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April 17, 2025 52 mins

In 2002, a terrorist group failed to assassinate Nelson Mandela. In 2012, a plot to assassinate Jacob Zuma was foiled. Both plots were attempts to fulfill a prophecy and renew a bloody covenant with God.

Sources:

Thompson, Leonard L. The Political Mythology of Apartheid. Yale University Press, 1986.
FA Mouton (1995) F A van Jaarsveld (1922–1995) — a flawed genius?, , 27:1,
5-11, DOI: 10.1080/00232089585310011
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00232089585310011 

Stephney, Inez Mary. “Race, History and the Internet: The use of the Internet in White Supremacist Propaganda in the late 1990’s, with particular reference to South Africa”
https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/api/core/bitstreams/b04bdabb-ecd9-4f99-a3ae-fff55b88f483/content 

Schönteich, Martin, and Henri Boshoff. “Volk”, Faith and Fatherland: The Security Threat Posed by the White Right. Institute for Security Studies, 2003.

Ndlovu, Sifiso Mxolisi. “Johannes Nkosi and the Communist Party of South Africa: Images of ‘Blood River’ and King Dingane in the Late 1920s-1930.” History and Theory, vol. 39, no. 4, 2000, pp. 111–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678052.

http://www.anc.org.za/content/formation-umkhonto-we-sizwe 

https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/johannes-nkosi 

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/december-16-reflection-changing-south-african-heritage 

https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222024000200001 

https://www.iol.co.za/news/rightwing-coup-plot-case-postponed-1491552 

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/battle-blood-river-1838 

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/origins-battle-blood-river-1838

https://web.archive.org/web/20071220164018/http://www2.univ-reunion.fr/~ageof/text/74c21e88-617.html#_ftn13

https://web.archive.org/web/20081217042554/http://history.humsci.ukzn.ac.za/files/sempapers/Adutoit2005.pdf 

https://www.litnet.co.za/adriaan-snyman-1938/


https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/items/a64ddcfc-49eb-4680-b59d-b342d8bc358c 

https://www.news24.com/news24/five-boeremag-members-found-guilty-of-conspiring-to-murder-madiba-20150430 

https://mg.co.za/article/2004-08-03-boeremag-relied-on-rottweiler-and-kgb/ 

Snyman, Adriaan. Voice of a Prophet. Vaandel Publishers, 1999.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone media.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
On December sixteenth, nineteen fifty six, all over South Africa,
people gathered in city squares and event halls. Children's choirs performed,
congregations gathered to sing hymns, and whole towns turned out
to hear speeches from civic leaders and church elders. They

(00:28):
barbecued and picnicked. They made a whole weekend of it,
with parades led by mounted police and festivals headlined by
government officials. All over the country, people attending events in
their own towns tuned in to hear the Prime Minister's speech.
In Krugersdorp, a judge addressing the crowd in Jermyston urged

(00:49):
Africaners not to forsake God by tolerating communism, saying quote,
everywhere is the cry for equality of whites and non whites,
and everywhere it is fanned by communism. In Freddorp, a
speaker waxed poetic on the noble character of their Dutch
pioneer forefathers, saying quote, they were neither conquerors nor oppressors.

(01:14):
They always followed a determined policy towards the barbarians. In Vadfal,
a member of parliament gave a speech about the importance
of apartheid, that it was in fact a kindness allowing
the races to live and let live, retaining their racial
identities by avoiding race mixing. That speaker mc botha would

(01:35):
later help design and implement the administration of the Bantustans,
and that day he told the crowd that apartheid had
a far more positive outlook than something like segregation. In
Kempton Park, theologian Petras Dreyer warned that there could be
no middle ground. Economic integration inevitably leads to social integration,

(01:57):
which always ends in blood mixing. Apartheid was still young
in nineteen fifty six, the system was still being constructed.
Dryer predicted a complete disappearance of the white race if
the country failed to quickly adopt total and complete apartheid.

(02:18):
That celebration, the one in Kempton Park, was presided over
by festival chair William Henry Huggett. He'd been the mayor
of the city for several years in the early fifties,
and he was on the board of his local branch
of the National Party. The newspaper write up about the
event mentions him only briefly, I couldn't even tell you

(02:40):
if mister Huggett gave a speech, But I'm willing to
bet that they're in the audience listening to those warnings
of impending racial annihilation. Was his daughter, a twelve year
old Monica Huggett Hunger And this it's weird, little guys.

