Jaco Kleynhans is the head of international liaison at the Solidarity Movement, an organization of more than twenty conservative community organizations with more than half a million members across South Africa. Kleynhans is responsible for political, economic, cultural, academic, and linguistic engagement with countries, organizations, political parties, businesses, and individuals around the world. He has worked on political campaigns in the U.S. and Europe and has an extensive knowledge of international politics.
Murders of white farmers in South Africa have become commonplace. What is the South African government’s response to this endless list of crimes?
South Africa is an extremely violent country. The murder rate per 100,000 citizens is currently the second highest in the world. There are several reasons for this. First, the South African police, prosecuting authorities, and courts fail to catch and successfully prosecute criminals. Second, violence, especially in the fight against apartheid, has been condoned for too long, and a generation or two of South Africans have grown up with violence, such as violent theft, rape, torture, and murder, as the norm. Enormous illegal immigration from the rest of Africa in recent years has added to the crime problems.
What makes the attacks on farmers, and especially the brutal murders of farmers, worse is that political rhetoric and a continuous hateful message towards farmers and white South Africans in general are increasing. Songs are sung that encourage people to kill farmers. Since the end of apartheid, 3,000 farmers have been killed in South Africa. Mostly, it is accompanied by extreme torture and brutal murder. The number of farmers in South Africa has decreased from 50,000 to less than 30,000 in the past three decades, while the country’s population has increased from 40 million to more than 60 million. The murder rate of farmers is the highest of any category of murder in South Africa. It is more dangerous to be a farmer in South Africa than to live in Baghdad, Iraq, or in Damascus, Syria. Hatred towards farmers is increasing due to the failure of the government. Populist movements scapegoat farmers, and specifically the Boers/Afrikaners.
Nelson Mandela’s government has been much romanticized in the West, but discrimination and everything you mentioned were born under his rule.
Yes. The problems had already started under Mandela. The worst racial laws, like affirmative action, started under Mandela. The farm murders started under Mandela. The problem is that you cannot mention this. We must pretend that these issues only started with Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa. The ANC was never a good government. Shortly after Mandela became president, new racial discrimination against the white minority began.
How are farmers coping with this situation?
Most farmers are increasingly organizing to create their own well-trained safety structures. The Solidarity Movement and AfriForum are directly involved in this. Over the past few years, we have trained 10,000 people to, among other things, handle firearms, patrol areas with drones, and use technology such as cameras. Where farmers are well organized and equipped to secure their homes and farms, attacks decrease. The challenge is that South Africa is very large and that it is often precisely older farmers in remote areas who are targeted by organized gangs of extremely well-armed and violent attackers. Improving farm safety is also very expensive.
And why is it that the media, which is so aware of racism, remains silent in the face of these racist crimes?
The media still believe Afrikaners, and white farmers specifically, are responsible for the sins of the past. Despite the fact that apartheid came to an end three decades ago, violence against Afrikaners is still underplayed, and the murders of farmers are dismissed by the media as just part of a larger crime problem. Racism towards black people is always well communicated, but the tremendous increase in racism against whites and the hate crimes and murders against white farmers are dismissed as normal and not as racism.
Are you receiving support at the international level, or, again, is there silence on the part of states and international organizations?
Five years ago, we at the Solidarity Movement started a campaign to inform the Western world about these issues. Great progress has been made, but support is still limited. We get a lot of sympathy, but of course there are still many politicians who believe that the idealized South Africa of Nelson Mandela exists. That country does not exist. South Africa is dominated by corrupt and radical groups. There is a growing awareness in the U.S. and some European countries of everything that is going wrong in South Africa. We are increasingly enjoying support from individuals, smaller organizations, and more conservative political parties and groups in the West. However, it is important to convince the American government and governments in Europe to take a stronger stance on events in South Africa and to act. Furthermore, we also urgently need to raise greater financial support for our projects, something that has been difficult until now.
It is paradoxical that the South African government, which is allowing these crimes, denounced Israel for genocide before the International Court of Justice.
The ANC government in South Africa is increasingly anti-Western. They consider whites in South Africa to be an unwanted remnant of Western colonialism in Africa, just as they, in their own words, consider Israel to be an unwanted remnant of the West in the Middle East. In the past two years, South Africa has moved closer to Russia, Iran, China, and also terrorist groups such as Hamas. While groups like the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan are killing tens of thousands of people through ethnic cleansing, the South African government looks away and decides to report Israel to the ICJ instead. South Africa’s government claims to hold the moral high ground, but in truth, the South African government is merely a pawn of the new anti-Western movement. That the ANC in South Africa is financed by China, Russia, and/or Iran is currently only an allegation, but it would make sense if one looked at the ANC government’s selective morality.
The Economic Freedom Fighters, the country’s third-largest party, celebrate their rallies by chanting “kill the farmer.” What influence does this party have on what is happening?
The EFF’s influence is growing. Already, for more than 15 years, poverty and unemployment have been increasing in South Africa. Millions of people are extremely desperate for easy, populist solutions to their problems. The EFF, which is openly communist and racist, offers no workable solution, but their promises of farms expropriated from white farmers and given to black people, free houses, health care, and more sound like something that can work to poorly educated and desperate people. Therefore, there is the fear that the EFF may show the sharpest growth of all political parties in the upcoming national election on May 29. This may make them a very dangerous coalition partner for the ANC in the future.
The upcoming elections in May predict that the African National Congress could lose its absolute majority. What could this mean for the Boer community? Are things going to get worse, or is there any reason for hope?
Our community is well organized. Within the Solidarity Movement, we have more than twenty organizations with almost 700,000 members who pay membership fees every month. Our movement creates solutions in communities. This includes our own education, post-school training, our own safety structures, etc. So, we cannot simply stumble from one election to the next. Afrikaners/Boers today are barely more than 2 million people in a country with more than 60 million inhabitants. Almost 500,000 of our people have left the country in the last three decades. Despite this, we continue to build and fight. We build our own colleges, universities, and schools while we fight in the courts and in communities for the preservation of our language, culture, and living spaces, as well as our basic rights. It may sound like an uphill battle, but we are confident that we will succeed based on our faith. We are not going to allow our continued existence to be canceled. In 100 years, the Afrikaners will still be in South Africa.
