and We decided let's see if we can quantify that.
Let's see if we can prove that this actually is a problem and So what we did just to explain the study we took the last three years 2017 2016 and 2015 and we We took the 15 most-read news platforms in South Africa,
particularly their websites, and we went through every single news article that related to an incident of violence on a farm.
We put all those articles into a spreadsheet and we basically checked all the variables and we put everything down.
Once you've done that, you have a massive And from that database, you can draw up some statistics.
And what we found was very, very shocking in terms of how incidents of violence on farms are approached.
So, for example, we know during the course of those three years, there were probably, I think we said there were about 800 farm attacks, conservatively speaking.
They weren't reported all in the media.
If I recall, there were 264 incidents in total reported in the media.
There were about 16 incidents, considering now there were more than 800 pharma attacks, there were about 16 incidents where the perpetrator was white and the victim was black.
But now you can count how many times is the same incident repeated in the media.
So we talk about news reports or incidents.
We talk about incidents, so there were 264 incidents.
Then we talk about news reports, in other words, how many articles were published.
Then we talk about mentions.
So what we refer to as a mention is when a news report mentions an incident that counts as one.
So sometimes a news report mentions three or four incidents.
So then it would be four mentions, but it's one news report.
And then you can draw up the statistics and you can break them down.
And to summarize, what we found was the single biggest determining factor, the single biggest variable that determined how a story would be treated by the media is the race of the perpetrator.
That's what it boils down to.
And we were able to quantify that.
So if we take out the Afrikaans media, and we look at the English or the mainstream media that we're in the list, for every time, and you compare white on black incidents of violence to black on white incidents of violence.
Every time a black on white incident of violence is mentioned, on average, A white and black incident of violence would be mentioned 16 times.
So put differently, white and black incidents of violence would be mentioned on average 16 times per incident.
Black and white would be mentioned then, according to that, there would be 16 times as much.
Sorry, let me just phrase it correctly.
White and black incidents of violence would be mentioned 16 times as much as black and white incidents of violence.
And I mean, there were many other variables that we looked at, for example, When do they use images?
When do they put an illustration next to the article?
Which could then be an indication that they regard it as a more important article.
Which also confirmed this double standard.
We looked at a whole variety of things.
We looked at, for example, when they know how many incidents are there where they knew about the incident but they decided not to report on it.
And there again you can see the double standard.
So I have all the graphs up there in chapter 16 of the book and we really hope that people would duplicate this study elsewhere in the world.
I think it would be very interesting because you can quantify this and it's important to hold The media has a very important role to play in terms of holding government and holding public officials accountable.
Well, and if the average reader, based upon the prevalence of the articles, thinks that white on black violence is 16 times more prevalent than it is, well, that has a huge effect.
Most people do not experience the world directly.
They experience particularly countrywide affairs through the lens of the media.
And this kind of unfairness is really distorting people's perceptions in ways that can escalate very quickly.
That's exactly the problem. So you can be a journalist and you can be biased, but then you must be outspoken about your bias.
You shouldn't pretend to be neutral while you are driving an ideological campaign.
You can't be an activist but pretend to be neutral and present yourself as being neutral.
And that's unfortunately what's happening.
And that's the problem.
So also, I don't think necessarily, I mean, we are very much in favor of press freedom.
So I don't think necessarily it's The media or a newspaper, for example, should have a right to choose who their target market is and they should have a right to write for them.
But the problem is, when you portray yourself as being neutral and objective, while clearly executing a double standard, you should know that you have a double standard because you make editorial decisions.
You know, I'm not going to publish this story.
I'm going to run with this one instead.
What happens then is you create false perceptions and you strengthen negative stereotypes.
There was another study, not done by us, which I quote in the book.
It was a group of researchers.
They took three months in South Africa.
And instead of just looking at farms, they looked at all news reports that dealt with racism in South Africa.
And they did the same thing.
And one of the things they looked at was the most prominent propositions that were made or put forth in those articles during those three months.
I think it was the year 2012.
And they found that the single biggest proposition put forth in articles on race is all whites are racist.
That's the single biggest proposition.
The second biggest was Africans are victims.
And of course, the word African is a code word for blacks, because in South Africa, there's the argument that if you are white, you cannot be an African.
And then the third one was race is the primary explanation.
So those are the three Biggest propositions in the South African media in articles that deal with racism.
Well, and given that whites are a small minority in South Africa, this whole idea that white privilege is based upon institutional power is taking a real blow.
And hopefully this idea of white privilege, which is a fundamentally racist concept in my I think that we can get along, but we need to stop listening to the race baiters.
And the net result of all of this race baiting in South Africa is going to be the deaths of a lot of people, I think.
The excess food supply that allows people to live in cities will dry up and there will be riots and there will be murders and there may in fact be starvation.
It's happened elsewhere on the continent.
It used to happen in Europe as well before land was privatized.
And that's my big concern, that if you care at all about South Africans, black, white, color, doesn't matter, then you need to put whatever weight you have behind pushing back against this idea of land expropriation and hopefully driving forward the country to a race neutral legal system, which I think, at least for me, would be more of then you need to put whatever weight you have behind pushing back Yeah, no, absolutely.
And you use the term race neutral.
It's interesting.
