Whereas most observers have now become conscious of the extreme, sadistic nature of the daily killings and rapes in South Africa, not many are ready to acknowledge the frequently ethnic aspect of such crimes. A few days ago another Afrikaans writer, Winnie Rust, was brutally tortured to death in her home in Wellington, in the Western Cape. Her name may be added to an ever-growing list of Afrikaans writers who have been brutally murdered or attacked in recent years, including Pieter Pieterse, Lisbé Smuts-Smith, Louw Rabie, Daan Wybenga and Chris Barnard. In Barnard’s case, he survived the attack, only to die a short while later. The other four, as well as Winnie Rust, were not so lucky.

Over the past few months a climate of intolerance has been created by radicalised black-nationalist students on campuses, as well as by the mass media who support many of their extremist ideas, such as that South Africa should be completely purged of all Western influence and “Africanised”. Part of such a purge would be, as it was put, the “abolition of the Afrikaans language and culture”, not only at university but in all other spheres too. Afrikaans place names are being steadily extirpated and even historical buildings by Afrikaner architects demolished.

Hence the hash-tagged slogan that was also painted on various campuses, #AfrikaansMustFall. As in Canada, where some English-speakers have always been hostile to French, a number of English-speakers in South Africa since the nineteenth century have argued for only one language in the country, English. Most recently, the deputy director of the Department of Higher Education and Training, Dr. Diane Parker, told an audience in Oudtshoorn that “the government wants to prepare students to become international citizens by using English as the ‘chosen’ language at university”. She also pleaded for one, English-speaking nation, the same proposal that the South African Communist Party under its Lithuanian-born leader Joe Slovo had made during constitutional negotiations in the early 1990s.

Usually, authors and journalists express some concern when their counterparts are targeted by being censored, imprisoned or killed. Murder is the ultimate form of censorship as you silence the writer forever. Just yesterday one Thabo Arafat Molamu told me on Twitter that I and another author, Steve Hofmeyr, more famous as a singer, “must be necklaced for irritating Blacks in their own land”.

He was of course referring to the infamous method of execution embraced by Mrs. Winnie Mandela and the ANC during their so-called “People’s War” in South Africa when opponents or rivals were caught and set alight with a petrol-filled tyre around their necks. In 2008, this method of execution was also meted out to foreign Africans in South Africa during the so-called xenophobic killings. More than eighty people died during such attacks and not one of their murderers was ever charged, as far as I understand.

However, the South African “literary scene”, if such a thing exists, has maintained a stony silence around the killing of writers. The Cape-based PEN Afrikaans simply tweeted “Sleep peacefully, dear #WinnieRust. Our hearts are broken and we think of your loved ones and family.”

Slaap sag, liewe #WinnieRust Ons harte is stukkend en ons dink aan jou geliefdes en familiehttps://t.co/E4jrGkRnfx via @Netwerk24

— PEN Afrikaans (@PenAfrikaans) May 12, 2016

One would think that Winnie Rust had died in a car accident or from a heart attack. No mention of the murder, its brutal execution, the torture she was subjected to! I hazarded a tweet to the “Feminist President” of the English-language South African PEN, Margie Orford, but she has not deigned to reply. Nor has South African PEN issued a statement condemning the permanent silencing of Winnie Rust.

The killing of Afrikaans writers, like the destruction of our entire heritage, including statues, paintings and other artefacts, does not seem important.

During another attack on the parents of writer Riana Scheepers, a polemic ensued because she had said to a newspaper: “”my mother and father are not two racists living in a white tower”, as if real racists would be fated to undergo executions at the hands of extra-judicial death squads of “antiracist” murderers.

At the time, I had sent out a press release on behalf of the writers’ organisation Pretoria PEN in which I cautioned against the tempation of a totalitarian society that will judge all utterances and events according to a single model or explanation:

South Africa is repeating the totalitarian mental structures of many twentieth-century societies, especially in Eastern Europe. In imagining itself as an ideal society, a multicultural democracy after the American model, it is refusing to acknowledge its own, increasingly dark side. It punishes or censors those who dare to speak out or depict in their works the often innocent victims of social, criminal and political violence.

Ironically, none of the local media carried my press release, nor did South African PEN take any cognisance of it. But it is still to be read to this day on the website of the Jordanian PEN.

Many people outside South Africa imagine that those who are being murdered, especially these Afrikaans writers, deserve to be killed. Yet, what stands out from these murders is that these authors were, like most people in publishing and literature in Western countries, “good liberals” or leftists. They had many black and coloured friends, and subscribed to the tenets of multiculturalism. None of them dared even to criticise our government, which is vehemently castigated every day on the internet and in the print media.

No, they did not deserve to die. Except if South Africa has really become a sadistic society where, as in the Marquis de Sade’s works, precisely the virtuous deserve to die while the criminals and the bad will thrive because they are following “nature’s law”, that is, the law of the jungle…

Dr. Daan Wybenga was a cultured man who spoke several languages, including his native Afrikaans, English and French. He was an author and a professor of literature at university. So trusting was he of people of all races that he had invited his black murderers into his home himself. They tied him to a chair and beat him to death with blunt objects. According to a Free State newspaper, his face and body were so mauled that his son could only officially recognise his father by looking at his hands.

All of these authors had believed in “the brotherhood of man”. They had been so trusting of others that they became defenceless in their own homes, while the daily newspapers reflect the reality of South Africa as a society at war with itself, where a much-vaunted “freedom” often means the licence to sow death and destruction.

If we are honest, we must acknowledge that these murders mean two things:

Firstly, that the age-old hatred or Boerehaat in the English half of the country, the east coast, Natal, the Eastern Cape, as well as parts of Cape Town and Johannesburg, is still alive, fuelling movements like #AfrikaansMustFall. One sees it every day in the media, including social media like Facebook and Twitter. Steve Hofmeyr and I are hated, vilified and served with death threats, not on account of our opinions or statements, but because we dare to be ourselves, making us that hated thing, an Afrikaner or Boer. By refusing to “assume a new, politically correct identity” we become objects of ethnic rancour.

Secondly, that literature is not possible in a society where writers, even if it is only from one language and ethnic community, have to fear for their lives.

I will make a point of reading the works and writings of all these murdered writers. That would be a fitting way of remembering them. We should perhaps think, too, of building a wall where we can inscribe the names of all Afrikaans writers who die violently – soldiers of the word who are running worse risks than real soldiers every day.

On the other hand, similarly to real soldiers, we should have courage, especially the courage to speak out against our slow descent into anarchy. It reminds me of a long poem by Shelley I read as a schoolboy in a book on my father’s shelf: The Masque of Anarchy. Despite its message of pacifism, the poem wants us to rise up against the tyranny of violence, if only with our eyes.

Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.

The first cure for the problem would be to see it for what it is: a slow genocide that not only touches authors and public figures but also thousands of ordinary people, farmers, office workers, women, girls and boys.