The project is being driven by Ernst Roets and his new Lex Libertas think tank. Roets is a hardliner and former deputy CEO of AfriForum. He is perhaps the most hardline Afrikaner leader South Africa has produced since the end of apartheid.

But South Africa’s government did not want to deal with Afrikaner and farmer moderates when they raised the crisis of attacks on farms. Instead, the government took away the protection farmers enjoyed from the Commandos of old and then sabotaged the police reservist system that was promised to replace it.

All the while it upped the propaganda against farmers, falsely accusing them of theft and blaming them for high food prices and therefore mass poverty. It was a deliberate campaign of stigmatisation – and stigmatisation is used to get broader society to disassociate with a group so that when that group is attacked no-one will come to its defence. As the stigmatisation deepened, the government introduced a policy to have their farms and businesses expropriated – the ultimate statement that they were an illegitimate entity and needed to be removed from South Africa, including by force if it came to that.

Along the way the government lied about the extent of the killings happening among commercial farmers – lies the legacy media was only too happy to echo. It took this newspaper only a few weeks to produce a research report showing that farmers run a far higher risk of attack in their homes and businesses than is the case for the broader population and that those attacks are seven times more likely to end in murder than is the case for comparable attacks against non-farmers.

No doubt the media and the government will keep lying in an effort to undermine the planned memorial in Washington DC. That would be doubly disgraceful given that the memorial, and the planting of thousands of crosses in Washington DC, is essentially a mass public funeral for the thousands who lost their lives in South Africa’s farms. In African culture, as with all civilised people, that is a thing you treat with solemn respect. That is the only way to respond – you put political and related disagreements aside. Anything else is depraved.

You do so out of respect for people such as Amanda Platt, who will be there to represent the victims. Platt survived an attack on a farm outside Pietermaritzburg in August 2023 when six armed men tried to force their way into the house she shared with her husband, Tim. She was stabbed with a spear as an attacker shouted “Kill the Boer” while trying to drag her through a broken doorway. Despite being injured, Platt managed to escape and raise the alarm, before returning to the house because her husband was still trapped inside.

Heidie Taljaard will also be there to tell how her family was wiped out. Her parents, Dan and Breggie Brand, and her sister, Elzabie, were abducted from their smallholding near Hartswater in the Northern Cape in July 2020 and murdered. Their bodies were later found in the veld. Taljaard has since written about the grief and trauma that followed, as well as her struggle with justice, forgiveness, and faith.

Leon Lotz will be there to tell of how his wife was raped in front of their children while he rushed desperately to help, but was too late, in an attack that saw his father-in-law killed and his mother-in-law severely assaulted. Lotz heard members of his family screaming over the telephone while he rushed to the farm.

They will be representing the thousands of victims who did not survive, victims such as Andrew Monokara and his wife, Loryn, who were attacked on their farm, Graigmont, near Dewetsdorp in the Free State in May 2014. The attackers bound the couple with wire before shooting both of them in the head. Andrew was killed instantly. Loryn was not, and despite a bullet through the face was then raped and left for dead. She survived long enough to be taken to Pelonomi Hospital in Bloemfontein, dying three days later. The attackers stole a television and Andrew’s firearm and fled in the couple’s double cab bakkie.

Thank you to Ernst Roets for making sure that the world will see and know what has happened and that decent people everywhere will be able to stop in a moment of solemn respect for the thousands of farmers who have been killed and maimed on their South African farms.