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By Root 1053 0

duty. On May 7, 1993, he entered the fray, turning up at the biggest right-wing rally to date in Potchefstroom, a town seventy-five miles southwest of Johannesburg. There, a mini-Nuremberg was enacted, complete with flags, imitation Swastika insignias, parade drills, long-bearded Boer “bitter-ender” warriors in brown shirts, and barking orators like Eugene Terreblanche of the AWB. An ample and varied host of malcontents gathered there, united all by their expectation that on the day the blacks came to power they would treat the whites as the whites had treated them. An AWB offshoot called the Boer Resistance Movement (Boere Weerstandsbeweging, or (BWB) was there, an outfit called Resistance Against Communism, the Afrikaner Monarchist Movement, the Foundation for Survival and Freedom, Blanke Veiligheid (White Security), Blanke Weerstandsbeweging (White Resistance Movement), the Boer Republican Army, Boere Kommando, Orde Boerevolk (Order of the Boer People), Pretoria Boere, Volksleër (People’s Army), Wenkommando (Victory Commando), the White Wolves, the Order of Death, and even the Ku Klux Klan. They might have been dismissed as a bunch of wackos in fancy dress, were there not 15,000 of them, and were this not the mental swamp that had spawned Hani’s murderer, Janusz Walus.

Constand Viljoen was treated with reverence by the first Boer patriots to spot his arrival. At the pageant’s climax, he was called up onstage and invited to assume the leadership of the volk. He did as he was bade, Eugene Terreblanche ushering him up the steps and declaring that he would be “proud, proud” to serve as “a corporal” under a Boer hero like Viljoen. Entering into the spirit of the occasion, Viljoen denounced the “unholy alliance”that had emerged between Mandela and De Klerk and declared himself ready and willing to lead the Boer battalions. “The Afrikaner people must prepare to defend themselves,” the general cried. “Every Afrikaner must be ready. Every farm, every school is a target. If they attack our churches, nowhere is safe. If we are stripped of our defensive capacity we will be destroyed. A bloody conflict which will require sacrifices is inevitable, but we will gladly sacrifice because our cause is just.”

The crowd roared their approval. “You lead, we will follow! You lead, we will follow!” they chanted. Terreblanche offered good theater but the serious-minded Viljoen, who still commanded much respect within the officer class of the SADF, was the redeemer the volk had been waiting for. The leaders of the AWB, the BWB, the Wenkommando, and all the rest of them took turns to pledge their fealty, as Terreblanche had done, to the general, who was anointed there and then the leader of the new “Boer People’s Army.”

A political wing was created too that day, the Afrikaner Volksfront, a coalition of the Conservative Party and all the other assorted militias. The Volksfront’s platform: the creation of an independent Afrikaner state—a “Boerestaat”—carved out of South Africa’s existing borders. “An Israel for the Afrikaner,” Viljoen called it, making almost explicit a new vision of himself, shared by his ecstatic followers, as the Boer Moses.

Journalists were sometimes tempted to mock these Old Testament naysayers. But the arrival of Viljoen, who brought in four other retired generals as his aides-de-camp, made the white right a serious threat. Within two days of the Potchefstroom rally De Klerk sounded his strongest warning yet, declaring that the possibility had increased of “a bloody Bosnia-like civil war.”

Viljoen set about his new mission with the dedication and thoroughness that had characterized his military operations in Angola. Within two months he and his generals had organized and addressed 155 clandestine meetings nationwide. “We had to mobilize the Afrikaners psychologically, start our propaganda campaigns,” Viljoen would later reveal. “But as importantly, we had to build a massive military capability.” In those first two months the Volksfront recruited 150,000 secessionists to the cause, of whom 100,000 were men-at-arms,