Karin Mitchell, The High Treason Club: The Boeremag on Trial (Cape Town: Penguin, 2025)

THE TRIAL lasted nine years, occupied 1 280 court days, involved over 200 witnesses and produced a transcript of 60 000 pages. Twenty-three accused were charged with high treason and some of them with murder, sabotage and terrorism in March 2003. Verdicts were handed down only in 2012. Investigation carried on while the trial was in progress, allowing the prosecution to stay one step ahead. The lead prosecutor later blamed the length of the trial on the defendants who brought frequent applications: protesting at remand conditions and claiming prisoner-of-war status, for example. There were two escapes. The first involved two accused who remained at large long enough, protected by farmers, to establish an arms cache uncovered eight years later. Another, bigger escape saw only one accused make it out of the courtroom into the street where he encountered the police marathon champion.

Right-wing and fascist movements thrive on victimology. Thus, some whites who had dominated South Africa for centuries not only saw themselves as God’s chosen people, but after 1994 as victims. In its more extreme form this involved invoking the Afrikaner prophet Siener van Rensburg and another seer, Johanna Brand, who foresaw whites being overwhelmed by Africans. Events in Zimbabwe at the turn of the century on top of the collapse of apartheid led some to take Van Rensburg seriously and prepare for action. The rhetoric was archaic and predictable: memories and myths of God’s boerevolk of the long-gone republics and propaganda about the righteous Afrikaner nation. The Germanic odal rune was used as a symbol of, among other factors, blood and racial purity. The Boeremag used the Israel Vision movement as a recruiting ground and was in a sense a successor to the Blanke Bevrydingsbeweging (White Liberation Movement, BBB) of the 1980s.  

The Boeremag kicked off with wild coup plans to take over South Africa, expelling all Africans northwards and Indians into Natal, and occupying military bases such as Lohatla. Its ambitions changed as the authorities conducted police raids, leadership shifted, and the numbers involved unsurprisingly dwindled. Organisation became chaotic and negligence crept in: a rental car was left with incriminating items; and a mobile armoury was found abandoned in a van near Lichtenburg.  

But one act of planned terrorism still involved bringing down a plane over Khayelitsha. By its climax in late 2002 the Boeremag’s ambitions had been reduced to a crude bombing campaign by a few individuals. One attempt was to kill former state president Nelson Mandela in a roadside bombing in Limpopo. By sheer chance, Mandela travelled instead by helicopter. Ironically, the Boeremag trial was to start the following year in the same courtroom as the Rivonia trial fifty years earlier.

The bombing was concentrated on Soweto: most notably the Dlamini mosque (run by an inter-racial couple) and a taxi park packed with fully fuelled vehicles. The only death caused by the Boeremag occurred when the Midway railway line was blown up at Lenasia. A piece of track was projected 450 metres and killed Claudia Mokone who was sleeping in a house in Protea South. There was also a bombing at Grand Central Airport that damaged police property; relative inconvenience at the Umtamvuna bridge in KwaZulu-Natal; and extensive damage and injuries at a temple at Bronkhorstspruit. D-Day was Friday 13 December 2002, but a car carrying 365 kg of explosive was apprehended before reaching a Pretoria taxi rank; and a police airborne assault on a farm at Marnitz proved the nemesis of the Boeremag. The last arrest was that of the terrorist group’s so-called chaplain, Vis Visagie.

Karin Mitchell, who covered the Boeremag trial as a young reporter, bases her book on court records, press reports and interviews; in particular with Mike du Toit, accused number one, and the lead investigator, Tollie Vreugdenburg. The latter was an immensely dedicated detective of the old school who stuck to his task in spite of hostility and intimidation in particular towards his family from the community of Warmbaths. Du Toit was a teacher and a well-educated man whom Mitchell befriended and proved a valuable source of information about the Boeremag and life in prison during the trial and after conviction.

The forensic trail that linked the various bomb blasts is well described by Mitchell and ultimately rested on pieces of blue plastic. She also describes the interference detectives experienced from crime intelligence. A final act in this drama was the claim that the Boeremag was set up through incitement from elements of police crime intelligence anxious to curry favour with the post-apartheid regime. This possibility was tested in a court case and comprehensively discredited.

Vreugdenburg believes there are 1 500 extant far-right groups in South Africa. It would be instructive to know how many of them have been involved in spurious asylum applications to Trump’s America.

The Boeremag members were fascists and fantasists who tried to start a war, however improbable, in South Africa with little regard for the lives of those who might get in their way. The name of their new country was to be Suidland. Mitchell tries to provide a human side to these people describing the effect on their families of a long trial and even longer sentences, although by the end of 2023 all those convicted had been paroled. Not all readers will react positively. Nor will they do so to insertion of the author ‒ a journalist ‒ into the narrative, albeit that this is today increasingly common.