(03:20):
This is a story about religious fervor. It's about myth
and legend and racial holy war. It's a story of
very modern bombings and treason convictions and planned assassinations. But
it's a story rooted in history. So first, if you'll
indulge me a bit of history. December sixteenth is a

(03:45):
significant day for South Africans. Today it's celebrated as Reconciliation Day,
but it wasn't always a day of peace. In nineteen
sixty one, the newly formed paramilitary Arm of the African
National Congress and Konto Wi Sizwey announced their existence with
a series of bomb blasts and leaflets declaring quote, the

(04:08):
time comes in the life of any nation where there
remains only two choices, submit or fight. That time has
now come to South Africa. We shall not submit, and
we have no choice but to hit back by all
means within our power in defense of our people. In
nineteen thirty, the South African Communist Party held a nationwide

(04:28):
protest encouraging black South Africans to publicly burn their past books,
the internal passports black people were required to carry at
all times. At a passbook burning rally in Durban, police
attacked demonstrators, killing A and C organizer Johannes and Kosi.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
In twenty twelve, a.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Series of police raids were carried out, rounding up four
men accused of treason and a plot to assassinate President Jacobsuma.
And the reason that all of these things happened on
December sixteenth is the same. It's the same reason those
crowds gathered in city squares all over the country in

(05:10):
nineteen fifty six. Until the holiday was repurposed as Reconciliation
Day in nineteen ninety five, it was celebrated as the
Day of the Vow. The holiday occupies a place of
great importance in the political ideology of the africaner nationalist.
In the eighteen thirties, Dutch speaking settlers in the British

(05:31):
controlled colony at the Cape of Good Hope began migrating
north away from British rule of course, the land north
of the British Colony wasn't empty, and these exploratory missions
often came into conflict with the African people whose land
they wanted to settle on. In eighteen thirty seven, one

(05:51):
of those bands of Dutch pioneers, known as the Fore Trekkers,
set their sights on a bit of land in what
is now Quasulu Natal. They approached the Zulu king Dingane
an attempt to negotiate, stating a desire to live in
peace with the Zulu, but noting that they had been
victorious in prior conflicts with Zulu warriors. The negotiations did

(06:16):
not go well. Dingane was understandably cautious in dealing with
the Fort Trekkers. Earlier treks north had brought the settlers
into violent conflict with the indigenous people they encountered, and
their proposal just wasn't consistent with.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
The way the Zulu lived.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
The Fort Trekers wanted a written contract for ownership of
the land in perpetuity. Neither of these things were possible
in Zulu society. Theirs was an oral culture. There were
no written treaties or contracts, and their customs and laws
didn't allow for the permanent transfer of ownership of land
held by the king. In February of eighteen thirty eight,

(06:57):
a four treker delegation led by Petretif met with Dinghane
to sign the treaty. There are conflicting accounts as to
whether this treaty was actually signed, but ding Ghane clearly
had no intention of giving the Dutch settlers any land.
The entire delegation was led to a nearby hillside and killed.

(07:18):
There were retaliatory attacks and skirmishes throughout the year, but
the settlers spent most of eighteen thirty eight regrouping. Farmers
from the Cape Colony were called up as reinforcements, and
the bit of history that matters here came at the
end of the year, the Battle of Blood River. In

(07:40):
December of eighteen thirty eight, Andres Pretorius led a caravan
of fifty seven ox carts and four hundred and sixty
four trekker men into Zulu territory. The four trekkers were
armed with guns, and the caravan had several cannons. The
battle began at dawn on December sixteenth. A surviving member

(08:02):
of the Zulu forces said their first charge was mown
down like grass by the musket fire. The Zulu had
an overwhelming numerical advantage, accounts very widely putting the number
at at least nine thousand, with some estimates ranging as
high as thirty thousand, but the Fort Trekkers had a
strong defensive position and they had artillery. By noon, three

(08:27):
thousand Zulu warriors were dead. The Fort Trekkers had not
lost a single man in the Battle of Blood River.
There is, of course, no river with such a hideous name.
The battle was fought on the banks of the Encome River,
but on the day three thousand Zulu men were slain
in a matter of hours. The river is said to

(08:49):
have run red with their blood.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
That much is true.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
The Battle of Blood River was fought on December sixteenth,
eighteen thirty eight. The Day of the Vow, however, celebrates
a possibly apocryphal vow sworn by Andres Pretorius that if
God would deliver them a victory against the Zulu, their
descendants would forever keep that day as a holy sabbath.

(09:15):
They didn't, not until many decades later, anyway. Leonard Thompson,
an English historian who led Yale's Southern African Research program,
posits that the Day of the Vow is political mythology,
a piece of history that was resurrected and embellished when
it was politically expedient. There is some kernel of truth.

(09:39):
There is a contemporary account in the journals of Pretorius's secretary,
General Jan Bantis, that one week before the battle, Pretorius
called his senior officers to his tent and asked them
to pray to God for victory. And he promised that
if they were victorious, he would build a church to
commemorate it. And they did win, and he did build

(10:01):
that church, thus fulfilling the only portion of that promise
that we have any record of. For decades, white South
Africans did not keep December sixteenth as a holy sabbath.
An eighteen seventy seven text by a South African nationalist theologian,
contains a history of the battle, but it makes no

(10:22):
mention at all of any vow or of divine intervention.
The story re emerged in the late eighteen hundreds amidst
the Boer Wars, and in eighteen eighty a ceremony was
held to renew the covenant, and in this ceremony they
tied the story of the four treker victory over Black
Africans to the present struggle for national identity against the

(10:45):
British Empire. There were sporadic celebrations of the holiday in
the last few decades of the nineteenth century, and the
story was evolving as a sort of founding myth. God
wanted the Africaner to have the land. God wanted whites
to conquer Black Africans. God gave the Afrikaaner of this

(11:07):
land because they were God's chosen people. When South Africa
gained independence in nineteen ten, one of the first acts
of Parliament was to make the Day of the Covenant
a national holiday. In nineteen thirty eight, at the celebration
of the one hundred year anniversary of the Battle of
Blood River, nationalist politician D. F. Milan addressed the crowd.

