- A sun-dappled morning breaks over Braam Pretorius street,
a picture of leafy serenity, and the white-only staff of Radio Pretoria
turn on the microphones for another day of vocal resistance to the new
South Africa.
-
- "There is a storm out there. Our culture is under
attack. We're expected to speak only bloody English. Things are going to
have to change," said the station manager, Jaap Diedericks.
-
- With its Boer flags and portraits of victories over the
Zulus the studio resembles an Afrikaner museum, but Mr Diedericks believes
Radio Pretoria is about the politics of the future, not nostalgia.
-
- A regime of black "racialists" is uprooting
the language, the wealth and the freedom of those who found empty veld
and built a first world country, he said. Everything they and their ancestors
worked for risks being blown away in the rainbow nation.
-
- In such times it is right that each day's broadcast starts
with Christian prayer. God will provide, one day, but meantime the Afrikaner
must defend himself as best he can. Eight years after history's lid closed
over apartheid the dreams and fears of the Boers are back on South Africa's
political agenda. A spate of bombings has been blamed on militant whites
who allegedly want to stir a race war and overthrow the government.
-
- Arms caches
-
- The police have found several arms caches and a dozen
suspected ringleaders are due to go on trial next year, but many think
the terror is just starting. Last weekend a bomb exploded in a hangar full
of police aircraft.
-
- Security analysts put the odds of a successful coup as
zero, the state being too strong, the plotters too weak, but mayhem and
racial tension are possibilities.
-
- Deepening the unease is the sense that the bombers, however
few and isolated, are drawing on a well of Afrikaner resentment shared
by farmers, liberal intellectuals and business executives.
-
- While the police try to anticipate the next attack, President
Thabo Mbeki and his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, have recently sat down
with rightwing white politicians to ask, with a sense of urgency, what
do Boers want?
-
- Tuning into 104.2 FM provides some answers. The Afrikaner-language
Radio Pretoria has an official listenership of 110,000 but claims the real
figure is six times higher. It aims to nourish the striving for freedom
and self-determination by promoting a Christian-Protestant European heritage.
-
- When the apartheid-era version of the national anthem,
Die Stem, fades the newsreaders, chat-show hosts and phone-in listeners
talk of persecution by the democratically elected "regime". Namibia
is often referred to as South West Africa and Zimbabwe as Rhodesia.
-
- Their own country throws up questions: is Aids the solution
to black population growth? Should farmers keep illegal guns to deter robbers?
Where is the safest place to ramble with the kids? How do you get a visa
to emigrate to Australia?
-
- Seldom do you hear that since 1994 whites have retained
the vast bulk of the country's wealth and that "black empowerment"
schemes to balance the ownership of resources have faltered.
-
- "We don't want to go back to apartheid, we want
more say in a real, new South Africa that accommodates all our differences.
We're the people with experience in running a modern state but the government
just milks us as taxpayers," said Mr Diedericks.
-
- Hankering for lost status was part of the resentment,
he admitted, but most came from the erosion of the Afrikaans language in
schools and public life, the deterioration of hospitals and services, the
affirmative action which denied jobs to whites, and the crime.
-
- The solution was a 10th province for whites only in the
old Transvaal and Free State republics. The constitution allowed for self-determination
so peaceful pressure, such as economic sanctions, would hopefully be enough,
said Mr Diedericks.
-
- Coup plotters
-
- Many listeners sympathised with the alleged coup plotters
but considered their strategy ridiculous and counter-productive, he added.
"The black leaders waiting to take over from Mbeki and Mandela are
more radical. Violence against whites will increase because the blacks
aren't controlling their racial feelings whereas we are controlling ours.
-
- "Even so, we weathered the English storm and we
will weather this one. We are the most successful white tribe in Africa,"
said the station manager.
-
- For the first time since the 1930s, it is now common
to see whites begging at road junctions. After a rocky start Orania, an
Afrikaner enclave on the rim of the Karoo desert, is reporting a surge
in applications of people wanting to move there.
-
- Boer intellectuals also warn of alienation. Liberal academics
recently formed a new organisation, the Group of 63, to promote Afrikaner
culture and involvement in public life. Despite rejecting violence some
of the academics were named by the alleged coup plotters as potential cabinet
ministers, according to police.
-
- A draft copy of a report to be published this week by
the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies suggests the new militants
are very different from the redneck bluster of Eugene Terre'Blanche's AWB,
a force in the early 1990s.
-
- "The new guys are middle class and intellectuals.
They are doctors, engineers, senior military officers," said Henri
Boshoff, one of the report's co-authors. "They are not personally
losing out in the new South Africa but have grievances over what they see
as an attack on their language, culture and identity. In that sense I would
compare them to the terrorists of Eta in Spain."
-
- They may number less than 1,200 and will not overthrow
the state but have the military training and organisation to commit atrocities.
"I reckon they will be around for at least a few years."
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,847626,00.html
|