The Flippie Engelbrecht Case, White Guilt, and a Theonomic View of Labor

One day when the Boer people have, Deo volente, regained our own homeland and control over our children’s education, we will definitely include the story of Flippie Engelbrecht in our history books to exemplify the suppression our people suffered under the current political system and the climate it created.

Engelbrecht is a black farmworker who was supposedly beaten by the white farmer for whom he worked, Johnny Burger, and his white farm manager, Wilhelm Treurnicht, in 2008. According to the narrative, the attack caused Engelbrecht to develop epilepsy, and Flippie suffered a horrible seizure four years after the attack in 2012, falling into a fire and requiring both his hands to be amputated. He was also reportedly left blind after surgery following the attack. A media frenzy has developed surrounding this story, as it is a perfect example for the media to further their Marxist ideal of white guilt and humiliation to establish an egalitarian social order. In a gesture of white pseudo-repentance, an Afrikaner man from Johannesburg even made Flippie artificial hands free of charge.¹ For the past couple of months, the story has been repeatedly televised and has made various newspaper headlines.

Earlier this week, the case took an unexpected turn when Johnny Burger committed suicide, for he could no longer endure the tension and humiliation of the pending court case in addition to the overwhelming criticism and antagonism he and his family received from the public.² Today, just a few days after Burger’s suicide, it was reported that Engelbrecht’s lawyer, Carina Papenfus, had deliberately lied and twisted many facts in the case against the white farmers. Three independent sources who have known the Engelbrecht family for years confirmed to the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport that Flippie had developed epilepsy long before the alleged attack. Hospital records researched by Rapport indicated that Flippie had only been admitted to a hospital in 2009, more than a year after the alleged attack. Papenfus also claimed that Engelbrecht had his hands amputated in 2009, while hospital records confirm it was 2012. A co-worker of Engelbrecht, Sarah Papp, also claimed that while she was visiting Engelbrecht in the hospital, he admitted that someone had shoved him into the fire and that his injuries weren’t caused by an epileptic attack. According to an official report from a school for the blind that had evaluated Engelbrecht for admission in October 2009, Engelbrecht’s mother informed them that he had mysteriously become blind after he went to the doctor to treat a furuncle on his cheek.³ We thus have enormous reason to doubt both the connection between Flippie’s suffering and the alleged attack and the allegation of an assault in the first place.

Prior to Burger’s funeral earlier this week, therefore, an attendee told Rapport: “That woman (Papenfus) sent Johnny Burger to his grave. The Boers are angry.”⁴

And the white farmers in this country certainly have reason to be angry. The slander that marks the Engelbrecht case is certainly not an isolated incident. In 2007, the South African Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs claimed that white farmers “regularly rape and assault” their workers, despite not being able to provide a single case to back up those claims.⁵ From the time I reported on the suppression of white farmers in South Africa a couple of years ago, the situation has worsened even further. The number of farm attacks have dramatically increased over the past few months,⁶ as the Boer genocide in general has intensified. Earlier this month, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform proposed shares in farms for black farmworkers, which, considering the economic consequences of such a proposal, would boil down to an expropriation of the soil which the Boers have cultivated for centuries.⁷

Many will remember the brutal murder of the famous AWB leader, Eugène Terre’Blanche, back in 2010. His murderers, who were also his employees, claimed that they murdered him because of a wage dispute.⁸ Regardless of how truthful that witness is, this case, along with the Engelbrecht case currently making headlines, should open the eyes of the white man to the dangers of black employment in contemporary South Africa. It is a well-known fact in South Africa that in most cases of black-on-white crime, black employees, often intimidated by criminals to provide relevant information about their employers, are either complicit in crime or at least have knowledge of its planning.

Scripture teaches that the wages of sin is death, and one sin for which the Afrikaner has suffered the past couple of generations is laziness. Scripture clearly rebukes sluggards (Prov. 6:6), and the Afrikaner-Boer people are suffering God’s judgment for their unwillingness to do their own labour. Of course, there is nothing wrong with employing someone as an aid for one’s labor, and Scripture even allows Christians to employ slaves, but once a man has become so dependent on foreign labor that he would rather sit back, do nothing, and see his own people demographically displaced in their own land, he is certainly living in disobedience to God’s law. It should also be noted, however, that white farmers’ employment of blacks in South Africa had historically been mutually beneficial, their labor relations being generally characterized by the goodwill present in most race relations prior to the Marxist takeover of the country. There is historically very little that could legitimately incriminate whites for their treatment of the non-white population of South Africa. This being said, it would be suicidal not to observe that the consistent reliance upon black labor by whites and the sinful culture of laziness it created are significant contributions to the judgment which the Boer people currently endure.

The most encouraging example of contemporary resistance to this culture of laziness is the Afrikaner enclave of Orania. My family and I enjoyed another visit to this homogenous community recently, as the Oranians confirmed to us that their biggest challenge is ridding themselves of a cultural dependency upon black labor. Nonetheless, Orania continues to grow from strength to strength without the aid of black labor, and, admittedly, it provides a Boer nationalist with a great sense of pride to see whole factories and farms built from the ground up solely by the hands of your own people, in obedience to Genesis 3:19. Apart from that, the community is free from the constant danger which other South African whites encounter, a tribute to the fact that they do not allow black employees (read: spies) free access to their private properties. There are, however, undeniably still a number of ideological problems within the Orania movement due to its liberal leadership, and the community still has a long way to go if it wants to survive in the long run.

America has similar labor problems and consequent demographic problems that could, just as with South Africa, most effectively be resolved by the implementation of theonomic civil law. The Lord promises us in Scripture that if we submit to Him in all our ways, He will straighten our paths (Prov. 3:6); the current state of the apostate West confirms this. May we ceaselessly pray to be speedily delivered from this judgment.