(11:30):
He said Blood River had decided the future of South Africa,
that it was to be a civilized Christian nation under
the authority of the white race. And now, in that
moment in nineteen thirty eight, they were standing on the
banks of their own Blood River quote, seeing the dark
masses gathering around your isolated white race. A decade later,

(11:54):
when Milan was elected Prime Minister, he oversaw the implementation
of apartheid. You might be wondering at this point, why
am I telling you about this? What does this racist,
fake holiday have to do with the subject of our story,
Monica huggets Stone, It has everything to do with her.

(12:16):
Her belief in the vengeful racist God of Blood River
is central to the way she has lived her entire life.
She brings it up in almost every interview I could find.
In one podcast from twenty twenty one, she describes visiting
the site with her family as a child. To this day,

(12:37):
she believes that if the africaner renews that vow, their
God will guide their hand in slaughtering the enemies of
the white race, whoever they may be.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
And this is what I'm clinging to, is that the
God of Blood Lover is not dead. Even if the
enemy all over the world, and might they not only black,
the white governments of the waste caused the fall of
South Africa and Rhodesia and the rist of the white

(13:10):
colonies in Africa.

Speaker 4 (13:14):
The jew has their hand in there.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
Oh, absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
The constructed mythology around the importance of that day became
so central to African internationalist ideology and identity that for decades,
there was no scholarship at all examining its historical roots.
In nineteen seventy nine, historian Flores van yarsfeld was presenting
a conference paper at the University of Pretoria. He had

(13:45):
begun to question the historicity of the popular cultural narratives
about Blood River, and just as he approached the lectern
to present his paper, forty men burst into the lecture
hall and surrounded the professor, emptied the tin of hot
tar over him, and coated him in white feathers. Those

(14:05):
men were members of a group that had up until
that very moment operated entirely in secret.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
This was their big public debut.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
The leader seized the microphone and announced himself. He was
Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Africaner Resistance movement. He called
vin Yarsfeldt's paper blasphemous, an attack on the sanctity and
very essence of Africanner identity. Early on, in the process

(14:36):
of figuring out who Monica huggets Stone was, I saw
a very strange comment. I was reading a blog post
about an internal schism within a modern day Africaner nationalist
group called the Swedelanders. The blog was written by Adrian Snyman.
We'll get to him in a minute. But in the

(14:57):
comments under the post, there was one from Monica posted
in twenty twenty three, and she was so sorry to
see whites turning on each other instead of focusing on
the real enemy. And she ends this rather long comment
by saying, quote, the time is now for the Boer
people to stand together, to go on their knees and

(15:18):
beg forgiveness from our creator, the Great Almighty God, who
created the heavens and the earth. We have turned our
backs on God and have the mistaken idea that we
ourselves are the saviors of the Boer people. God has
not abandoned us. He is waiting patiently for the people
to call upon him. Just as at Blood River, he
will answer again and give his children victory. And I

(15:43):
didn't know what that meant, so I made a note
of it, and I moved on, And then I saw
it again in a YouTube.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
Comment just a few months ago.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
She wrote, may the God of Blood River be with
his children and give us victory against his enemy.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
And then I found a series of.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Articles she wrote for a rabidly anti Semitic Christian identity
magazine between twenty eleven and twenty seventeen, and they're all
very strange. The Bible verses she quotes are from a
translation I'd never heard of. It's not the King James
or the New International. It's something else, entirely, something called
the Ferrari Fentin Bible. He was apparently a British businessman

(16:28):
who died in nineteen twenty, and his translation is not
well regarded by biblical scholars. He was also briefly the
head of the South African diamond mining corporation, the Dedbers Group,
and he believed that British people were the true Israelites.
I didn't know the Ferra Fentin Bible was even an option,

(16:49):
but I guess if you're a racist South African who
believes white people are the descendants of the lost tribes of.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Israel, it's the perfect choice.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
In those articles, she predicts a coming race war, and
she agonizes over what she calls satanic attacks on the
Aryan race, and there at the end of pages of
apocalyptic rambling, she calls for a renewal of the vow
of Blood River.

