As the inquest into the gruesome murders of Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow Mkhonto – collectively known as The Cradock Four – continues, lobby group Afriforum a week or so ago were calling on the Khampepe commission of inquiry ‘into the delay in investigating and prosecuting apartheid-era crimes to also include “terror” by the African National Congress (ANC).’ The group’s CEO, Kallie Kriel dropped this bombshell with the same righteous justification he’d shown when seven years ago he refuted UN findings that apartheid was indeed ‘a crime against humanity.’
This was around the time where consultations around the thorny Land Expropriation Bill were underway drawing widespread views around private property rights, food security and very conservative attitudes. It was also around the time of ex-Afriforum Ernst Roets’s ‘dark and dramatic 31-minute monologue on YouTube’ about ‘stringing up’ academics seemingly as a swipe at a certain Professor Elmien du Plessis, a property-law and land-reform specialist, who’d criticized the lobby group on twitter. The Black Friday protests against farm murders had taken place a few months earlier, so yes, the atmosphere was particularly charged.
Except, back then, Israel’s war in Gaza hadn’t yet happened and South Africa had not instituted the landmark case against the Jewish state at the ICJ. The obvious attempts at bullying notwithstanding, President Cyril Ramaphosa had not gone on to nonetheless articulate his case at the United Nations, the US-funded PEPFAR could still be relied on in the fight against HIV/AIDS and MTN had not been under investigation for allegedly violating the US Anti-Terrorism Act.
Whatever issues might have existed with the West, those were mostly confined to online ‘twars’ and the US dumping its chickens on us. Domestically, the regular tumbles around potentially dangerous comments from politicians, race-based policies and whether the waving of the apartheid flag really amounted to hate speech. Afriforum were at the forefront of it all, with Roets even posting a video of himself doing target practice with a juiced-up Glock 19 in support of gun ownership rights. But then came the mother of our problems – the land issue. This is like mentioning the G-word around hardline Zionists, or the ‘Epstein files’ around Trump, or, for that matter, whether there are genuine plans to create a white state by annexing the Western Cape. That’s when Kallie Kriel repeatedly kept creeping up in my small-time readings.
On a News24 interview with Mahlatse Mahlase back in 2018, Kriel had sought to walk back his apartheid revisionism by paraphrasing the sentiments of a US ambassador made at the UN in 1973 that basically suggested that apartheid atrocities should not ‘be seen in the same light as what we saw under Communism where a hundred million were killed … [or] what we saw in Germany where there was six million people sent by Hitler into the gas chambers.’
This was during the Cold War and the people who supported the ‘crime against humanity,’ pontificated Kriel, were from the Eastern Block – dictators and communists, so, meaning not the sort of people a person of Western values would be taking to heart. According to Kriel, this was the context under which his conclusions were drawn.
Espousing a purely intellectual posture where debates and facts – no matter how uncomfortable – should not be shouted down, the interviewer’s next questions quickly seemed to expose the immediate cracks in his argument. (This was around the time that Afriforum had been on their maiden US roadshow supposedly to spread the message of a white genocide in SA.)
Interviewer: Is it not hypocritical? On the one hand, you were in the United States, you were claiming that the farm murders are genocide and people in Rwanda who lived through a genocide where close to a million people were actually killed will say, in terms of numbers, you can’t call the farm murders genocide?
Kriel then refutes that he’d initially used the term genocide, stating that on evidence gathered by Genocide Watch, there were some ‘dangerous signs in terms of people being able to make derogatory statements … such as Julius Malema saying ‘we’re not calling for the wholesale slaughter of whites, at least not for now.’ You have him praising a lion that attacks a farmer. You had a former president saying that all the problems in the country started when my forefathers arrived.’ And so on…
That said, Kriel is adamant that although Afriforum represents interests that are dear to the hearts of white Afrikaners, they have also represented poor black families in Nkandla by taking the KZN Department of Education to court, taken on mining companies on the behalf of black communities in Limpopo, assisted Phumzile Dube’s family in the culpable homicide case against Duduzane Zuma (for which he was ultimately acquitted). ‘If we fix potholes, there’s not a sign that says only Afrikaners can drive over this,’ he says.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about your recent (2018) trip to America. What was the purpose of that trip?
