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lands,” asking whether there is a “white
genocide going on right now” in South
Africa, where the “government’s anti-
white rhetoric is now being realized in
legislation to take white land.”
Ernst Roets, the deputy head of the
Afrikaner civil-rights organization
AfriForum, appears in Hopkins’s film,
and is a favorite of the right-wing in-
ternational media; he has discussed ex-
propriation on Tucker Carlson’s show.
When I visited him at his headquar-
ters, in an office plaza outside Preto-
ria, he was wearing glasses and a blue
shirt with the AfriForum logo stitched
along the pocket, which gave him the
look of an I.T. specialist. “Afrikaners
are the villains of South Africa, because
of our history,” he said.
They are the remnants of a ruling
class—the descendants of the employ-
ees of the Dutch East India Company,
who arrived in the late seventeenth cen-
tury, and now constitute about sixty per
cent of South Africa’s four and a half
million white citizens. The National
Party, which instituted apartheid, was
established specifically to secure their
interests. In those days, their language—
Afrikaans, a creole sometimes referred
to as Low Dutch—was imposed on
nonwhites. The 1976 Soweto Upris-
ing—in which some twenty thousand
students marched, and several hundred
were killed by the police—was held to
protest the mandatory use of Afrikaans
in schools. Now Afrikaans both unites
and divides the country; it is the basis
of a white-identity movement, but it is
also the first language of three-quar-
ters of colored South Africans. Moenier
Adams, a musician from the Cape Flats,
the sprawling region outside Cape Town
where hundreds of thousands of black
and colored South Africans were forc-
ibly resettled under apartheid, has a
song that describes the language he
grew up speaking as a “history book
without a cover, of a white guy looking
for a brown-skinned lover.”
Traditionally, there has been friction
between whites of English descent and
Afrikaners. “I think that tension has less-
ened as a result of current government
policies,” Roets said. “White English and
white Afrikaans people are sort of pushed
together into one bigger group with com-
mon concerns.” They are united, he
thinks, by a shared sense of siege. “Po-litical leaders... actively and continu-
ously vilify white farmers in particular
and even go as far as romanticizing vi-
olence against them,” Roets writes, in his
book “Kill the Boer”—a phrase, mean-
ing “kill the farmer,” that is also the re-
frain of a song Julius Malema and his
supporters sometimes sing at rallies. Afri-
Forum’s Web site declares that its mis-
sion is to insure that “Afrikaners—who
have no other home—are able to lead a
meaningful and sustainable existence, in
peace with other communities,” but the
organization is increasingly broadening
its messaging to advocate for “minority
rights.” Roets recently co-produced “Dis-
rupted Land,” a documentary, in En-
glish, which argues that white colonists
arrived in the Cape at the same time as
Bantu-speaking black groups, giving
them equal claim to the land. (Robert
Edgar, a professor emeritus of African
history at Howard University, told me
that mainstream historians reject this
idea. “That one has been around since
the nineteenth century—the myth of the
empty land,” he said. “Bantu-speaking
groups would have been well established
in that area several centuries before the
Dutch showed up.”) In the past decade,
AfriForum’s membership has shot up
from nine thousand to more than two
hundred thousand.
Roets does not deny that apartheid
was a moral catastrophe. “Everyone
agrees it was a horrible system,” he said.
“I’m sure it’s less than one per cent
within the white community that thinksotherwise.” But he believes that the goal
of land reform should be to reward peo-
ple with provable legal claims, not to
alleviate the lingering damage of South
Africa’s racial history. “It’s wrong to say
that dispossession happened to all black
people or that it was committed by all
white people across the entire surface
of South Africa,” he told me. “Of course,
then people say, ‘Oh, so you’re pro-apart-
heid.’ No! We are free-market people.”
On his bookshelf, Roets had a bust ofRonald Reagan. “We want the state to
be small and out of the way. Apartheid
was a big-government system.”
Roets dismisses the term “white
genocide.” “Farming is an occupation—
you can’t have a genocide against an
occupation,” he said. But, he argues,
“there is a large-scale killing of farm-
ers.” AfriForum has verified fifty-four
murders of farmers in 2018. The police
count sixty-two, of whom forty-six were
white. These killings constitute only
two-tenths of one per cent of the ho-
micides in South Africa. But to Roets
and his constituents they represent part
of a politically motivated strategy to
push white people off a continent that
they have inhabited for hundreds of
years. “In the vast majority of farm at-
tacks the attackers have stated that they
were primarily motivated by the inten-
tion to rob,” he writes. But he asserts
that they are also influenced by “hate
speech, land reform, labor disputes, rac-
ism.” He has pleaded his case before
the United Nations, and to politicians
in Australia, the United States, and
Germany, hoping that they will press
the A.N.C. to address farm murders
and to abandon plans for expropriation
without compensation.
In “Farmlands,” Lauren Southern
warns of a coming race war—“an ever
more realistic bloody future in South
Africa.” She interviews Jeanine Ihlen-
feldt, a third-generation white farmer
in the Eastern Cape, whose father,
Schalk Featherstone, was shot to death
by a black former employee in 2015. The
camera follows Ihlenfeldt as she weeps
in her father’s living room, the site of
his murder. Southern suggests that the
attack was a straightforward act of po-
litically motivated racial hatred. She ne-
glects to mention that the murderer was
previously convicted of stealing a pickup
truck from Featherstone and spent time
in jail for the crime. “It was just retri-
bution: ‘You put me in jail for stealing
your bakkie, I’m going to kill you,’”
Ihlenfeldt told me. The perpetrator was
on tik—South African meth—at the
time of the killing; he had stabbed his
girlfriend to death a few days earlier.
(He is currently serving a life sentence.)
“I felt exploited,” Ihlenfeldt said of
Southern’s film, when we met in Febru-
ary. Ihlenfeldt, a fifty-four-year-old
mother of two with short white hair,Fact Levy South Africa 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508344.indd 49 5/3/19 7:51 PM