And again, I can stand on the sideline and witness politics in North America, especially in the US at the moment.
And there's the same trend.
So I think that's the same trend.
I've seen groups in the US, for example, now less and less quoting Martin Luther King, who spoke about the content of your character, as opposed to the color of your skin, and more and more quoting Malcolm X and people like that.
In South Africa, it's the same thing.
We have this new movement.
Again, it's the radicals.
It's not the majority of people who would say that Nelson Mandela was a sellout because he spoke with the white people.
He struck a deal with the whites.
The argument was we need to move to a country where you are not judged by the color of your skin, but by the content of your character.
That was the entire argument. The term for that in South Africa is non-racialism.
It's written in our constitution.
We need to strive for non-racialism.
And this is a very interesting point.
I'm actually a legal scholar.
I'm busy with my PhD now in constitutional law.
And I think this is a very important...
One of the most important things about constitutional law that people don't understand is a constitution can change without the text having changed.
The most... In South Africa, the South African constitution states that it is the highest authority in the land.
That's not true. A document can never be the highest authority in the land.
The person who is appointed to interpret the Constitution has the highest authority in the land.
And so, for example, the South African Constitution talks about non-racialism.
We must strive to be a non-racialist country.
But non-racialism is being interpreted today as something completely different than what it was meant as initially.
Well, black economic empowerment would fly in the face of that non-racialism, would it not?
Yes, exactly. The way black economic empowerment is, basically you need to look at the colour of the skin of a person and then that would determine if he's a legitimate person to appoint.
That's basically what it's about.
Or to have some sort of a business deal with, which is racial discrimination.
But that now is being done under the banner of non-racialism.
The code word that was used to define or to capture the Martin Luther King idea about the content of your character, that was written into the Constitution, and that same word is now being interpreted to mean something that's completely the opposite.
Well, paper does nothing.
People do everything.
Exactly the point. And so the legal terms are de jure realities versus de facto realities.
De facto realities play a much bigger role than de jure realities because what's happening on ground level determines what's happening in the law.
Well, and you just get one thin edge of the wedge to set precedent and you can just lever it from there.
That's exactly the point.
So people across the world, people say South Africa has the most or one of the best constitutions in the world.
The question is not what the text of the Constitution says.
The question is how is it being interpreted?
And it's being interpreted currently in a way in which minorities are being targeted by government policies and it's all done under the banner of non-racialism.
Well, and this, of course, is the big concern of a lot of white people throughout the world, that looking at South Africa as a canary in the coal mine, that in the post-Second World War period, the blacks and whites in population were more or less or roughly equal.
And then when whites became the minority, then you see increases in farm murders, you see economic disempowerment in the form of racial quota hiring laws, you see endless cries of victimhood on the part of the majority and endless attacks against the white minority.
And I think people are concerned.
That as whites begin to head towards minorities in historically white countries, the same hatred, the same division, the same hostility is going to emerge more openly and blatantly in European countries, in North American countries, and other places.
Yeah, I don't want to be a prophet of doom, but the term that the ANC uses in South Africa, which is a term that they got from the Soviet Union and Communist China when they were trained by them in the 1970s in propaganda and so forth, They have all these buzzwords that they use in terms of defining what's happening in South Africa.
But the one major term is they always talk about the balance of forces, which is the ANC's entire strategy is based on the balance of forces.
And what that means is, and it's a very important strategic lesson, it means that you have to consider what's happening in terms of, politically speaking, the balance of forces.
And you need to portray yourself or position yourself Within the realities of those balance of forces.
And the more the balance of forces shift in your favor, the more you can be upfront about what you intend to do.
And it's well documented.
Joe Slover was the leader of the Communist Party in South Africa in the early 90s, and he especially pushed this strategy.
He said that the ANC should not position themselves as a communist movement, especially that was just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of history theory and so forth.
He said the ANC would do better to position themselves as being liberal and as being Democrats.
And then they have what they call the National Democratic Revolution.
That's their strategy. And it's written in the strategy and tactics document.
And basically what it means is that the organization needs to portray itself as being liberal, as upholding liberal values, so that it could get international support.
So that it could become the favorite to run the country and also get support of people who are concerned about communism in South Africa, which they did and which worked.
And then the strategy says once we have obtained state power, we can then use the state mechanisms to further the goals of the revolution.
And it sounds It's really weird to listen to this, but as I said, it's not supposed to be controversial because it's all written up.
It's all written in the strategy and tactics documents.
And without wanting to make a direct comparison, that was exactly the strategy pursued by the National Socialists in Germany after the failed Munich Putsch.
And they said, well, we're just going to continue to gain political power until we can establish our vision and enact our principles through the mechanism of state power.
And it is a very dangerous thing to see.
I really do want to thank you for your time today.
I also wanted to remind people to check out the Afroforum website at afroforum.co.za.
The Twitter feed is twitter.com forward slash Ernst Rots, E-R-N-S-T-R-O-E-T-S. And the book, which is well worth reading, I know it's a little grim, but it's very, very important, not just for the future of South Africa, but for the West as a whole, is called Kill the Boer, that's B-O-E-R, Government Complicity in South Africa's Brutal We'll put a link to the book below and the book is also going to be available at killtheboerbook.com.
Ernst, thank you so much for taking the time today.