Kriel: What we did is a deed of patriotism. If you go and look in places like Cuba, Venezuela and Zimbabwe when property rights was not respected, it was not simply just one group of property owners that were harmed. We know in Zimbabwe today the economy was destroyed. There’s a ninety percent unemployment rate, so that is to the detriment of a country. So if we go and speak out and say “people, tell the South African government, the ruling party, that this will destroy the economy,” we are trying to avert a catastrophe in this country.’
Interviewer: What catastrophe? We are at the current moment going through a parliamentary process where anybody … can go and contribute in terms of what we think should happen to Section 25 of the Constitution
Kriel: The catastrophe is that the ruling party in December at their national [conference] adopted the policy to expropriate without compensation. The catastrophe is when the country’s president says on various platforms that ‘we are going to expropriate land without compensation, to give it to our people is already a worrying issue. Is he not the president of everybody? So that is their stated policy and we have a right to mobilise against that as is the right of any group to do so.
Interviewer: So you’re very selective in who you go and see. Conservative lawmakers, you choose Fox News with its conservative views that has portrayed the land issue as part of this genocide against white people in South Africa? And you didn’t correct any of those statements?
Kriel: What we unfortunately have are people like Adam Habib calling us Nazis … he says we spoke to Front Nationale in France and the Alternative for Germany … and we spoke to alt-right groups. We never did that. We are a mainstream organisation.
Kriel: Fox News never referred to genocide. They said what the threat was which regards to land and also mentioned the problem that we have on farm murders in South Africa. And we believe that is an important message to bring across because now the problem is people don’t react to what we say, they simply react to who we are.
Interviewer: Is it not because you have racialized it in both the issue of land and the farm murders?
Kriel: If we speak about the land issue, it was racialized by the deputy president [David] Mabuza when he said whites should give up the land voluntarily to make sure that there’s not violence and it will be taken by force.
Interviewer: The issue of land would be racialized, from a historic context, that it was land that was taken away from original people of South Africa who are of Khoi, Black etc descent?
Kriel: In all our documents, and also in the book on farm murders that we took to the US, it states that there are also black people that are suffering under this. Thirty percent of people that die in farm murders are black people. So we put the facts on the table. But what we are worried about specifically, we’re worried about all murders in the country. But I think the fact that you’re having twenty percent of farm murders where people are tortured and being brutally killed … if you’re going to torture someone for hours then there is a very big problem. And that problem is not helped by the fact that people are making minorities a scapegoat and making these anti-Afrikaner, anti-white statements.
Interviewer: We are clearly still a very divided nation, that project of reconciliation is by far nowhere near anything, what is Afriforum doing in terms of making your constituency, which is white, understand issues of white privilege … issues of we need to share the land?
Kriel: If you look at our local projects, of our more than 100 branches countrywide. Those are projects that are to the benefit of the community as a whole. Despite the divisions in the political discourse, that there is a strong feeling at local level for people from all communities to work together. We will not be deterred to cooperate with people … as we are working with communities across the country to tackle crime. Those things will go ahead and we won’t be deterred by false accusations … Afriforum respects the dignity of all people. We’re not Europeans. So we want to make sure that this country should be built to the benefit of all people … we want to go into the process of renewal of trust amongst the various communities in this country. We also want to engage government because it’s in none of our interests if we go into a conflict situation.
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So just when many thought Kriel was aware of the insensitivity of his views on apartheid, the man just had to rub it in with the ANC “terror” submission. It seemed for most commentators, the question was not whether his call for justice was justified but if he was really the right person to be making them. Some went back to Kriel’s own numbers, 1350 deaths that the ANC allegedly had a hand in. And the fact that they were actually going down this path left them disgusted that they had degenerated to numbers and stats instead of the individual lives behind the barbarism of past sins. And, how in succumbing to the supposed rage baiting, they’d forgotten to honor the true heroes of the saga especially the families of the Cradock Four, denied justice for four decades.
Featured Image: Afriforum logo. Source: Afriforum website.