Dan Roodt, American Renaissance, November 13, 2018

When I last wrote about Hannah Cornelius, the names of her killers had not yet been released. Nor were the macabre details of the crime, worthy of a Scandinavian crime thriller, known to the public.

The gang rape and murder of this beautiful young Afrikaner girl has had a catastrophic effect on her family. Her liberal mother, Anna, died by going swimming in the sea under conditions that suggest a death wish. As her husband explained, he thought she no longer had “the physical or mental strength left” to struggle with her loss, and “decided to go swimming in the ice-cold and stormy Atlantic Ocean.”

In his testimony during the trial, Willem Cornelius said:

It is my belief that my family died when Hannah died . . . . Me and my son are not a family — we are the survivors who live in the ruins of what once was.

Before Anna died in the ocean, she frantically launched herself into a do-gooder project, Peter-and-Linda-Biehl-style, that aimed “to support underprivileged children and youth to become positive, healthy, self-sufficient and contributing members of society.” She named this project “the Hannah Cornelius Foundation,” after her daughter. Probably her belief in liberal sociology — that the environment alone creates the criminal — was stronger than her sense of reality or her sense of self.

Nietzsche thought Socrates was an ugly man and therefore not a worthy philosopher; Hannah’s killers’ coarse faces suggest they were untouched by the horror they had inflicted on the Cornelius family. During the sentencing Vernon Witbooi, Geraldo Parsons, Eben van Niekerk, and Nashville Julius looked almost proud, as if they were enjoying their notoriety. When they were found guilty, one smirked and another made the thumbs-up gesture.

The four Colored men raped Hannah before they killed her. They then stabbed her in the neck and crushed her skull with a rock. Why? It is a question few ask. Mothers such as Anna Cornelius (and Linda Biehl) would reply that the killers were themselves victims of their upbringing, bad teachers, and sordid environment. As for myself, I see a kind of Jungian collective unconscious at work. The men operated as a group, with shared values, a common culture, and racial identity. They acted on their instincts, but also on the precepts of today’s South Africa which, in the words of black nationalist Julius Malema, wants “to cut the throat of whiteness.” Violating and killing Hannah was tantamount to acting out Julius Malema’s fantasy.

Joseph Conrad’s famous cry, “The horror! The horror!” has become an emblem of South Africa. Our country, which used to be so beautiful, so ordered, and so pristine, has been “transformed” into the ultimate multicultural nightmare. And the horror goes so much deeper than the murder, rape, robbery, and barbarism that have come to characterize this profoundly corrupt society. We are rotten to the core, and crime is just a symptom of a deeper malaise.

Vernon Witbooi, Geraldo Parsons, and Eben van Niekerk received life sentences from the female judge, Rosheni Allie, for rape, murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and robbery. The fourth accused, Nashville Julius, was not present during the rape and murder, so he got 22 years for robbery and kidnapping. In South Africa a “life sentence” is seldom for life, and the three could be out in five or 10 years.

There are already 16,000 convicted murderers in our prisons, double the capacity. The ANC regime will not build more prisons because they are stealing billions from the taxpayer to spend on themselves. Also, they would much rather spend the remaining money on affirmative-action or so-called black economic empowerment (BEE) schemes than on putting more of their own voters behind bars. Prisoners can vote in South Africa, and they vote overwhelmingly for the ANC.

Judge Rosheni Allie is herself an affirmative-action official who once overturned a 15-year sentence for murder because the accused was “a youthful offender from a very troubled and disturbingly unstable domestic background.” The case of Hannah Cornelius has received world-wide attention (though very little in the United States), so it would have been more difficult to let these offenders off with a slap on the wrist.

As usual, feminists are ready to blame “all men” for “gender violence.” A particularly repulsive example of this was published in the Sunday newspaper Rapport by Sonja Loots, who managed to cook up a brew that mentioned former president PW Botha, Donald Trump, and Adolf Hitler along with Hanna Cornelius. She also used the word “penis” in the headline. As this country slouches its way towards another Zimbabwe with hyperinflation and empty supermarket shelves, I have become inured to the low-grade propaganda from the media.

But I was disturbed by the elements of white guilt in Willem Cornelius’s testimony before the court in which he bemoaned the “attention” showered upon his daughter and her death while thousands of other victims of rape and murder in South Africa do not elicit any media interest. Even though his “family died when Hannah died,” he still needs to show what a good liberal he is and how much he feels for the strife and decay of Cape Town’s teeming Colored ghettos. He noted that he was pleased Hannah was liberated from any form of racial or ethnic consciousness (he called it “baggage” in his testimony). He seems very traumatized and confused, having lost his daughter, his wife, and his job (he feels he can no longer work as a judge), left with only his autistic son, who keeps asking to see Hannah since her “holiday should be over by now.”

Poor Hannah. As I wrote in my first piece on this topic:

In a sense, Hannah Cornelius — my kinswoman — never had a chance. Even with her beauty, intelligence, excellent grades, mastery of French, and so on, she was never allowed to develop into a normal, care-free, protected Afrikaans girl, moving mostly in a white environment, meeting white boys her age at teenage parties or braais (our word for barbecues). Instead, she was flung into the liberal melting-pot, her identity confused, her corpse finally collected by the South African Police Service from a dirt road on the outskirts of Stellenbosch.

Even in death, Hannah is not free. Her name and those beautiful physical features that made her posthumously famous are being exploited to turn her into a poster girl for the liberal cult, to demand from us the sacrifice of yet more first-borns to feed the bloodthirsty gods of multicultural harmony.

Among Afrikaner children’s heroes is Rachel de Beer, who took off her own clothes to keep her little brother alive on a cold winter’s night in the open veld, and died in his place. I see Hannah Cornelius as a kind of postmodern Rachel de Beer. She sacrificed herself, not for her little brother, but to the liberal cult.