By Phakamisa Mayaba
In a well-planned but fundamentally ill-calculated move, Lex Libertas et al have set themselves – and by consequence, the rest of us – on a path of tension, resentment and suspicion from which there is no going back, for them or anybody else. I wish I could say it was impulsive. That they did not properly think it through. That there was no other way of tackling B-BBEE laws, farm murders, expropriation with nil compensation, and whatever else is irking the neo-right nowadays.
However, last week at the National Mall in Washington DC, the group embarked on the White Cross Project – planting 3 000 crosses bearing the names of people who had been killed in farm attacks in South Africa. From the circulated images, this was not your everyday commemoration punctuated by a sombre, mournful mood. It seemed more like a taunt and a tour-guide-ish recital of how these unfortunate victims met their demise. At times there were smug looks, broadsides and veiled insults, but not many tears for the dead.
The language was tailor-ade for an American audience, because the last thing one imagined was the well-placed word ‘homies’ tripping off of the mouth of Lex Libertas founder, Dr Ernst Roets. But that’s exactly what was needed to drive home the ‘genocide’ narrative – that and old white women alongside European influencers speaking bitterly of black kids who want to slit their throats, drive them off their farms, and a police force that is indifferent to the carnage.
Privilege and tone-deafness let loose on the right-wing MAGA movement – the January 6 hoodlums who stormed Capitol Hill when they did not like the outcome of the 2020 US election. Exactly the kind of people who require no statistics or hard evidence to support, disseminate and propound the the narrative that ‘the Boer is the bastion of Western civilization on the southern tip of Africa’, and he is being systematically hunted down by savage natives. Cowboys and Indians, African style.
Sadly, this lot’s knee-jerk response to hard journalistic questions is to quote Trump’s favourite retort: fake news. All of it. These are people who are notorious for not stomaching proper reportage: the sort that brings out the receipts, quotes you verbatim, and reminds you of one thing you’d have forgotten during Donald Trump’s personal assault on the Fourth Estate: that there is still objective journalism outside of Fox News.
But nothing was going to get in the way of die manne telling anybody with a platform their story. It’s been a long time coming, and in the intervening years, they clearly have figured out a pattern that relies primarily on three things.
The first was to lie – selectively, or through their teeth – and hope that those lies arrive in receptive ears. With South Africa having gained hostile enemies following its own case of alleged genocide in The Hague, one could rest assured that there’d be no shortage of people eager to point out the country’s own hypocrisy.
But the problem with lying often enough is that the lies can likely spread so exponentially that they fall out of your reach. Since the early days of Roets’s crusade, his organisation back then, Afriforum, has doubled down on the ‘genocide’ angle, only to recently deny that he’d ever called it such when the data clearly refuted the claims. But the word stuck and it essentially served his purpose to simply go along with it.
Now, our man has opted for the term ‘persecution’, and he knows exactly who is audience is, as he relates the stories about the likes of Michael Kernick, allegedly burnt alive around the same time a tweet went out on X saying ‘me and my homies are going out into the southern parts of KwaZulu Natal to kill some farmers’.
Remember, Roets knows that such callous inferences not only have no leg to stand on in court they are also extremely dangerous. But this was no court of law, just a roadshow to make the most of whatever seemed like it could stick.
And so, the ‘white genocide’ meme gained traction, and with the sort of money that seems to be funding the neo-right it was able to buy itself into media — but sadly not the type of news coverage you want when you’re trying to be taken seriously. Established media houses actually took time to delve deeper into the numbers – the 3000 farm murders that the initiative referenced were actually collected from as far back as 1990, and if that fact alone were to be pointed out, that would no doubt deny the group ‘the sensational headline these people are looking for’, according to one eNCA journalist.
But who needs objective media when there are influential figures like Tucker Carlson who was willing to platform at least one farmer to share his horrendous experience of rape, murder and a police force that is seemingly in cahoots with criminals against farmers. It’s convincing stuff, and if you were living anywhere but South Africa, you’d probably completely buy into it.
Anyway, the second thing the story needed was a turnout. Measly, embarrassing, something like a family picnic in Matatiele. No crowds, no Vierkleur-waving nutters, not so much a memorable video of Steve Hofmeyr yelling “free the Boer” in front of a frantic stadium. Seemingly no amount of funding or advertising could bring the people out to stand with their fellow men who are supposedly being butchered in South Africa. Even the Boks at Baltimore attracted a more credible audience.
The third thing could be that social media just wasn’t buying it. Indeed, there was a deluge of videos screaming ‘genocide’ and pleading with Donald Trump to act, lest there should be a decimation of an entire people pretty much like Rwanda except with blue eyes and farming implements.
Problem is, humans are generally curious species and they can easily be offended. For the longest time, Roets called it genocide. Now, against mounting evidence and a backlash against this mischaracterisation, he finds himself trying to walk back the BS by filing a complaint against Al Jazeera’s reportage on the matter.
For all their efforts out in the US, the sympathy they no doubt received, what Roets and his journeymen will realise is that when all is said and done they will have to come back home. And when they have, they will be faced with the same problems they were trying to get away from.
For all its ills, South Africa remains a constitutional democracy with free and fair elections, and their best bet of effecting the change they want would be to take advantage of this privilege. Peddling narratives of exeptionalism in a country with a deep-seated racial history and violence only makes you seem like a spoilt brat who’s totally lost the plot.
Featured image: Ernst Roets and white crosses in Limpopo. Source: Ernst Roets Facebook page.