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Hatecrime against an AFrikaner art-gallery owner in Pretoria: SAPS refused to take statement
March 11 2012 - Dr Dan Roodt, founder of the pro-Afrikaans Action (language-rights) group and president of PEN-Pretoria, writes on March 10 2012:
'Last night (my wife and) I spoke to a woman who owns an art-gallery in Pretoria. She told of the way she was attacked by three black men in her home, beaten up for an hour, threatened that they would rape her.
They put a gun-barrel to her head and she expected them to pull the trigger. She was so calmly resigned to her fate that one is left filled with a mixture of horror, amazement and humour.
When they threatened to take her to her bedroom to rape her there, she said she 'was thinking that the bed hadn't been made as yet and that she felt shame about it.'
At one stage, she even invited them to 'get it over with and just shoot her dead, and to stop just threatening with it.'
Every time they were ready to shoot her, she said, 'she'd ask them if she could first turn off the fire underneath the onions she was cooking because she was afraid they would burn.'
Eventually they did let her turn off the hot-plate.
In the end these men just left there without shooting her or raping her: just very badly assaulted.
But that was not the end of her ordeal: there was more when she went to the police station to report the attack.
Upon her arrival, she said, 'I was received by a person who was unable to read nor write, and who was unable to write down my report on the incident.'
Then she wrote her own report and of included all the details, also the words which were used by these black men against her, such as 'You white bitch, we are going to rape you." Or: "You white bitch, we are going to shoot you."
When her report was read by to her by this 'black policeman who was unable to read', HE objected to HER using the words 'white bitch.'
He said he 'could not accept the statement in that wording and she will have to change her statement'.
An argument followed: with her insisting that she HAD to tell it exactly as it happened because this was a racial hate-crime. The black police officer also refuses to
let her use the word 'white' - but finds the word 'bitch' acceptable, but not the two words together, 'white bitch'.
Finally she simply had to leave and to this day, no formal charges of assault, armed house-robbery, attempted rape, attempted murder were thus far lodged.
Roodt writes that he wanted her to repeat her statement in front of his video camera in exactly the same casual, humorous and resigned manner she had told it.
"It was the black humour and the casualness in which she told it, which probably would have upset the entire world.
However, she didn't feel like it and so another unique story about which one could write books, has been lost forever.
Actually what is happening to us in South Africa right now cannot be described with words nor with pictures.
It is so strange, so fantasti-gorical, so bizarre that outsiders would not understand it properly.
This exquisite, cultured and well-spoken woman has accepted the fact that any life - also her life -- is not worth anything.
She however has an exquisite trust in her own intelligence - that she's more clever than her attackers.
"They expect you to react in a certain way and when you react differently, it confuses them. Then they don't know what to do. We will always beat them in the end,' she concluded.
Sure, under the current definition, that would be a 'racist' belief because in a world of unforgiving 'equality' the intelligence of the black rapist, the black murderer and the black rapist is 'equal'
to the white art-dealer's. They simply had made different career-choices...
The other interesting aspect of her retelling of the ordeal was that she never referred to the race of her attackers.
Until my wife wanted to know: 'I take it they were black?" Whereupon the art-dealer replied in utter amazement:
'My heart what kind of question is that? Of course they were black. I don't know how you can even ask such a question'.
It seemed that this way, she wanted to draw attention to an unwritten natural law.
My impression was that she really didn't care about what happened to her. To this day she has not taken any kind of security arrangements.
She accepts that such things simply happen.
It's as if we live on a different planet: one in which new laws rule: the law of the jungle and that one cannot influence this.
Her fatalism to me was shocking and fascinating at the same time.
There 's a small group of Afrikaners who have recognised the grotesque otherworldly aspect of the New South Africa and as time goes on will learn to describe it.
Eventually we will even succeed in making it understandable to the rest of the world.
It's a very delicate process - because the usual words and understanding fall short to describe it, when dealing with people steeped in the well-known cliches about South Africa.
What is happening to us (Afrikaners) right now is worse than a war because it forces us - as did this woman - to accept that our lives and by extension our language, culture, history, tradition, heritage and everything interconnected with those, are worthless. Literally not worth anything.
Perhaps that's the new definition of the Afrikaner: a human being without value, a Throwaway Human, a human who can only be grateful that he's still alive.
Because hanging over all of us is the sword of Damocles: that gunbarrel against your brow; that knife hovering above your chest.
With all the stories of human slaughter we hear and read about, there also are many other stories of people who barely escaped with their lives.
A friend of mine's heart literally stood still four times in the ambulance after blacks had stabbed him senselessly in the Pretoria central district.
Four times the emergency personnel kickstarted his heart again. Today he's healthy as a horse and cheerfully alive.
The fact that we live and can still do ordinary things every day, is a miracle, a wonder.
That's why it's hardly strange that there's a little flower called 'Afrikaner'- because indeed we are as fragile as flowers: here one moment, and gone the next.
Cut off. Killed off. .
http://praag.co.za/dan-roodt-magazine-178/11207-ons-lewens-wat-so-min-werd-is.html?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page
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