Speaker 1 (17:21):
And that blog.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Monica's comment in twenty twenty three on that post about
internal divisions within a right wing Africannor group preparing for
a race war. Well, that comment wasn't her only appearance
on that site. In twenty eleven, the blog's author, Adrian Snyman,
wrote a post with the title thank you Aryan Nations,

(17:44):
and the post is a response to Monica Stone. She
had written privately to Snyman to let him know that
she would be attending the Aryan Nations World Congress in
September of twenty eleven, and she'd be giving a speech
about the white genocide in South Africa. Sneyman's post describes
Monica as the only female member of the Africaner Resistance
movement to have ever served time in prison for her

(18:06):
involvement in the group, and he urges his readers to
email her their letters of thanks so she can present
them to the Aryan Nations after her speech. And here's
where things start to go off the rails. Adrian Snyman,
the author of that blog.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Is a prolific writer.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
In his younger years, he worked for a newspaper covering
horse racing, and for decades he'd cranked out dozens of
novels under a variety of pseudonyms. But by nineteen ninety
he'd found his calling interpreting the prophecies of Nicklaus van Rensburg.

(18:48):
Nicholas van Rensburg was born in eighteen sixty four on
a farm in what is now South Africa. He never
learned to write, and he only learned to read by
sounding out the words of the Bible. He died in
nineteen twenty six during the Second Boer War. He was
a close companion of General.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Coups de la Rey.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
He was also allegedly a prophet of God. I spent
too much time trying to parse the prophecies. I had
trouble locating any actual, original written versions of the prophecies.
I don't want to see interpretations of them. I want

(19:31):
to see them, and I looked for some original source
for entirely too long before I realized they don't exist.
According to Snyman, Van Renzberg's daughter Anna wrote down over
seven hundred of her father's visions, but the original handwritten
books were lost. At the time of her death in

(19:52):
nineteen eighty one, the family was not in possession of
any of those writings. It appears he's based his books
on a document written in nineteen forty two a man
who had seen those original written versions of the prophecies
related them orally to another man who wrote them down

(20:13):
sixteen years after Van Rensburg died, and even that document
was lost until Sneiman received it in nineteen ninety. There's
no explanation of where it was in between or how
he came to possess it. Very unclear providence on these prophecies.
There's no chain of custody on the prophecies. Sneiman has

(20:35):
written so feverishly on the subject for the last thirty
five years that almost everything I can find about Van
Rensburg is written by him, and everything else relies on
his work. There are some contemporary accounts of some of
Van Rensburgh's visions, but it's worth mentioning that the most

(20:58):
spectacular examples of his coming to pass aren't ones I
was able to find written accounts of that date back
to his lifetime, and the interpretations of those prophecies that
present possible modern occurrences as their fulfillment are almost universally
written by fervent race war enthusiasts, people who really really

(21:21):
want the prophecies to be true. And the problem with
prophecies that some people really really want to be true
is that there will sometimes be people who take matters
into their own hands and try to make them come true.
Most of his visions are entirely symbolic, things like I

(21:45):
saw a red bull and AGray bull fighting is interpreted
by his followers as an accurate prediction of World War One,
or out of the north, a speckled black ox appears.
He is looking in our direction. The earth in our
country becomes desolate, but in Europe it becomes pitch dark,
and that is apparently a prediction of the Great Depression.

(22:09):
According to Sneimann, Van Rezberg correctly predicted such events as
every war of the twentieth century, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster Aids,
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the election of Margaret Thatcher,
Princess Diana's divorce, Princess Diana's death, and a nineteen ninety
five earthquake in Japan. As for the prophecies that haven't

(22:32):
come true, well maybe they just haven't come true yet.

Speaker 5 (22:39):
In nineteen sixteen, he tells his friend boy Mussmann, there
will come a time when I will be once again
in the news. In those days, I see we are
still fighting amongst ourselves, and it is over, and we
will have a black government. It is then that the
Afrikaan is final and fist struggle will begin.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
According to Snyman's books, Ben Ronzburg had a vision in
nineteen twenty five, six months before his death.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
The actual text of.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
This prophecy is word slid, something about a goose coming
out of a man's mouth, but it's interpreted to mean
that Van Rensburg predicted that in the distant future a
black man will be released from prison and that man
will attain power, and under his rule the country will
be thrown into chaos, and at some point that man

(23:40):
will die a violent death, and on the eighth day
after his death, the day he is buried, a civil
war will begin. By his own account, Snyman started interpreting
the prophecies in nineteen ninety He published his first book
on them in nineteen ninety two, but the earliest writing
I could actually get my hands on is from nineteen

(24:02):
ninety five, So I can't tell you if Sneimann always
believed that this particular prophecy was about Nelson Mandela and
his release from prison in nineteen ninety and his election
as president in nineteen ninety four, but that's his interpretation. Now,
and this particular prophecy has inspired at least two attempts
to force it to come true. In late two thousand

(24:26):
and two, a white supremacist terrorist organization calling itself the
Booramag set off a series of bombs in Soeto, outside
of Johannesburg. They targeted a mosque, a Buddhist temple, an airport,
a gas station, and railways, and those bombs went off
after the first round of arrests earlier that year. After

(24:50):
the wave of bombing, the group emailed newspapers taking responsibility
for the attacks. They demanded the release of the Booramag
members who'd already been arrested, but it warned that it
wasn't just lower ranking members of the group that people
should be worried about interfering with the mission of the
Boramagu was a challenge to the God of the Blood River.

