WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-12-13 Time: 07:00:10 Posted By: Jan
Kameeldrift is a lost place on the map. Some say it’s in Cullinan, over among the rolls of postcard pictures, slung out on the plains far east of Pretoria.
Others say it’s in the dark green hills and serene forests outside Brits, somewhere on the way to the reckless jangle of cash at Sun City.
In fact, it’s only about 20 minutes from the Pretoria City Hall.
It looks like a border town, like a stop on the frontier, just far enough away from the skyscrapers to feel the weight of the sky. It leaves its late afternoon clouds limp, the sun dusty.
There are darts of sand roads through dozens of smallholdings necklaced in barbed wire and spikes. Some have two tracks of electric fencing. Some have dogs.
Some even have ostriches, a turbulence of grey fury racing breathlessly between the rows of humming current.
It’s easy to lose your way in the thick of hunch-backed thorn trees and bushveld. It’s difficult to know which road you’re on, or which turn to make. There are a hundred dead ends, and around the next corner, a dozen more.
At night it’s the darkest stir of insiders.
In seven months there have been four murders here and 11 attempted murders. There have been four rapes and 60 burglaries.
Children are ushered inside before dinner. Gates are clanked shut and curtains pulled closed before the sun has disappeared.
Kameeldrift, with its tangle of rocks and secret gardens, and banks of wild white flowers behind the back yards, is under siege.
Feral gangs are making their way through fences and around outbuildings, their shadows slithering over lawns in the moonlight.
They open fire on houses with shotguns and pistols, spraying walls and windows and whatever lies inside, leaving empty magazines.
Teenage girls have been assaulted and raped in their bedrooms. Men have been gunned down in front of their families.
Seldom is much stolen – the odd cellphone is common; some say it’s simply to cut off communication. It’s inexplicable.
The men here, who were once drafted into the apartheid SA Defence Force, say it’s reminiscent of the guerrilla war they remember, but even that, they insist, is only a means to describe it.
Yet a strange levity, a light, almost doctrinaire belief is rising steadily out of the terror. Sunday church services are packed.
Divided almost evenly between black and white, the Kameeldrift community is becoming more and more religious, praising God for miracles and seemingly surviving on complete faith, even as it sways on this desperate edge.
Everyone knows the story of the man who was wrestling intruders in his lounge when his young daughter appeared on the fringes of the violence with his gun in her hand.
He grabbed it from her, and as it took an arc from one side of his body to reach the other hand, he shot his child accidentally. The bullet passed through her with scant injury.
Everyone knows the story of the teenage girl who was lying in bed when gunmen targeted her bedroom, pounding more than 20 bullets into the window-frames and walls, skimming off the blankets covering her and hitting only her feet, which were sticking out of the covers.
Everyone knows the story of the 16-year-old hero who still bears the scar of a 9mm muzzle on his back. This, after he had been previously hit by the load of a shotgun.
Now, the rampaging bullet could fly noiselessly through the inside of his body and emerge under his arm. His lung, which was severely injured in the attack, healed too swiftly.
God is here, say the people. And it is God who surely knows.
It must have been 2am, or just after, when Bonny Bekker got up to go to the bathroom. At four months pregnant, she was getting used to these night-time interruptions.
Usually she would be quick, nothing going through her mind but the thought of getting back into bed next to her husband Roelof.
But as she passed the window of the cottage they shared next to her parents’ thatch house, she felt a shadow. Something had shifted. It felt as if somebody was watching.
Minutes later, her mother, Veronica Roach, was ripped out of sleep by the sound of gunfire. The men were already in the room. Things were blurry, moving very fast.
The next thing, she saw her husband Rudi’s silhouette, but it was falling, crumpling to the floor – and immediately, two of the men were on top of her.
“They didn’t say a word, or maybe they shouted once. I realised they were going to rape me. They were keeping my head up all the time, pushing my chin up. I shouted out ‘Lord God, help me’.
“The next thing, Rudiger was in the room. They started shooting at him. He ran; they ran after him. They fired at him with a shotgun.
He thought it was the neighbours because they were shouting in Afrikaans. He called out: ‘Don’t shoot, it’s just me.’ But they kept on.”
There’s the briefest of silences in the lounge where we are sitting. The smell of the thatch is comforting, like fresh branches, like a fire in a bundle of fragrant leaves.
Veronica glances away for a moment. This room is filled with art and family things, barbers’ chairs bought from an antique shop and the loving detritus of childhood trophies.
Rudiger knew they were going to kill him. They’d shot him again, this time in the back at point-blank range with that 9mm pistol. As he fled downstairs, there was another silhouette.
A man was standing in the open doorway against the moonlight. The teenager threw his cellphone at him and lunged for him in a total attack. Everything was accelerated.
“The furniture was scattered everywhere, pushed back, so you could see how they struggled,” says Kira Roach, Rudiger’s older sister.
And then, as suddenly as the terror had started, everything was finished. The man got up and fled with the others into the night.
To this day, no one knows who they were or where they went. The Roaches’ was the third house they hit that night.
Outside on the sand track that was their escape, rabbits stretched into gentle leaps over shadows and frogs croaked. Owls surely watched. It was as if nothing had happened.
Yet there is joy in this house. You can feel it. It shines off sisters Bonny and Kira, their mom Veronica, now a widow, and Rudiger, laughing because he’s alive. They’re all alive.
But Rudi – a softly-spoken teacher at the local primary school and a dad who liked to wake them up on the weekends with a serenade of pots and pans – is dead.
They say there have been so many miracles since he left this earth. People have learnt from his loss. People have been brought together. This can only be the will of God.
Dominee Ben Fourie of the local Dutch Reformed Church is managing the cave-ins of loss. His pews are full.
He used to like to arrive, unexpected, outside the homes of parishioners having birthdays and play his banjo while he sang loudly – but not since one of them almost shot him before they realised who he was.
He has seen the bloodied bodies. He’s dealing with the children who cry. Yet he too is glowing with a sense of truth.
“We cannot be inhibited by fear. We pray. We give thanks to the Lord. We ask for his guidance in our situation of cruelty.”
Fanie Visser – who penned a memorandum which was given to Minister of Safety and Security Nathi Mthethwa when he visited Kameeldrift recently and cried with those who had suffered so much pain and anxiety – says their view is that they cannot lose their beliefs; their strength comes only from God.
“Yes, we think sometimes in practical terms of what we might do if we don’t eventually get the necessary support, if everything else fails. There are only two options left: establish a private police force and finance it, or withhold tax. We know it is our basic constitutional right to have fair protection, but we don’t want to take severe steps.
“We have our own neighbourhood watch at night-time, but it’s impossible to maintain that infrastructure.
“This is raw, raw crime; this has nothing to do with politics or race. The black people in the area also have to deal with the effects, so this brings our community closer.
“But we worry about the children suffering. They realise what their parents are going through, living like this.
“Really, we can say we have one thing on our side, and that’s the thing that is keeping us strong.”