Sowing the seeds of violence Senekal explained Page 2, 8&9
Sparked by trending videos of protesters overturning and burning a police vehicle, last week’s violent protest outside the Senekal Magistrate’s Court has unleashed all shades of extremists fighting each other on the fringes of the political spectrum.
Initially, conversations grew around the police inaction, especially after police responded that some protesters were carrying weapons, posing a threat to innocent lives if they had intervened.
Frustrated that the police had previously responded to peaceful black protesters at gatheringssuch as #FeesMustFall and Marikana with force, but had not stopped or arrested violent white protesters at Senekal, members of the Economic Freedom Fighters and party leader Julius Malema took to Twitter to mobilise supporters to attend the next court hearing. They stirred up emotions around defending state property against the protesters.
Frustrated that the plight of white farmers was not being heard, organisations and individuals began to laager their supporters, arming themselves for the Battle of Senekal on Friday. They stirred up emotions around fears of a white genocide.
Both sides slugged it out on the political stage, each trying to go one better than the other. Their tweets became more confrontational and aggressive as extremists on the left and the right dominated the conversation, fuelling the flames of last week’s fire.
By Thursday night, just ahead of Friday’s sequel to the initial court hearing and violent protest, the talk had turned distinctly militant.
Twitter conversation in South Africa relating to Senekal was virtually nonexistent up to 1 October this year.
Then came Twitter account holder @ KoosdlRey.
His Twitter bio reads: “Proud Boer. Christian. White. Right. Not racist, realistic. No white privilege, just worked my ass off. Trump2020. BREXIT, Israel.” He tweeted a link to this article about the initial court hearing scheduled for Senekal last Tuesday: “Two ‘suspects’ arrested, let’s go visit them, en masse. #BrendinHorner.”
This one-liner primed a dormant fuse among extremists on both sides of the imminent social media war.
By the next day, supporters of protest action at the Senekal Magistrate’s Court began gathering. People who wanted to be part of it were presented with a link on this tweet to a WhatsApp group chat for people travelling from Pretoria to Senekal to arrange transport for the “Boere Optog” (Farmers’ March).
Within a week, events at Senekal and the ensuing stoking of racial polarisation led to the left wing and the right wing arming themselves, and issuing subtle and overt threats of confrontation.
Here’s how the initial emotionally laden narrative turned political, and escalated into open militancy on social media, as faraway Senekal in the Free State became the clashpoint for the far left and the far right on Friday.