(25:13):
If their demands weren't met, another wave of bombings would commence.
On December sixteenth, the day of the vow. Those bombings

(25:36):
did not come to pass. Police responded to the emails
by raiding ninety four properties and arresting eleven more Boromac members. Intriguingly,
some of the homes that were raided that day belonged
to men we've encountered elsewhere in this story. There were
police raids at the home of Baron Stredam, the White Wolf,

(25:56):
who went on a shooting spree in nineteen eighty eight,
and at the home of villem Rata, the former Rhodesian
military officer who commanded the German mercenaries at Radio Pratoria
in nineteen ninety four. Africana Resistance Movement member Mani Merits
and Pete Rudolph, the leader of the Order Borofolk at

(26:16):
one of these homes, though none of the reporting specifies
whose police found a list of names of the detectives
who had been investigating the Borromac. The trials took over
a decade, with testimony from over two hundred people. In
the end, twenty three members of the group received prison

(26:37):
sentences of varying lengths between five and thirty five years.
The ring leader, Mike Detoy, was the first South African
to be convicted of treason by the post apartheid government,
and because the cases spent eleven years in court, we
know a lot about them. At the group's first meeting,

(26:58):
members took the vow of blood River. They carried copies
of the vow pasted into a little book at all times,
and they gave each other code names like Rottweiler and motherfucker.
After they swore their allegiance to God and each other,
the leader of the group gave each man a single
nine millimeter bullet. In later testimony, a member said quote

(27:22):
he said, there was no turning back now. Anyone turning
back will be shot, and if you knew somebody would
betray you, you had to make sure he was shot.
In October of two thousand and two, former President Nelson
Mandela was scheduled to travel to Limpopo for a ceremony
opening a new school. Boromag members placed a large bomb

(27:44):
on the side of the road they knew he would
have to travel to get there, and.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
Stretched a trip wire across it.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
They were hiding in the bushes waiting to watch the
former president get blown to bits when they heard the helicopter.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
They'd failed.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
Had Mandela not taken a helicopter at the last minute
instead of traveling the final leg of his journey by car,
the bomb almost certainly would have killed him, and this,
they believed would trigger Van Rensberg's prophecies of a race war.
Both their own testimony and documents recovered in the police

(28:22):
raids show their dedication to the Van Rensburg prophecies. A
lot of their planning documents just don't make sense at
all without the context of the prophecies. One plan presupposes,
without explanation, that the violence will simply begin when a
mob of black people engage in violent midnight attacks in Johannesburg.

(28:43):
That's an extremely unlikely and unexplained scenario in the real world,
but it is something that does incite an unstoppable wave
of violence. In some of Sneyman's interpretations of the prophecies,
their planning doctor humans also fixate on the idea of
amassing their forces in a small town called Prisca. There's

(29:06):
no political or tactical advantage to being in Prisca, but
the town is mentioned more than twenty times in one
of Snyman's books. Van Rensburg had a vision that a
miracle would occur in Prisca, that in their hour of need,
the Boers would receive much needed help from abroad. In
the prophecies, the white africaner is armed for the final

(29:29):
struggle in Prisca when German guns arrive. It's very important
in the prophecies, these German guns. The guns must come
from Germany, and that's so interesting. I mean, the prophecies
are a jumbled mess and a lot of it doesn't

(29:50):
mean anything. They're mostly about bulls fighting and white horses
on hillsides and chickens running east. But the German guns
are quite concrete. And I wonder if that was on
anyone's mind in nineteen ninety three when Monica Huggett started
hosting German mercenaries in her home. Maybe it's a coincidence

(30:15):
that those Germans were the ones smuggling in the guns
they hoped to use in the race war back then.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Hard to say.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Over the course of the Boromag trials, witnesses testified to
almost unbelievable plots that the group never had a chance
to carry out. Members testified that they'd considered stoking racial
tension by carrying out terrorist attacks intended to appear as
though the perpetrators had been Jewish or Muslim. One early

(30:46):
plan involved shooting down an American passenger plane, but that
was scrapped because it was likely to kill white people.
A police informant who'd infiltrated. The group testified that one
member claimed his American contacts in the coup klux Klan
could help them create a poison to put in the
water supply. Another member sat on the stand that they'd

(31:07):
plan to poison oranges and then leave them on the
streets of Soweto where black people might pick them up
and eat them. When the guilty verdicts were read, Pete
Rudolph stood up in the gallery and yelled in Afrikaans,
we shall overcome. How odd to see Pete Rudolph misbehaving
in the gallery twice, so many years apart. It was

(31:29):
a few episodes ago now, but thirty three years before this,
in nineteen eighty it was Pete Rudolph who stood and
applauded as the VIC Commando bombers were led into the
court room. But during the trials, thirteen of those defendants
took a unorthodox approach to their defense. They challenged the

(31:52):
court's jurisdiction to even try them at all, claiming that
due to irregularities in the nineteen ninety two referendum and
then I ninety four election, the current government was illegitimate
and the post nineteen ninety four constitution was not binding.
The government's position was, of course, that the nineteen ninety
two referendum had authorized the government to negotiate a new constitution.

