PETER BRUCE: The wrong sort of forum

The trip starts with two AfriForum leaders tweeting from London: “We have just arrived at Heathrow @kalliekriel and I are on our way to the US to garner support and lobby against racist theft (#LandExpropriation) and #FarmMurders. From here, will head to Texas.” The accompanying picture with the tweet shows AfriForum leader Kallie Kriel and its author, AfriForum deputy leader Ernst Roets, riding a shuttle bus at Heathrow.

Showing off about what they are doing was never going to end well and as criticism of the trip has mounted AfriForum has put its future on the line. If you’re attacking your own country abroad, what point is there of the country wanting to sit down and listen to you when you get back?

I have never met either of the two gentlemen. AfriForum is an Afrikaner political lobby that has picked up on farm murders and, now, the possibility of land expropriation to draw attention to itself and its “work”. It appears to be well-funded and recently hired arguably the best criminal prosecutor in the country, Gerrie Nel, to a full-time position to run high-profile cases against select targets. Julius Malema is one. It has campaigned against the eradication of Afrikaans as a language of tuition at historically Afrikaans universities and has fought the changing of street names in Pretoria.

You could, I suppose, compare AfriForum’s lobbying in Australia, Europe and the US with the old Transvaal Republic’s president Paul Kruger’s visit to Europe to try to whip up sympathy and support for the boer republics fighting the British at the end of the 19th century.

But Kruger was legitimate in a way that AfriForum is not. Or not yet. Setting out deliberately to run down, insult and generally denigrate your country to foreigners is an extraordinary thing. It will play well, no doubt, to the AfriForum base (conservative whites worried about their place and their security in SA’s future) but campaigning overseas against your own government makes it hard for your government to take you seriously if you ever ask it for help.

And that, surely, is what AfriForum wants. It wants to be a player, a factor, in SA. But it will surely not be lost on Messrs Kriel and Roets that not only are they free to lobby against the legitimate government of SA; when they return no-one will lay a hand on them. The culture they are trying to defend never offered that to the people they now denigrate. If land expropriation is “racist theft” in Roets’s words, what was the forced removals of tens of thousands of black and coloured people from their homes during apartheid?

I think defending your culture is a good thing. The ANC’s dismissive attitude to the Afrikaans language is extremely short-sighted. This is a fully developed language, unique to SA, in which you can learn to become an internationally recognised brain surgeon, an engineer or a scientist. If Afrikaans capital wishes to build an Afrikaans-medium university now that the language has been toppled at existing universities then government should allow it.

But AfriForum’s push-back against the current land expropriation debate (it hasn’t even been concluded yet), its loud and threatening response to anyone who questions its farm attack numbers, will win it no new friends. No farm has yet been expropriated without compensation. In fact, Western Cape premier Helen Zille has a good piece in Daily Maverick today where she suggests she may have found a farm which could, or should, be expropriated without compensation under the existing constitution.

And the farm murders that AfriForum has elevated to a sort of white genocide as it lobbies among right-wingers abroad are actually falling (unevenly) over time, according to figures AfriForum has itself published. There is little in what I have read and from the vitriol directed at me when I’ve dared to question the farm genocide story* to persuade me that farmers are any more at risk from murder and robbery in SA than the rest of the population.

On Sunday during a Twitter “debate” (they always get a bit nasty) something (or someone) calling itself Dimenthal Sulfide tweeted to me that “74 farm murders/39k farmers is 5.4 times larger than 19k murders/54m South Africans. 5 times more likely to be murdered as a farmer”. The numbers are not in dispute apparently. But lies, damned lies, and what was that again? That’s right, there were 19,000 people murdered in this country in the past financial year, 74 of whom were farmers. That’s less than one half of one percent. It isn’t even remotely genocide.

It is interesting that in the most recent official crime statistics the Eastern Cape had the highest murder rate, of around 56 per 100,000 population. Yet if you look at the AfriForum murder map in its report, the Eastern Cape “contribution” to farm murders was very low.

Of course, the murders on farms are awful and often grotesque. But every single one of those 19,000 murders involved unspeakable terror, pain and suffering. They occur because our security and police infrastructure doesn’t work, because crime is out of control in our country. And I’d still be surprised if even 200 of those 19,000 murder victims were white people.

By making exceptions of murder on farms (almost a quarter of which occur in Gauteng, which implies they are on peri-urban smallholdings and often close to poor black populations living in shacks) AfriForum constructs a cruel lie about the country in which we live.

It shouldn’t do it. Of course there is concern about expropriation. And of course Afrikaners, much more than city-dwelling English speakers like me, have a historic relationship with farming and farms. They’re very much like black South Africans in that. Even though you’re not on the farm, knowing it’s out there matters.

Also, everyone knows wholesale expropriation is not on the cards. It would shatter this economy very quickly. But AfriForum should sometimes do what it asks the rest of us to do and put itself in the other man’s shoes. Conspiring with foreign supporters, presumably to bring pressure on government, only makes the job of fixing this country harder. There’s little doubt it represents a sizeable constituency, but we all have to live here whether we agree with each other or not.

I’m sure AfriForum has a contribution to make to that but on current form it’ll damage more than it fixes.

• One fellow whose name I forget wrote a long complaint about a piece I did in the Sunday Times a few weeks ago about farm murders. He objected to me using the word “story”, as in “the farm murder story”. May I just explain to him that among English-speaking journalists the word “story” is what we publish. It is what we follow and what we do. It is not, as I suspect might be the case in Afrikaans, a “storie”, a weak excuse or a lie.