carine hartman 2021

By Carine Hartman

Chief sub-editor


Don’t shoot this Boertjie

You were still suckling when Winnie Mandela lifted her Lions matchbox with the call to 'kill the Boer'.


My mom was a snob. A failed one because as a Nooi Mulder of Muldersdrift, she married a lowly miner; unlike her two sisters who married “well”.

One moved in the “hoi polloi” circles of her surgeon-general of SA husband, the other had her medicine free from the chemist she chose. My mom chose love. Or lust. I remember finding letters high up in my dad’s cupboard telling my gran “If we don’t get married now, Rentia will be pregnant”.

You have no answer for lust, I think as I look at them kissing on my wall: him in his ill-fitting suit with his artist friend on his right, her in her bridal Victorian lace with four peach-coloured bridesmaids covering her left.

That lust lasted more than half a decade. Or maybe not. He wandered through the years; she went quite mad. They didn’t talk. Really talk.

But I got the “really talk” from Nooi Mulder who couldn’t show a family farm because, true to my heritage, it was pulled through many asses. Not that she understood my soul.

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“Tell them your dad works above ground” was always more important than “Girl, you need to be just … you”. I didn’t ever hear that last, vital, sentence from her lips. But her life lessons were good: “Girl, never talk religion or politics with men.” I don’t. I, to this day, avoid religion like the plague.

Politics? Now that’s a kettle of vrot fish you can’t talk about. Unless you see a failed strike but little pockets still marching.

Unless you see a pic of a man screaming “shoot the Boer”. I’m struggling with that hatred. You’re 30, I want to tell the screaming man with his fist. You were still suckling when Winnie Mandela lifted her Lions matchbox with the call to “kill the Boer”. Nothing PC about her: she wanted to kill the Boer, not shoot him, like you. Know you’re PC without even knowing it.

Your leader toned the war cry down so that even a court can’t call it hate speech. It’s that PC hatred that just hurts – and my back from bending over backwards. I’m a Boer. Don’t shoot me. Kill me. I’ll still take my PC hat off to your hate.