There is something very worrying about government and the police reducing farmer murders to base criminality. Ditto with attacks on foreign nationals who run small enterprises in the townships. Denying that these are crimes of race hate and xenophobia, points to something deeper going on in our society.
I have written extensively on both but the brutal murders of over 3000 farmers since 1994, many of the victims either shot point blank, stabbed, or their spouses mutilated with unspeakable cruelty, points to a deeper motive.
The obliteration of farmers is not just about robbery and common assault; it perhaps is also about revenge for land dispossession. What these murderous thugs do not realize is that they are also eradicating the producers of food who have come to exemplify the apartheid past.
The evil of these deeds can be traced back to how they understand the word "boere" with its double entendre. It can mean farmers on the one hand, or it may connote conservative Afrikaners, whom these murderers consider to be responsible for dispossession. A collapse of these two meanings often inspires hatred against people they assume are responsible for their lack of power.
This vociferous denial of racially motivated purges is reminiscent of the denial of the connection between HIV and AIDS by former President Mbeki and his allies. With Peter Mokaba, he wrote reams and reams of rubbish denying the disease as being sexually transmitted because if he did so he would have had to admit that black men are sexually irresponsible for the rapid spread of the disease with their multiple and concurrent partners.
Mark Gevisser wrote about this in his book, Dream Deferred: "which refers to a document, secretly penned by Mbeki and distributed to ANC leadership. Entitled "Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot & Mouth and Statistics: HIV/Aids and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African", it described the HIV/Aids thesis as entrenched in centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans. It compared Aids scientists to latter-day Nazi concentration camp doctors and portrayed black people who accepted orthodox Aids science as self-repressed victims of a slave mentality, according to the article" (DA@Work 12 November 2007).
The state's denial that farm murders is not genocide and that the murder and brutal attacks on foreign shopkeepers are not xenophobic have to do with something far more sinister than is obvious. It is the shame to admit that black people can also be racist; that racism and racial discrimination is not only a "white thing"; it also a "black thing" and that we are capable of racism, often more heinous. It resurrects the history of tribal and internecine warfare reminiscent of pre-colonial conflict in the southern African regions, not to speak of the whole of Africa.
To label these very specific transgressions "criminality" is to let the police and the state off the hook. It allows them to ignore the seriousness of the crime and negate the communities' specific attempts to protect themselves as SAPS has done with the Commandoes in the rural areas.
It also means government does not have to set aside dedicated forces to eradicate the underlying causes and investigate the overt and covert forms of racism that incite the murder of a class of hard-working people who do not wait for handouts from government, but who know that they must work to move ahead. Tribalism and ethnic warfare, as well as resentment of the "Other" are not new phenomena.
What will be new is to find the solutions to the dark side of SA, a side we love to repress, lest it mars the image of this mythical Rainbow Nation.
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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