HITE South Africans are Africans too. This wild and beautiful country is our homeland. Those of us who have made our lives elsewhere in the world never forget the uniqueness of Africa – where sunlight glows as if lit by a divine flame, and the kindness of strangers is made even more valuable by the precarious living conditions that have always existed there.
Far too many of us have left. And most who remain are frightened. The white farming community is at risk of disappearing. Rumours persist of a ‘white genocide’. White South Africans are increasingly dispossessed and disadvantaged. Unable to find jobs in a junk status economy, pushed to the back of the queue when it comes for qualifying for minuscule government aid and blamed for the evils of apartheid, they are facing a dystopian present.
The truth is that this unique minority, made up mainly of Afrikaners, is now endangered. White South African farmers and their families are subjected to the most brutal and savage attacks for no other reason than they are white.
Recent reports show that attacks on white farmers increased by 25 per cent in 2018, with eight attacks per week. During these attacks farmers have been tortured with electric drills, blowtorches and bleach. Black farmers are not subjected to such savagery. The extreme and singular brutality of these assaults indicates a rage which must stem from personal feelings of revenge.
These crimes against a vulnerable minority are provoked by the ANC government. Their land reform policies, aimed at seizing mainly white-owned farms, have ramped up feelings of resentment against white farmers. No financial compensation will be given to families who will be made destitute by this land grab.
The Expropriation Bill is a disastrous and malicious policy, constructed out of revenge and appeasement.
White South African farmers are being offered up as sacrificial lambs by the ANC to placate an increasingly frustrated and impoverished population. The ANC are using land reforms as a way to distract from their appalling corruption and conspicuous consumption, which has exacerbated poverty and crashed the economy. Women are too afraid of being raped to use public transport.
And thanks to years of corruption and mismanagement in the state-owned power company Eskom, the lights are literally going out in South Africa. The future is grim.
Almost half a million ‘poor whites’ live in squatter camps without electricity or plumbing. There is little or no government assistance for those trying to eke out an existence in these camps. If the ANC implement their land reforms as they plan to, many more will have to endure this suffering because they will have nowhere else to go.
The ANC will continue along their disastrous path because they fear being pushed out of power by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the second-biggest opposition party in South Africa’s parliament. The EFF’s leader, has told his supporters that they are ‘cutting the throat of whiteness‘. A senior EFF official, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, accused white farmers of committing a ‘violent crime against humanity’ for merely being land-owners.
This rhetoric against white South Africans is abysmal, as is the quiet acceptance of it by the rest of the world. But the EFF are not guerrilla fighters hiding in the empty swathes of South Africa’s veldts. They are lawmakers, sitting in parliament. Their murderous talk should be taken seriously. And so should the reluctance of the ANC government to confront them for fear of losing voters. So it is up to the rest of us to hold these racists to account. Did the world learn nothing from similar deadly threats by the ruling Hutu party in Rwanda, uttered before their genocide of millions of Tutsis? The dehumanisation of the other, for this is what it is, never ends well.
We certainly can’t rely on Theresa May to help these farmers. May showed off her credentials as the worst Prime Minister the UK has ever had the misfortune to experience when she obtusely supported the Expropriation Bill on the grounds that it was ‘legal’ and ‘democratic’. Neither quality applies to government seizure of land without compensation. But May, as we have seen with her betrayal of the Brexit mandate, really has no idea what democracy means.
Anything can be made ‘legal’. Apartheid was legal in the South Africa I grew up in. Defining whether something is right or wrong under the parameters of legality does not give it validity. The only outcome of land reform will be yet another famine in Africa.
And why hasn’t the Commonwealth spoken out against this persecution of white South African farmers? After all they are members of this organisation and deserve protection. Commonwealth ministers like to parrot soundbites about ‘the environment’, ‘diversity’ and ‘equal rights’ but these are useless platitudes if they ignore the persecution of white farmers. If Baroness Scotland, Commonwealth Secretary-General, finds time to raid the foreign aid budget for her office decorations, surely she can rouse herself to threaten South Africa to behave and stop race baiting or risk being kicked out of the Commonwealth. If she is unable to do so, she should resign.
The white South African farming community is unique. Its language and culture is found nowhere else in the world. But these farmers are now the forgotten few, persecuted because of their race, hunted down by mobs who have effectively been sanctioned by the South African government. That there is no global campaign for protecting this vulnerable minority, as there is for others, speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of our liberal elite. South Africa is at risk of implementing another system of apartheid, this time aimed at whites and just as violent. How much blood will it take to satiate the quest for retribution and ‘justice’?
