12 to 12 Part 4: Hypocrites-R-Us

Pictured: First day of school in Orania

Dear readers, welcome to 12 to 12 Part 4: Hypocrites-R-Us. This is the latest episode in the series, which aims to give non-South African audiences a glimpse into events that occurred between December 2017 and December 2018, although some things happened before or a little after the period mentioned. Like the others which preceded it, this episode is written from a personal perspective. Therefore, if there are any errors, they are mine. I hope you enjoy it. Now let’s get cracking…

The post-Apartheid South African army didn’t know what to do with me. Unlike 99% of the troops in the unit, I was very calm under pressure, unemotional in the face of danger, understood tactics instinctively, created solutions to problems constantly, stayed focused the whole time during “business hours”, was driven to be the best I could be and cared about only one thing- going to war. “Put an objective in front of me, a rifle in my hands, a pack on my back and a team behind me, and I’m a happy guy”. I’ve been saying that for almost two decades. Most civilians laugh when they hear me say this, but only until they realise I mean it. A good example of this is what happened about three weeks ago. My father and his girlfriend had returned from a little holiday at her beach house, which is on a farm owned by somebody else. She was keyed up after spending the previous night without other guests around, which had made her paranoid about blacks coming in to murder her, and annoyed with some things she had seen her children do, so she proceeded to dump her stress on me. I can take stuff like that to a great extent because of a very long fuse, though given the chance, I’d prefer not to hear it. Anyway, she was running down some people and asked me what I thought about what she’d described. After an hour of being talked at, barely given a chance to get a word in and cut off every time I tried to speak so that more often than not I forgot what I wanted to say, I was fed up.

Nevertheless, I began to speak politely and with an even tone. So I began with “US Navy Seal Team 6 are Tier 1 operators. That means…”- and then my father cut me off. “Oh, there you go with that army stuff again,” said he. I had put up with over an hour of interruptions and condescension along with attempts to turn me into an unwilling echo chamber, but that hour of bullshit wasn’t the problem. Actually, the problem was this nonsense had been going on for more than two years and I had finally had enough. I balled my hands into fists and banged them on the table just enough to rattle the glasses but not spill anything and the way I remember it, said in a growl “I listen to you people speak without interrupting, but when I try to reply, you cut me off. You’ve been doing it ever since we sat down. I’ve had enough of this shit. God damn!” My father’s eyes got very big and he stood up, suddenly afraid. He left the table, his girlfriend began to shake and she tried unsuccessfully to hide her fear. “What’s the matter? I’ve never seen you like this in all the years I’ve known you.” To the best of my recollection, I replied “Every time you ask me something, I try to answer but you guys cut me off and sometimes even change the subject. How the fuck can anyone have a normal discussion like this? It’s been going on for a long time and I am sick of it. You people expect me to listen but then you deny me the chance to speak. It’s not right and I won’t put up with it any longer. Oh, you haven’t seen me like this before? Well, just imagine what I keep cropped up…”

Yes, I was angry, but everything I had done earlier was highly controlled and designed to generate a certain effect, as in to make my father and his girlfriend listen to me. Had it been otherwise, I might’ve broken the table in half and done some serious, possibly lethal damage, but I didn’t. It wasn’t an intemperate outburst that could’ve turned violent, yet my father and his girlfriend didn’t understand that. They thought like a lot of people whom, to use a South African expression, “piss on the batteries” of current or former soldiers for a long time, then are surprised when they finally get an earful for their actions. That’s when an expression of unease flashes across their faces and one can almost hear them think “Jesus, is this guy going to fucking kill me?” It’s the typical response of the ignorant who’ve never faced the reality of life or death decisions and never stared into the open maw of the abyss, that they think every man and woman who is trained to kill, will kill without reason, just because they can. This ain’t some Mexican drug cartel that’s high on its own supply. We current or former soldiers are not loonies on the loose, so the answer to that has been and still is “No, unless you make yourself a threat to me or my friends. In that moment, eternity will begin for one of us and it probably won’t be me”. I also say something else: “I was born too late and went to the army at the wrong time. Maybe that’s a good thing, ’cause if I’d been born ten or fifteen years earlier, I’d have been in the Recces and done so much hardcore shit that they would’ve had to drag me in front of the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) after 1994”.

