The 2016 book A Citizen's Guide to Crime Trends in South Africa...
Sizwe SikaMusi@SizweLo
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Mar 18, 2025
~4 min read
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The 2016 book A Citizen's Guide to Crime Trends in South Africa revealed that when White people answered a survey about the crimes they’d experienced, their responses contradicted what they’d reported at police stations.
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White South Africans reported hijackings to the police at double the rate they reported house break-ins, but they told pollsters they had experienced break-ins twice as often as they had been hijacked. What's going on?
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Author Eve Fairbanks suggests the reason for the discrepancy is that White South Africans seem to have a memory of someone breaking into their homes when it never happened. *cough* Pistorius *cough*
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Fairbanks adds that White South Africans have what is called "Mau Mau anxiety", a morbid and unreasonable fear of Africans, named after the Kenyan liberation movement that drove White colonialists out of Kenya in the 1950s.
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In 2006, a group of Boers formed Afriforum to give its members a sense that there's a White-friendly ministate with radio broadcasts, a publishing house, and a private Boer college, all run from the organisation's headquarters which serves as the capital of this ministate.
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Afriforum's paying members get access to lawyers to pursue claims against government policies such as BEE and land reform. They submit complaints to in-house private prosecutors. For those anxious about home invasions, there's an app with a panic button for private ambulances.
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White South Africans fear Black rule, according to Fairbanks. Afriforum's Chairman and co-founder, Flip Buys, recalls thinking in 1994, "[Black leaders] have made compromises in order to get power. But after they've consolidated power, they will use it to pursue their interests".
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Fairbanks adds that White South Africans feel ashamed. Buys and his friends claim to have felt embarrassed to identify as White South Africans when attending international conferences because Europeans and Americans "subtly kept their distance".
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Buys and his Afriforum co-founders used the ideas of marginalised groups such as the Australian Aborigines and Tibetans, and believed Boers similarly lacked the protection of the state. Buys says he considers himself a "liberal internationalist" instead of a "White racist".
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One of Buys' first projects after co-founding Afriforum was to send a delegation to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights arguing that Boers deserved protected status as an endangered ethnic minority. It worked, by 2016, a quarter of Boers were paying members.
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An Afriforum employee is quoted saying in an interview that she hopes that Boers will someday seize political power from Blacks, because under a Black government, "everything is falling apart" and because Boers are "naturally good" at management.
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According to Fairbanks, Afriforum seems "to relish Black people's bafflement and criticism. The more contempt the better: If Afriforum's provocations got [them] treated badly, they could claim equal status as victims".
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Boers, particularly Afriforum, continually provoke Africans through outrageous actions and statements (e.g. displaying the old SA flag), goading the Africans into retaliating so they can cry wolf, play victim and moan about how Blacks have ruined a once-glorious country.
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Another example of Boers provoking Africans is to continually insist that they, descendents of Europeans, are actually "African"—an obviously ludicrous claim—but one that riles up Black people enough to keep the conversation away from White privilege, land, inequality etc.
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Fairbanks concludes that White South Africans need to tell themselves that Black people are ruining the country so they can justify "the panoply of privileges many White people were unaware they even had under Apartheid".
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If White people were to recognise any good in post-Apartheid South Africa, they would also have to acknowledge that they live far more comfortably than they would on the same salary anywhere else in the world, adds Fairbanks.
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A White man told Fairbanks that he believed he and his wife felt "deep down" that White South Africans had "gotten away with hundreds of years of injustice", while many White South Africans feel they "never faced a full reckoning for Apartheid".
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To justify the continuation of Apartheid, its administrators brainwashed the masses of White people into believing that without their rule, Blacks would take violent revenge. When that revenge never came, the Boer elites fabricated it.
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This suspicion of Blacks' intentions didn't vanish upon the negotiations for the end of White rule, even though Nelson Mandela assured Whites of forgiveness and the new government turned out to be nothing like Whites' worst fears.
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Journalist Rian Malan wrote that the end of Apartheid went quite well. A few years after the end of Apartheid, he moved to an upscale Cape Town suburb. Most mornings, he drank macchiatos at a trendy seaside cafe, which because of sanctions, was unavailable during Apartheid.
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Malan described his new lavish post-Apartheid living as "unbearable". According to Fairbanks, "he just couldn't forgive Black people for forgiving him".
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