Dan Roodt, American Renaissance, November 1, 2017

White South Africans rarely take their protest to the streets, preferring to vent their anger on Twitter and Facebook. Yet in what came to be known as #BlackMonday, October 30 2017, there was a spontaneous wave of protests, from big cities to small towns to schools. Farmers blocked highways with pickups and even tractors. Everyone wore black, the color of mourning, in sympathy with the rising number of white farmers who are being murdered every year. South Africans marched, parked, and protested, but mostly they prayed in large crowds, bending their knees in obedience to the Christian God.

Here is a video with pictures chronicling the protest:

It all started just last Tuesday, October 24th. Yet another farmer, Joubert Conradie (47), had just been shot dead in his home near the wine-producing town of Stellenbosch, leaving behind his wife Marlene, as well as a 15-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter. A neighbor named Chris Loubser recorded an emotional Whatsapp video on his phone, which he sent to 15 of his friends, saying they should all wear black next Monday. The video went viral, with tens of thousands of people promising to wear black too. Thus the hashtags #BlackMonday and its Afrikaans equivalent #SwartMaandag were born, and became a massive and spontaneous day of protest just six days later.

On the eve of #BlackMonday, my friend, the popular singer Steve Hofmeyr, posted a video exhorting people to join the mass protest. Within half an hour, it had been shared 8,500 times and viewed 50,000 times. The latest count is 47,000 shares and 650,000 views. Even Ann Coulter retweeted the video, while British celebrity columnist Katie Hopkins also publicized the plight of our farmers. From being almost ignored for years, the vicious and sadistic farm murders reached the international limelight.

The social media storm spilled over into the mass media. The normally liberal Afrikaans daily Beeld even discarded its usual red masthead on Monday for a black one, conveying a message of solidarity with its main readership in Pretoria. South Africa’s hopeless Minister of Police, Fikile Mbalula, who usually makes the news only when he accepts a luxury holiday paid for by an unscrupulous businessman, was forced to make a half-hearted statement condemning “all murders.” Political parties had to respond to the mass movement gaining ground. Plaasmoorde or “farm murders” became the new international Afrikaans buzzword, displacing apartheid.

Liberals and leftists tried to discredit the spontaneous outpouring of grief and anger as “racism” and a “longing for a return to white supremacy.” Whites are not supposed to feel any special concern for their kin being slaughtered in the countryside. Instead, they should mourn “all of the 19,000 murders” taking place in South Africa every year, many of which are gang- or alcohol-related killings in black ghettos or “townships,” as they are called in South Africa.

A leftist Indian-South African journalist, Ranjeni Munusamy, called her article on the protest “#BlackMonday was the reboot of the white right,” concluding that “white nationalism‚ however‚ should never be allowed space to flourish in our already besieged nation.”

The media pounced on any semblance of “racism,” but could find only the pre-black-rule orange, white, and blue South African flag and our old national anthem. Typical was columnist Tom Eaton, who wrote that “if you own an old SA flag, you’re either a nasty piece of work or a halfwit.” Actually displaying it makes you a Nazi. The same goes for singing the old national anthem, “Die Stem” or “The Call [of South Africa].” It is now racist to sing about “the promise of our future and the glory of our past.”

One blonde lady who wore her black biker’s jacket with a miniature flag on it was interviewed by a liberal journalist from News24, flagship website of the powerful Naspers group. The next morning I listened to the liberal talk Radio 702, which I call “702 Hate Radio” due to its tirades against “white privilege and racism.” Instead of proposing some kind of response to the plight of our farmers who suffer from a form of genocide, 702 was debating whether the old flag and “Die Stem” should be met with prison sentences “as in Germany.” The Colored presenter, Eusebius McKaiser, who once refused to shake my hand because I was white, said that “anyone protesting with an old flag in this country was just like a German marching with a swastika in Israel” — as if we were oppressing blacks instead of our being murdered by them.

Only a few days before the fateful shooting of Joubert Conradie, our Minister of Police had released annual crime statistics, with murder and especially carjacking showing a sharp rise. Buried in those statistics were farm murders, which had increased even more than other crimes. As stated by the Freedom Front Plus party and the website FreeWestMedia,

According to statistics for the past year, there were 74 farm murders and 638 farm attacks. Farm murders increased by 27.5 percent and farm attacks by 22.9 percent.

Given that there are only 20,000 farmers left, these are huge numbers. Freedom Front Plus had to violate a parliamentary secrecy law in order to publicize them.

In my view, South Africa has been changed by the #BlackMonday protest. Until now, the black elite and their white-liberal propagandists were under the impression that white and especially Afrikaner public opinion were under control, given the vast propaganda efforts of the ANC regime and the mainstream media. White protest groups felt isolated and divided, without a real connection to the mass of ordinary whites trying to survive in a hostile environment.

We now have a new situation. More valuable than anything — even the world-wide publicity — was the sense of community and solidarity created by these protests. Most whites now realize that the government is one in name only, and will not protect them. The South African government does not care very much about farm murders — or any other kind of murder — and the protest clearly reflected this lack of trust. People are now looking to their immediate family, neighbors, and friends for protection. That is how the much-maligned Afrikaner “volk” is reconstituting itself, in the face of black farm murderers and carjackers.

In their overreaction against the old “Prince Flag” that goes back to the first Dutch town of Den Briel liberated from the Spanish Empire in 1572, both the ANC regime and the media have only strengthened this powerful symbol. It was under this flag that the old South African Defense Force crossed the Angolan border in the late 1970s to meet Cuba and the ex-Soviet Union head on. “Die Stem” is being sung at Afrikaans cultural festivals all over South Africa, despite attempts to ban it. Led by the indefatigable Steve Hofmeyr, whose popularity has only grown, we have almost experienced a Baltic-style “singing revolution,” with people refusing to let go of their patriotic heritage, despite constant taunts of “racist” and “white supremacist.”

The battle lines have been drawn in South Africa, at least symbolically. Even previously apathetic whites are saying, “Things cannot go on like this.” Corruption and violence have delegitimized the “black liberation state” of Nelson Mandela. On Facebook and elsewhere, people are openly talking about a tax revolt.

#BlackMonday might come to be seen as a watershed moment in our country’s recent history. Ironically, whites had to wear black to become conscious of themselves as an oppressed group. Black has become the new white.