(32:17):
That referendum, for the record, asked the question, do you
support continuation of the reform process which the state president
began on two February nineteen ninety and which has aimed
at a new constitution through negotiation, and that referendum passed
with sixty nine percent of voters saying yes. Here's Monica's

(32:40):
memory of that election, just for fun.

Speaker 4 (32:45):
I mean, I remember my niece was about three four
years old. We walked into the welting booth and she
little as she was, it's the Nazi salute, and she said,
my daddy is voting No.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
The Boramag defendants were unsuccessful, obviously, but they did try
to subpoena South Africa's last apartheid president, FW de Clerk,
I guess, in an attempt to prove that the government
didn't legally exist, and after the verdicts were in some
right wingers blamed to Clerk. If he hadn't ended apartheid,

(33:23):
none of this would have happened in the first place.
A press release from Andres Breidenbach, leader of the far
right party HNP and chairman of a group called the
Afrikaner Folksrad attacked to Clerk. The press release read, in part,
each of those sentences is yours personally, because you are
the real trader who subjugated our people to a hostile

(33:45):
power with cunning in deceit. And further down the page
he continues that you have not created any git through
which the Boer, African or people can escape from this
dispensation in a constitutional manner, shows your evil intent against
our people. News reports at the time say the press
release was issued via his Facebook page.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
But I couldn't dig it up there.

Speaker 4 (34:08):
No.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Unfortunately, I found it on Stormfront. I can't believe I'd
never noticed before, but the internet's oldest running Nazi message
board has an entire subsection where all the posts are
in Afrikaans.

Speaker 1 (34:24):
In a two thousand and.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Nine dissertation by Inez Mary Stephanie at the University of
the Vitvatersrand, the author makes a claim that I believe
but I can't find anywhere else. She writes that in
the mid nineties, the Africaner resistance movement didn't have their
own website. I mean, it was the nineties, how many

(34:45):
people knew how to make a website. But instead of
the group just not having a website, American clansman Don Black,
Stormfront's webmaster posted their online presence for them. What a
strange and fascinating intersection. But back to the press release,

(35:09):
I wouldn't have bothered to tell you Andreas Breytenbach's name
if that was his only appearance in this story. There's
already too many guys I know, but it's not no
because he had friends overseas two and he was in Washington,
d C. In September of twenty twelve. I can't blame

(35:31):
you if you've forgotten why. That's interesting. It's been a
long story. It was in September of twenty twelve that
Monica Huggett Stone led that tiny gaggle of Aryan Nations
members on a march through DC. It was her second
attempt at getting public attention for her South Africa project,
raising awareness for the white genocide.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Of the africaner. But what if it was something else?

Speaker 2 (35:59):
A month before that rally, the front page story in
d Africaner, the newspaper for the far right party HNP,
said that their chairman Andres Breitenbach had decided that there
would be a march in America the following month, quote,
a march will be held in America next month. This
action stop genocide was initiated by the HNP. So maybe

(36:27):
there was some other march against white genocide somewhere in
the United States in September of twenty twelve, as possible,
I guess, but this was the only one in Washington, DC,
and that's where Andres Breidenbach was the week of Monica's
Arian Nation's rally at the Capitol. I can't find him
in any of the photos, but that same party newspaper

(36:51):
uses a photo of Monica at her rally to illustrate
their story about Breidenbach delivering a letter to the ambassador
in Washington that same week. Maybe something is lost in
translation here, but the article appears to conclude with this statement.
The group of local protesters was also encouraged by the

(37:13):
fact that their spokesman, mister Andres Breitenbach, gave an interview
to the media at the embassy, and Monica obviously saw
and had no issue with the wording of this article
because it was proudly posted to the Aryan Nation's website,
which is where I found it. But it gets even stranger.

(37:35):
Breitenbach wasn't the only South African who paid a visit
to the Aryan Nations in September of twenty twelve. That
same month, a man named Hein Bunsier took a trip
to the United States. When he was arrested for treason
three months later, it was revealed in court that he'd
been trying to secure funding from the Aryan Nations and

(37:55):
the ku Klux Klan. Buonsire and three others, Johann Printslou,
John Martin Kievy, and Mark Trollop were arrested on December sixteenth,
twenty twelve, the day of the vow and the day
they had planned to assassinate South African President Jacob Zuma.
The charges against Boonsire were dropped in August of twenty thirteen,

(38:19):
and after a psychiatric evaluation, John Martin Kievy was committed
to a state hospital. Mark Tarlot pled guilty to conspiracy
and Johann Princeleu was found guilty of treason after a trial.
So legally, can I tell you that Hein Buonsier was
soliciting funding for terrorism?

