FARM MURDERS
PALESA MORUDU: Black Monday revealed farming’s glaring whiteness in an inept state
Apartheid flags aside, what the protests highlighted was the ANC’s incompetence regarding land restitution
Last Monday, SA was in the middle of a full-blown racial war. No one died because the war was fought in the echo chamber of Twitter. But the conflict did claim two important casualties: facts and social cohesion. Black Monday was ostensibly a response to the murder of Stellenbosch farmer Joubert Conradie. According to News24 editor-in-chief Adriaan Basson, "Conradie’s friend, Chris Loubser, recorded a video in his bakkie, calling on his friends and family to join him in a small gathering on Monday wearing black. Because of its amateurish authenticity and his raw emotion about his friend’s death, the video spread like a veld fire over social media and soon caught the attention of organised labour movements, lobby groups, right-wing organisations and thousands of decent, law-abiding South Africans." By Monday morning, the whole event had gone south. The news about the protest had turned into a digital racial conflict. Farmers, who were overwhelmingly white, blockaded roads with their ...
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