Some Afrikaners claim that only a national preserve can save them

By PETER HAWTHORNE /CAPE TOWN

hundred years ago, Afrikaner Boers who trekked north from the Cape of Good Hope fought the British in what Whitehall dubbed the Boer Wars and what the voortrekkers (pioneer farmers) called their Wars of Independence. By the middle of this century they had political control of the country, holding it stubbornly against the anti-apartheid world until the tide of black nationalism swept the African National Congress to power.

They may have lost the ultimate war for political power, but many Boers continue to fight their battle for self-rule. They claim they face a murderous plan by black militants to drive them off the land on which they had settled in the last century. And they are pressing the A.N.C. government for their own "homeland"--a final halt for what they consider to be the Afrikaners' last Great Trek. Politicians and farmers from the community formed from the mainly Dutch settlers--but also includes French and German--who first arrived in South Africa almost 350 years ago claim they are now an endangered species and that only an Afrikaner national preserve could save them.

An alarmingly high crime rate has become a national concern throughout South Africa. It was primarily an urban phenomenon in the past, and most city dwellers have been victims of criminal activity--often violent--either at home or in their businesses. But now, according to the mainly Afrikaner commercial farming community, the crime wave has moved to the countryside. Most worrisome, they say, attacks are not just by criminals but by politically motivated killers who are intent on driving them off the bushveld they have farmed for generations.

Since 1994, when the A.N.C. government came into office, the South African Agricultural Union (S.A.A.U.) has recorded some 2,250 attacks on farms, resulting in the deaths of 521 farmers, members of their families and farmworkers. This year the countryside has seen more than 300 attacks--80 in the month of May alone--and 19 murders. "You kill a farmer, you kill a farm," says Corne Mulder, a Member of Parliament for the Afrikaners' Freedom Front (F.F.) party. "It's dispossession by death, and damn the consequences."

While the motive for many of the attacks may be purely criminal--the robbers are usually after the farmers' money and firearms--some have been particularly brutal, including torture of the victims. And some perpetrators have made racist or political remarks or have left political slogans behind. In March this year the men who attacked a farm outside Pretoria told a mixed-race woman who tried to protect her white husband: "We don't kill coloureds, only whites."

In attacks in the Free State and the Eastern Cape the information from the Farmers' Union and the police is that the assailants are reported to have said they were members of the A.N.C.'s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) or the so-called Azanian People's Liberation Army. In May a gang drugged guard dogs and broke into the house of a disabled 60-year-old farmer, Donald de la Field, near Rustenburg, northwest of Pretoria. According to the police they tortured him, slit his throat and killed him as he sat in his wheelchair, then raped and killed his 52-year-old wife, Verena, when she arrived home an hour later. The gang took only a handgun from the De la Fields and left a written threat to "Kill the Boers." This slogan was popular with black militants during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The police say at this stage there is no compelling evidence of a coordinated black conspiracy to drive whites from the land. But after years of harsh treament at the hands of their former Afrikaner masters, a desire for revenge among dispossessed blacks may be behind some of the attacks. Poverty, unemployment and a wide wealth gap between whites and blacks also contribute to the climate of violence. Whatever the cause, the farmers are demanding that the A.N.C. government take urgent steps to combat what they see as a threat not just to their livelihood but to their existence. "The government has a responsibility to create a safe environment for all its citizens--and that includes the farmers," said S.A.A.U. spokesman Kobus Visser.

Last year President Nelson Mandela responded by announcing the creation of a Rural Safety Plan which he hopes will promote cooperation between local communities, the police force and the so-called commando units of the South African Defence Force. The government also set up a special police task force to investigate attacks on farmers. But many farmers are not waiting for action by underfunded and understaffed police forces. Some Boers are setting up their own security systems with radio alert networks, electrified fences and guard dogs.

"The farmers are gatvol--that means enough is enough," says the F.F.'s Mulder. "Their situation is part of the larger problem facing the Afrikaner in South Africa today. We are looking at a process of disempowerment." Mulder, the son of a former cabinet minister in the apartheid government of the 70s, is the constitutional affairs spokesman for the F.F., which has as its main aim the establishment of an Afrikaner volkstaat (homeland). Earlier this month, in an impassioned plea in Parliament, Mulder challenged Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to begin negotiations on the Afrikaners' proposals for their own place in the sun. "If the Afrikaner people are not free there will be no peace and stability," Mulder said. "If the government wants confrontation so be it." Mbeki's reply was to warn Mulder that these remarks might influence right-wing Afrikaners into taking the law into their own hands. "I think we are walking in very dangerous territory," he said.

The F.F. already has the homeland identified on the map as the Afrikaner Volkstaat, although it is yet to be officially named. It is an area of some 146,000 sq km--bigger than Greece--in a semi-desert and sparsely populated corridor of land bordered by the Orange River in the north and the Atlantic Ocean in the southwest. At its eastern point is Orania, a lonely, reclusive community of 700 diehard Afrikaners who regard themselves as the vanguard of a new, last trek into freedom from the hostile black world around them. Their spiritual leaders include Betsy Verwoerd, the 97-year-old widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the assassinated South African Prime Minister often named as the political architect of apartheid. Afrikaners propose buying and developing land in a northwest corridor from Orania to the sea. Mulder contends that 500,000 of South Africa's 3 million Afrikaners would be enough to establish the cultural homeland.

"At first it would just be a home base. No more than that," says Mulder. The F.F went into the 1994 elections campaigning for a homeland and secured a modest nine seats out of 400 when the right-wing, mainly Afrikaner, Conservative Party boycotted the poll. Now, according to Mulder, Conservative Party Afrikaners are taking an interest in the F.F.'s fight. "Afrikaners are becoming disillusioned, depressed and frustrated. If the Afrikaner is denied self-determination some will want to take up the armed struggle," he warns.

South Africa's Minister for Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development, Valli Moosa, this month provided some encouragement for the F.F. when he said that under the terms of South Africa's new Constitution, their push for a cultural, language and community home was "a legitimate pursuit." They may never create an autonomous sanctuary, but Afrikaners--Boers and burghers alike--hope at least to find personal security and lasting peace in the new South Africa.