In my experience, the vast majority of people live like whatever peace they have is secure. I know differently and do my best to prepare for the war that’s coming to South Africa, which considering that I’ve been unemployed for nearly four years, means that most of my preparations are of a mental sort. Even this sets me at odds with most of the people I know, because they are so enamoured of their beautiful pink bubble that my realistic point of view clashes with their delusions and leads to a lot of arguments. The last one happened after my little piece of theatre a few weeks ago, when my father’s girlfriend said that my military mindset is an impediment to financial prosperity. I know why she said it. First, because just a day earlier, while she was still on holiday at her family’s beach house, she realised all of the neighbours had left. The house being on a farm which has had problems with break-ins, she panicked because the place is not secure. There are no alarms and motion sensors, no floodlights and burglar bars on doors and windows, no weapons unless one counts the usual pathetically soft Chinese kitchen knives with which one would struggle to stab a rat. So she drove my father into a frenzy of closing windows and locking doors, they barricaded themselves in a bedroom and she took a double dose of sleeping tablets. She lives in fear. Whatever my circumstances, I do not. Taking those pills was stupid. I mean, what the fuck’s she gonna do to burglars with all those barbiturates in her ass?

Second, back at the ranch (well, her house), I sat calmly watching television, “my old colleague” at less than arm’s length. The woman cut her holiday short by two days and proceeded to get enough Dutch courage from a couple of wine bottles to take me on after she unpacked her luggage and ordered pizza. The way I see things is admittedly fatalistic, but this is the cold, hard, perhaps cruel but definitely unsentimental thing I say about the reality of South Africa in the 21st century: “We all have to die at some point, it’s just a question of why and how. If they wanna come, let them. I’ll do what I can with what I got and maybe take a few of them down with me. After that, the job’s done and it won’t matter how nice the funeral is, I’ll be dead and won’t give a flying fuck what happens to my corpse.” Dear readers, I write what I know, so even the last part comes from personal experience. Yeah, I died once, went Upstairs, saw what it was like, and I really didn’t give a flying fuck about what was gonna happen to my corpse. My job was done, or so I thought at the time. For better or worse, because life is what happens when you’re planning something else, here I sit in front of the computer almost eighteen years later, typing away… The second reason is that she wants to retire, but there’s nobody she trusts to take over the business and keep the money rolling in. Nobody but me, or so she thinks. I’d heard it before, read the tea leaves and saw the implications. Not a snowball’s chance in the fiery pits of Hell am I gonna be paid peanuts to work for her, leading a team of minimum wage-earning monkeys to clean rich people’s houses just so she could live out her Mills & Boon fantasy of sailing into the sunset with my father…

I pulled out my cellular phone and called up a picture of me standing ready to kill the robber my friend and I had caught over a month earlier. “Do you know what I do?”, I asked her. “Let me show you. This is what I do,” I said, then shoved the phone in her face. “I hunt people down. It’s what I’m good at given the chance, it’s what I like to do. You moan about crime, but how many bad guys have you caught so far, or your family for that matter?” She didn’t reply. There was no need, because I knew the answer and it was a big, fat zero. She acts like king shit on Turd Mountain, runs others down all the time and takes advantage of them every chance she gets, but when proper security is needed, who do you think gets a call? “Yes, but why do you do it? Why do you care so much?” she asked, referring to both my passion for all things military and the security business. “Because people have died, fifty-six that I know about (South African soldiers), whose deaths I failed to prevent. Because somebody has to,” I replied. “Because I care about right and wrong, because if nobody stands up to fight, the bad guys will win and I can not allow that”. There’s another reason, which is tied to what I said, and it’s about the grandchildren, their future. My father’s girlfriend is a typical South African, with a mindset shared by the majority of those who are over the age of 55- and she is certainly over that. She can see what’s coming and yet is unwilling to fight against it, but like the only growing sector of the white South African population, she also doesn’t want to emigrate. Her children (my age or slightly younger) are too weak and stupid to assume responsibility and to cut a different path for their lives, so their children (her grandchildren) are doomed to remain here until shit comes down, even though one is apparently a very good polyathlete (multiple sports) and another has a flair for acting. I told this woman to make enquiries about sending the budding actor to Juilliard on a bursary or something, but she is content to pay for drama classes here. What the fuck’s the kid gonna do, act out a scene from Romeo and Juliet before she’s raped and hacked to death by marauding blacks? Well, if they won’t leave, then the best I can do is to provide for their safety and security by catching the occasional criminal while resisting repeated attempts to manipulate me into cleaning her lazy clients’ shithouses.

