Listening to the silent majority

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[77]

They both were 23 years old: Wit Wolf Barend Hendrik Strijdom and coloured ANC bomber Robert McBride. One shot eight people at random in a Pretoria Street. The other set a bomb off on the Durban beachfront having killed three women at the time of writing. Both were given the death sentence. They had different reasons and intentions for killing, because their fathers had indoctrinated them into different ways of thinking. Father Nicolas Strijdom had taught his son that blacks were animals. He was also regional leader for the ultra-right AWB^55.. Son Barend Hendrik was duly brainwashed from the cradle upwards into believing that whites in South Africa were at war with blacks. As a child, he had also learned that when the British ruled South Africa they handed out permits to shoot Hottentots. For all practical purposes and the law of averages, why not kill blacks as well? In school, he learned that according to the Bible white and non-white did not belong to the same church. At the age of 15 he already attended meetings of the Herstigte Nasionale Party together with his father. He was told of the need to create an all-white Boerestaat in which there would be no room for blacks. Gradually, Strijdom junior lost contact with reality. Initially he joined the South African police force, but was asked to leave.

Robert McBride grew up on the other side of the racial spectrum. His father had been strongly anti-white and he told his boy never, never to trust a white man. He said during his trial in the Maritzburg Supreme Court that he despised whites. As a boy he had had to endure racial insults from some of his friends, including teammates in a white rugby club. He saw apartheid as a sickness that had attacked the nation. In order to assist in combating this malady he had decided at one point to join the radical movements. He had received training in explosives in Botswana and became a member of a special operations unit of the ANC. So, here were two young South African men, who had virtually become criminals as a direct result of the poisonous brainwashing they had undergone long before they were able to think independently. The white boy's intentions were fed with exaggerated national pride and the love of his own group. The love for the Afrikaner fatherland and the need for an all-white Volkstaat became basic patterns in young Strij-

55. The ultra-right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging

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dom's mindscape, similar to that of the Nazi youth organisations. The coloured boy's traumatic experiences in school and thereafter shaped and coded thought patterns into his mind that led him straight to his doom. At the time of writing, both have been sentenced to hang.^56.

Law professors and some psychologists protested the verdicts by arguing that the apartheid system created these monsters and then condemned them to die, while in fact both young men were products of the very system that now wanted to eliminate them. Brian Currin, director of Lawyers for Human Rights in South Africa told David Breier of the Argus, ‘We find it ironic that the very same state that poisoned with racist policies the minds of millions of South Africans, should reserve for itself the right to execute one of their own victims. This trial was not a trial of Strijdom and McBride, but a trial of the whole apartheid strategy and philosophy.’ This argument is too simplistic. The South African government is not responsible for the structuring of father Strijdom's mind or father McBride's mind. Nor can any sane person blame PW Botha, or his immediate predecessors, for the fact that father Strijdom took his son to meetings of the Herstigte Nasionale Party and that the generation of Strijdom senior assisted in programming Strijdom junior's mind with fascist political ideas or perceptions and nonsensical religious racial phantasmagoria.

The Nationalist Party government in South Africa is a reflection of the voting majority's will. That's what democracy is about. The people voted the Nats into power, because they supported the Nats' brain power and policies. So the majority of voting South Africans wanted things in the Republic to be as they presently are. In 1986, President PW Botha delivered what is now known as his ‘we have outgrown the outdated concept of apartheid’ speech. So why should some commentators write in 1989 that the government is at fault for the thinking of Barend Hendrik Strijdom's brains in relation to apartheid? The State President uttered thoughts in 1986, that neither the older or younger Strijdom would say. After all, what are the President's words other than the outcome of National Party thinking in general? In turn, the majority of the white people of South Africa vote for the NP and so in the view of this

56. The data here was compiled from a page written by Frans Esterhuyse in the weekend Argus, May 27, 1989

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observer, there is reason to believe that a modus vivendi with the black population can and will be worked out in the near future.