Charleston killings echo massacre in S. Africa

By Glen Retief

Three weeks ago, I was scrolling through the day's Facebook newsfeed of kitty pictures and partisan broadsides when I saw an advertisement for T-shirts with the old South African flag on them.

The maker was a group called "Naughty South Africans." Why did Facebook's algorithms flag me as a prospective customer? As a fortysomething, white South African immigrant, I guess I'm supposed to be "naughtily" nostalgic for aproned black servants and whites-only barbecues under the acacias.

In fact that old orange, white, and blue tricolor reminds of a million and half dead in the Mozambican and Angolan civil wars, begun by the neighboring white governments. It makes me think of armored cars; of white farmers welding black laborers' hands to tractors; of revolutionaries lighting gasoline-soaked tires around informants' necks.

So I right-clicked on the advertisement to say I didn't want to see more like it. When Facebook asked me if the T-shirts might violate its community standards, I clicked yes. For better or worse, Facebook restricts hate speech. They didn't agree in this case, though, that the apartheid flag was that kind of symbol. Probably compared to gory snuff pictures and profanity-laced death threats, a retired flag looked as innocent as a daisy field.

Fast forward to last Thursday morning. My first thought when I heard about Charleston — long before I saw the Facebook pictures of Dylann Roof with the flags — was that this reminded me very much of a bright November afternoon in Pretoria, in 1988. Barend Strydom was much the same age as Roof: 23 years old. Like Roof, Strydom appreciated guns, and he, too, fervently believed blacks were out to kill, rape, and enslave white people.

Roof picked his American symbol carefully. The Emmanuel Methodist African Church is a landmark of black liberation. This killing was meant to send a message, clear as any Jim Crow lynching. Stay down, black people, or as Roof told a congregant who asked him to stop shooting: "You're taking over our country. You have to go."

Strydom started his own shooting spree in Strydom Square, after the early apartheid leader who shared his last name. "I ran and looked around searching for blacks," he later told the media. If Roof reputedly struggled because of how kind the congregation had been to him, Strydom found it hard to shoot innocent pedestrians after making eye contact.

"I did not look at their faces," he later confessed, of the eight people he killed and 16 he wounded. Strydom was caught by surely one of the greatest heroes in the history of such massacres. A 32-year-old man named Simon Mukondeleli tapped Strydom on the shoulder from behind.

"Excuse me, baas, but that baas is calling you," he said. Baas — boss — is the self-demeaning term blacks had to use to address whites under apartheid. But then Mukondeleli surprised Strydom, and grabbed his gun.

South Carolina officials have already begun talking about the death penalty for Roof. Although I'm not a supporter, the words used in court by the recently deceased Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted the Manson murders, seem applicable.

"If you won't hand down the ultimate penalty in this case," Bugliosi asked, "when would you?"

Strydom was sentenced to death eight times. He got lucky, though. FW De Klerk released him as a political prisoner in 1992, and after 1994 he received an amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Strydom sold his story for $8,000 to Rapport newspaper, telling them his violence had been justified. Today he farms north of Pretoria. Mukondeleli, much less fortunate, was shot in an unrelated street battle in 1999.

It was late, much later on Thursday, when I saw what has now become the infamous picture of Dylann Roof with his apartheid and Rhodesian flags. By now the world knows that, like the Confederate logo flying on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse, the apartheid tricolor is indeed a symbol of hatred. Given the ties between American and South African white supremacists, I will not be surprised to learn that Root took explicit inspiration from Strydom in planning his massacre.

Where to from here? Six years after Strydom slaughtered his people for their skin color, South Africa was free. Nelson Mandela was president. New flags flew. The country tried, however imperfectly, to take stock of its past.

Six years from today, where will America be? What flag will fly in downtown Columbia? Will we still imprison young men of color at triple the rate of even apartheid South Africa? Will racist police brutality still punctuate the headlines? Will black lives finally matter?

Glen Retief, who teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University, is the author of "The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood."  retief@susqu.edu