I was walking to work way back in September 2007, when the client saw me and offered a ride. On the way, he spoke of his double storey house near a secluded beach which had no burglar bars, alarm system or surveillance cameras. I knew the area, that there was a black “informal settlement” (illegally established slum) nearby and consequently, the risk of crime was high. So, I told him “Sir, this is South Africa. If you don’t watch your back, somebody’s gonna take you.” “Yeah, but I don’t want to live like that,” he replied with a plaintive moan. I shrugged. After all, it was his choice and if shit happened, his ass. Three months later, about a week or two before Christmas 2007, three burglars broke in, tied them up and went downstairs to ransack the house. That might have been the end of it, but apparently they overheard the burglars discussing how they were going to kill them, so they managed to untie themselves and got out through a bathroom window. They were at the B&B within hours because the place had surveillance cameras, an alarm system and besides my equipment, I walked around at night with a meat cleaver and did not sleep on duty. About a month later, while his husband was in hospital (yeah, a gay couple), I saw on the surveillance cameras two blacks try to break in through an entrance at the other end of the property. First, I called the armed response company and second, informed the guy there was a break-in in progress, that I called the armed response company and he was to wait for me to get him out of there. Meat cleaver in hand, I went to the cottage and found the client already outside. Much as I wanted to tell him what he did was stupid, I escorted him to the front of the house, where we found armed response waiting. The place was checked and cleared; it’s likely the wannabe burglars had either decided to try their luck somewhere else or were scared off by the armed response vehicle’s arrival. It later turned out the period between late November 2007 and the first week of February 2008 was an active one, because by my count I prevented ten burglary attempts on that block. This is a wealthy area. Business owners, lawyers, doctors, accountants, trust fund babies- you name it, it’s living there. Yet security’s for shit and in spite of what was happening, to say nothing of the pathetic police who only patrolled that street once a month (no kidding), the rich assholes did not form a neighbourhood watch. So the safety of those complacent motherfuckers rested on three things- my cell phone, my constant state of alert and the armed response company. Well, when you don’t fight for what’s yours, good things don’t happen- and whatever happens is gonna cost you money…

The armed response company came up with the concept of dedicated patrol vehicles for the area, which picked up the police’s slack, and the residents were supposed to pay extra for this service. It worked, because the company did what the police weren’t doing and by the end of the year children were playing in the street for the first time in over five years. There was just one problem though. The rich don’t become and certainly don’t stay that way by paying for what they get, and only a minority paid the extra charge for the service. Eventually the armed response company sent out letters to tell everyone that they had better pay up or the service would be terminated. I haven’t been in that area for four years now, and don’t know what’s happened since, though two things were for sure- while the crime levels dropped, the problems didn’t go away. One night, I saw a black guy try to break into four houses one after the other and called the cops on his ass. He spotted me and took off. The armed response company was called by the police dispatcher and showed up within three minutes. I gave the guy an updated description of the suspect along with his direction of movement. The cops arrived thirty minutes later (!) and I was almost shot because an incompetent monkey at the police’s emergency number got descriptions mixed up and the (black) unit which finally responded thought I was the suspect. Two days later, while walking home, the (white) armed response officer told me he’d bagged the guy, thanked for the tip-off and provided details about the type of stolen property a search of the suspect’s shack had turned up. Some time afterwards, I read in a newspaper that a guy whose details matched that suspect got seven years in jail. It was the second-last time I ever called the police, the last being years later, when I was at home and saw a burglar try to break into a lawyer’s office. Ever since, if there’s a problem where I am, I call the armed response company or deal with the incident myself rather than run the risk of getting arrested or killed by the incompetent South African police- and if you remember the episode in which a friend and I hunted a robber, it was the security staff of a company who called the police at my request. The second thing is the uncomfortable truth about South Africa- without exception, every criminal act I witnessed in that more than 90% white-owned area was committed by blacks who lived in the slum adjacent to the suburb, about two miles away.

