Originially published 6 Sep in News24
Four hundred people paid to hear apartheid's "Dr Death" defend the SADF's chemical weapons programme. Max du Preez draws a line from the Afriforum Theatre applauding Basson to a broader resurgence of apartheid nostalgia.
It would have been outrageous 20 years ago to imagine a public event that publicly celebrated one of the most notorious programmes of the apartheid-era security forces.
And yet, here we are in August 2026, when 400 people bought tickets to a talk in a Pretoria theatre (the AfriForum Theatre) where the old SAD's notorious chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme was defended and applauded.
The head of that programme, the soldier/doctor Wouter Basson, was the headline act.
In January 1997, Basson signed his name on the wall of a Cape Town restaurant next to the venue where he appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as "Dr. Death".
The invitation to the meeting that took place on Friday declared that Basson's enterprise was to develop "a defensive chemical and biological capability for the SADF".
READ I Sold out: AfriForum's theatre seats fill up for Dr Death's toxic tell-all
The TRC investigated the matter and held a hearing on it, and in its final report, totally rejected that notion. It found that the CBW project aimed to develop toxins and microorganisms to kill or incapacitate activists who opposed apartheid, to cause diseases that could be used politically and to use hard drugs like mandrax to control crowds. It even researched ways to clandestinely reduce the fertility of black women. Evidence was led that Basson prepared a drug to paralyse SWAPO guerrillas who were then thrown from aircraft into the sea. (He denies this.)
Horrific stuff that made many people whisper, rather hyperbolically: Dr Josef Mengele.
In 1989, the newspaper I then edited, Vrye Weekblad, exposed Basson's police counterpart and close comrade, General Lothar Neethling, the head of the SAP's forensic laboratory, and documented his ghastly record of developing toxins which were then used on activists, showing no trace in the autopsies. All our reporting was subsequently confirmed before the TRC and in new affidavits and confessions.
There was a Total Onslaught on South Africa, they said, and it necessitated a Total Strategy with no rules or regard for lawfulness, (I told my family that if I ever develop heart problems, they should take me to Basson, an experienced and practising cardiologist. He will go out of his way to keep me alive to avoid suspicion if I died under his care.)
A brief history
Are we experiencing a surge of apartheid denialism?
Every genocide, or period of gross human rights violations on a grand scale, has historically been followed by denialism by perpetrators and their followers and constituencies. (The Holocaust, Cambodia, Guatemala, Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Gaza.)
This didn't happen to any noticeable degree among white South Africans after the end of apartheid and the advent of democracy in 1994.
As someone who was intimately involved in the TRC process, I believe that this was in large part due to the fact that white people (reluctantly) watched policemen and soldiers daily on television who pleaded for amnesty, confessing to horrendous crimes of murder, assassination, torture, assault, kidnapping and humiliation.
There was no denying it: apartheid was a vile, cruel system and ideology - a crime against humanity, as the international community called it.
READ | Fred Khumalo I Things were better under apartheid? The lie we keep telling ourselves
Okay, there was also the Mandela factor; the sweet, much-too-brief rainbow nation intervallum; the relief of being able to travel overseas without restriction; the joy of playing the All Blacks again; the pleasant surprise of not being chased into the sea and having your property confiscated. And South Africa still kind of worked - by the early 2000s, the economic growth rate touched on 5%
And then the dark side of the liberation movemet took over when Jacob Zuma became president in 2009. The backwards slide soon became manifest: rapacious state capture, crude cadre deployment, the hollowing out of state institutions, rampant corruption (as we now also know in the police), the collapse of state-owned enterprises and most municipalities, and the gross neglect of infrastructure maintenance.
En kyk hoe lyk ons nou. (And look at us now.)
Our knight on a white horse then turned out to be a dithering man on a lame donkey. He could not stop the decline, not in his party and not in the country, especially not in the municipalities.
Well, at least Cyril Ramaphosa delivered a government of national unity and facilitated a new partnership with the private sector that is somehow keeping us afloat.
Fertile ground
But South Africans are properly gatvol.
Fertile ground, then, for supercharged revisionism; for nostalgia among many whites about the "good old days". Conversations often start with "I don't hate blacks, but.." or "I don't want apartheid back, but.." And the ethnic entrepreneurs got new impetus; the identity economy and commodification of culture flourished.
The manna from heaven rained upon the ethnic entrepreneurs with the election of Donald Trump as US president and the growth of the MAGA movement. When he started singling out Afrikaners for special treatment and declared that there was a genocide, that their farms and properties were being confiscated, MAGA came to stand for Make Afrikaners Great Again.
The architect of the Solidarity movement, Flip Buys, declared triumphantly: "The Afrikaner is back!" The vast majority of refugees allowed in the US are white South Africans, primarily Afrikaners. Strident, narrow Afrikaner nationalism was kosher once again.
READ | Pieter du Toit | Fighting old battles: Revisiting the Constitution may be right-wing endgame
At the heart of the new movement is the notion that there is no such thing as a South African nation; it's just a conglomerate of "peoples", volke. The cry is for "self-determination", even to the point of a volkstaat or three. They're opting out of South Africa in our Constitution. "Ons sal self", they say. No more "We, the People", but "We, the Peoples".
Now, that sounds just a little too much like that euphemism for apartheid, separate development. And this meant that "separate development" had to be rehabilitated to sound more like 2026 than 1948 or 1976. That rehabilitation included the military and its many bloody, senseless adventures.
Don't for a moment think this is only an Afrikaner thing. The Western Cape secessionists are mainly white English speakers.
Most of the right-of-centre, reactionary podbros are English-speaking. Look at the list of speakers at the planting of 3000 white crosses referring to farm attack victims on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on 26 September: David Ansara of the Free Market Foundation, James Myburgh of Politicsweb, advocate Mark Oppenheimer and our own version of Nigel Farage, Rob Hersov. Former English "liberals".
It was an easy jump: instead of blaming the governing ANC and its inept, corrupt leadership, blame "the blacks" - they simply can't run a modern democracy and economy. And then follows: it was better when we were in charge.
It's a denial of all the hard-earned gains of the last three decades, of a growing sense of nationhood, of our open society and robust democracy. Vote, agitate and work for positive change, don't withdraw into a white island.
I have empathy with white men who fought in the SADE's wars, believing at the time that they were fighting for a noble cause. I can understand their frustration at being demonised, their desire to sometimes get together as a brotherhood.
My advice to them would be to make peace with the fact that they were used by politicians and generals and that it doesn't all reflect on them. Rather, become productive, positive citizens, part of the South African nation.
Glorifying the nasty past and withdrawing to the margins is not in their or anyone's interest.
- Max du Preez is an author, columnist and documentary film-maker and was the founding editor of Vrye Weekblad.