Speaker 1 (38:39):
No I can't.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
He wasn't convicted of any crime in connection to the plot,
but the plot was real. It was real enough that
Johann Princelou was convicted of treason and Boonsire did make
two trips to the United States to connect with right
wing groups, one just months before his arrest. Early reporting

(39:02):
about his arrest explicitly states that the twenty twelve trip
had been an effort to secure financial backing from American
extremist groups. But I was puzzled about the economics of
such a trip. I mean, guns aren't cheap, sure, but
what's the return on investment in terms of ammunition when
you're looking at booking international travel. But it's possible they

(39:25):
needed money for more than just weapons. Buonsire was buying land,
a lot of it in Prisca. There is a post
from the year before his arrest on a website for
believers in the Free Afrikaner movement. It's a collection of
white South Africans who want an independent state, and the

(39:48):
post names Bunsire's real estate company, Hausenberg Development Cooperative, is
one of two companies allowing people to purchase shares in
a large tract of land. Illitate white resettlement. Later, reporting

(40:16):
from investigative journalism outlet I'mapunghani says Boonsire's company website was
in twenty twelve quote in the process of purchasing thirty
thousand hectares of farmland in Prisca, but I can't find
any follow up as to whether or not he ever
successfully purchased the land for his white enclave. During his

(40:37):
trip to the United States in twenty twelve, he appeared
on six episodes of one right wing podcast and made
a single appearance on a wildly fringe anti Semitic conspiracy
theory show. I spent the better part of the day
trying to dig up audio of any of those episodes,
but they seem to be lost a time. I'm Apungane

(41:00):
in twenty twelve that in one episode, Buonsire said, I
think we can assume that within the next six to
eight months, I wouldn't be surprised if we had a
full scale civil war in South Africa. It's a low
level war that's being waged against us, and at some
point any group of people or a nation would stand
up and say enough is enough. In the reporting about

(41:20):
Boonsiro's American connections, It's mentioned that he'd visited once before,
but no details are provided. It seemed like that first
trip might remain a mystery until I found an open
letter Boonsire himself wrote in twenty thirteen after his charges
were dropped. In that letter, he reveals that he'd been
publishing online for years under the pseudonym Heinrich Zeman, and

(41:45):
there is a bit of writing online in Afrikaans under
that name, much of it published by the Pro African
or Action Group. But I found one essay in English.
The piece tells the almost entirely fictional story of the
author's grandparent and its falling victim to the ongoing white
genocide in South Africa. They are victims of these infamous

(42:07):
farm murders, hacked to death in their beds by machete
wielding black men, and he writes in gory detail about
the couple's beloved dog, dismembered by the attackers as he
gave his life trying to protect his masters. It's gruesome,
it's almost pornographic in its description of the author discovering

(42:29):
that the dog's final act was tearing the throat out
of one of the black attackers. It was published in
twenty eleven by American Renaissance, the white supremacist magazine run
by Jared Taylor. Taylor's website notes that the author attended
the American Renaissance Conference in twenty ten, an event that

(42:49):
was headlined by a speaker from the Belgian fascist group
flams Belang, the successor organization to Flams Block, the neo
Nazi organization that coordinated the movement of stolen go uns
and mercenaries to South Africa in the nineties. Bundsaire's piece
was included in a collection of essays published by American
Restaurants in twenty twenty, and the book has a forward

(43:12):
by Jared Taylor himself. I will do some episodes on
Jared Taylor one of these days. He's had an enormous
influence on American white supremacist thought over the last forty years.
His annual conference has for decades now been a real
who's who of the international extreme right.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
I went once years ago.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
I mean I couldn't get inside, obviously, I just stood
outside in a park somewhere in Tennessee, and all I
got from my trouble was pepper sprayed and trampled by
some cops for the average person. I would guess the
only time you've encountered Jared Taylor's name in the news
was back in twenty fifteen. He was the spokesman for

(43:57):
the Council of Conservative Citizens. They had to make a
series of public statements after the Charleston church shooting. Dylan
Roof's manifesto made it quite clear that he'd been radicalized
by the Council of Conservative Citizens, specifically their publications on
black crime, and that's what convinced him that white people

(44:18):
were being treated unfairly. Their website set him down the
path that ended the lives of nine people whose only
crime was welcoming a stranger into their Bible study. Like
I said, Boonsire's charges were dropped when he was arrested.
In twenty twelve, he was removed as the head of

(44:39):
a newly formed political party, the Federal Freedom Party, after
its founder was arrested for treason. It obviously struggled a bit,
and it rebranded as Front National in twenty thirteen, and
then rebranded again as the Africaner Self Determination Party in
twenty twenty. I can't tell if Boonsire is still active
and the party he started seems like it would be

(45:01):
kind of hard to go back to canvassing for elections
when you've already considered triggering a prophecy by blowing up
the president. But people can change, I don't know. In
September of twenty twelve, Monica huggets Stone was in touch
with the leader of the far right party HNP and
a man accused of treason. She led a tiny Arian

(45:24):
nation's rally at the United States Capital and then she left.
She'd been living in the United States since two thousand
after marrying Jim Stone, a retired sports news broadcaster living
just outside New Orleans. Federal Election Commission filings show that
Jim Stone was on the payroll for David Duke's nineteen
ninety six Senate run, but the campaign didn't amount to much.