A few years later, the same guy whom I’d warned about beefing up security at his house gave me a ride home after the staff Christmas party. By then I had resigned from the security company and was working for him and the B&B directly, earning double what the security company used to pay- and in the mean time my boss (the guesthouse owner) and his husband were looking at me as if I was responsible for the break-in trauma they had experienced just because I had warned one of them about it. That had a role to play in what followed, but in the mean time… In the mean time, my bosses had seen and heard enough to conclude that I wasn’t talking nonsense, and when we were discussing the ANC’s latest threat to nationalise white-owned properties, banks, companies and means of production, he took me seriously when I asked him “Do you think if the ANC come to nationalise your businesses (they had at least two) and somebody orders your workers to kill you, that they would hesitate?” “Yeah, but they’ve been working for me for twenty years, I pay them well and give them Christmas presents every year,” he replied. I told him, “Sir, if they’re told to kill you and threatened with death if they don’t, what do you think your black workers are gonna do, die for you? Nah, they’ll pick up knives and axes and chop you up.” The Mercedes got very quiet and stayed that way until he dropped me off at home. Over the next three or four years, my boss and his husband bought citizenship somewhere and a house on an island. The story I heard later was that they’d also bought a dilapidated hotel and were in the process of refurbishing it, as well as enjoying cruises on the crewed yacht they owned. By December 2014, they had handed over their businesses- one to a manager they’d had for years and the B&B was rented out to an overachieving local businessman who got rid of three quarters of the staff in six months. That’s how I became unemployed on Valentine’s Day 2015, because I wouldn’t take illegal orders, jeopardise the security of the guests and do extra work for no increase in pay.

The new guy screwed things up royally. Though white, he got rid of one lazy and incompetent black woman, along with two whites who had worked there loyally and competently for years, and replaced them with incompetent blacks who did the job for half the pay or less. In a four star guest house which had been offered five stars, whose clientele was composed of bankers, lawyers, doctors, foreign tourists by the bus load, occasional foreign diplomats (even a former African prime minster with wife and sleepy bodyguards in tow) and South African politicians, service levels dropped, many clients went elsewhere and the guy gave up on the business. A couple (white husband and wife team) took it over in August or September 2017. The husband called me to say he was very unhappy with the manager he’d inherited (a black guy) and offered me the job. I wanted it but was looking after the house of a client at the time, and his wife never called me to set up an appointment after I was done with the gig. When I contacted the husband, he lied about he and the wife being sick, and I never heard anything afterwards. Yeah, so much for White Monopoly Capital or racial solidarity among the whites in South Africa… Dear readers, whenever Billy Roper refers to white people, he does so in capitals. I agree with him, but only when those being referred to as such deserve to be called White. The truth of the matter in South Africa is that if you want to see White people, you go to Orania (where everybody from the street sweeper to the mayor is White), farms or a meeting of the Suidlanders, because those people give a damn about the increasingly dangerous position of whites and do their utmost to create a sense of community in this fractured country. So, if you see I’ve written “white”, you can take it to mean that sadly, they don’t qualify for the big “W”.

End of Part 1.

The Southern Wrong Racist

South Africa

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