(45:48):
Jim was apparently the campaign press secretary and director of
media relations, but the only news story I can find
that looks like it was placed by a press secretary
is the one announcing he'd been hired for the position,
So maybe he wasn't very good at it. Jimstone passed
away in early twenty twelve, and in twenty thirteen, the

(46:08):
now widowed Monica Stone sold their home in Mandeville, Louisiana,
and returned to her hometown of Kempton Park in South Africa.
Back in South Africa, she operates a charitable organization called
the Living Waters Foundation, and interviews in recent years always
include a request for donations. She helps orphans, you see,

(46:30):
but only white ones. She's quite meticulous about it. In
twenty fifteen, a fellow South African neo Nazi recommended donating
to Monica's charity, writing on his blog quote, She's a
hardcore national socialist. She only gives money to white children.
If she gives money to someone and she later sees

(46:50):
them helping non whites, then she cuts off the monies.
I went with her in twenty fifteen to visit an
orphanage in Pretoria, the only one run by a white
woman who was doing it only for white children. But
when Monica later found out that the woman was also
helping blacks, she cut off.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
All donations, which I agree with.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Batman Ian Lamprecht was arrested in twenty twenty one for
violating a court order to stop harassing a Jewish professor.
But that's neither here nor there. I can't quite nail
down the specifics, but it seems Yan and Monica had
a falling out some time after twenty fifteen, but for
the most part in a movement constantly ripped apart by

(47:32):
personal feuds and power struggles and accusations of betrayal, I
can't find a single bad word about Monica Huggetstone. I
scraped together every existing record of her involvement in white
supremacist groups from nineteen seventy nine, when she first met
Eugene tare Blanche, through the present day, covering nearly fifty years,

(47:54):
intersecting with multiple bombing campaigns, international arms smuggling rings, and
attempted coups. She turned State's witness against her own boyfriend
in nineteen eighty And I dug through dozens of ancient
blogs in multiple languages, and I can't find a single
Nazi with a bad word to say about her. And

(48:17):
I think that's a first. There's always beef somewhere. I
will have to circle back at some point to talk
about the Swede Lenders, maybe another time. They are more
recent African nationalist group founded in the early two thousands,
and they publicly shy away from being associated with obvious

(48:37):
neo Nazi imagery, but the group is explicitly and completely
centered around the Van Rensburg prophecies. They exist to prepare
their members for the coming race war and spoiler alert
in case I don't get back to the Swede Lenders
anytime soon. Their spokesman, Simon Roche, spent most of the

(48:58):
summer of twenty seventeen ling in the United States, including
attending the Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville, and
back in that time period, they got into a little
bit of hot water in the movement. There were allegations
that Simon Roch had been pocketing donations from other white nationalists.
It was a bit of a scandal, and in twenty

(49:19):
eighteen he appeared on an American neo Nazi podcast to
address the issue, and at some point during the show
he was ambushed by Jan Lamprecht, who is a rival
of his, and it got a little heated and it
was a very lengthy, uncomfortable interview. But at the end
of all that, Simon Roche still spoke glowingly of Monica,
calling her someone with an impeccable reputation and recommending that

(49:44):
if after all of this, you are still not comfortable
donating to the Swedelanders, you should donate to Monica.

Speaker 6 (49:51):
Let me ask you this, are there other groups that
you think are reputable that are doing good work in
South Africa that if anybody has questions about the If
there are people who have questions about the integrity of Sidelanders,
who would they want to support instead of you?

Speaker 7 (50:08):
I would recommend that they support somebody like Monica Stone,
a very distinguished, decent lady who has fought for white nationalism.
She's probably a bit too right wing for me, but
she's a marvelous human being.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
So she's a bit two right wing for the race
war guy, but she's a marvelous human being.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
He says.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
She's eighty one years old now, and she spent her
entire life in the orbit of assassins and mercenaries and
war criminals and bombers and rapists and torturers and terrorists
and death squad leaders, and just one of the mill
neo Nazis with fantasies of racial holy war. Her religion

(50:56):
is quite literally one of blood. Her god is the
vengeful God of blood River.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
This story is over the part of.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
It that was in the past anyway, but I can't
move on without making the consequences clear. This is still happening.
We'll leave Monica huggets Stone behind at long last, because
she was just the backstory.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
No.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Now we live in a world where these once fringe
ideas are front page news at outlets with White House
Press credentials. Now in twenty twenty five, the President of
the United States wants to welcome as refugees these people
with their apocalyptic visions of race war and mass extermination,

(51:54):
These people who worship the god of the Blood River.
Weird Little Guys is the production of Cool Soo Media

(52:14):
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophy Letterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the

(52:35):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys separated it,
but as always, don't post anything that's going to make
you one of my weird little guys,
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Molly Conger

Molly Conger

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