Even by right-wing standards, the Afrikaans Protestant Church is besotted with Pretoria’s Voortrekker Monument. It is its Mecca, its Shangri-la, its Damascus and Golgotha with a burning bush and a glorious anointment.
It is also where dominee Adriaan Swart would allegedly drive teenage boys for sightseeing and sexual grooming. In one instance, the Pretoria high court heard, he removed a 14-year-old boy from school to take him for an afternoon there. Soon, this would allegedly lead to masturbation for both the reverend and the boy.
After outings, back at Swart’s home near Brits in North West, the reverend often wrestled the boy, fondling his penis, the now young man told the court last month. He was 10 years old when he first met Swart through the reverend’s wife, his teacher and headmistress. But once he turned 14, the court heard, his relationship with Swart changed.
First: Swart, 48, and his wife, co-accused Lizette Swart, 51, have not been convicted of the crimes with which they are charged. They both entered pleas of not guilty and they vociferously deny all charges.
Adriaan denies that he: masturbated the first complainant; required the boy to masturbate him; watched him while he was bathing; filmed him while he was naked and attempted to penetrate the boy’s anus with his penis; used the boy to create child pornography; made a video of the boy while he was naked in the bathroom; and then, years later, required another initially 14-year-old boy to masturbate him; made a video or took photographs of the second boy while he was masturbating himself or the reverend; intentionally possessed child pornography featuring the boy; created child pornography depicting the abuse of the boy; and intentionally imported child pornography.
I think I get the Voortrekker Monument thing now. When I was sexually groomed in high school, my hero was a journalist; he took me to a newspaper’s offices. If your hero is an APK reverend, there is no site holier than the Voortrekker Monument
Lizette denies that she intentionally and knowingly permitted her husband to have sexual contact with two boys since the ages of 14.
When you drive from Johannesburg to Pretoria, it’s impossible not to notice the Voortrekker Monument. It was built that way. In addition to being an unmissable eyesore/charming relic (delete according to preference), it is meant to remind one and all of the Voortrekkers’ victory over the Zulus at Blood River.
As a detribalised Afrikaner who sometimes drives to Pretoria, I often wonder why our country has kept the Voortrekker Monument without so much as painting it. But, after all I’ve learnt investigating this story, I would like to propose a striking new use for the “koekblik op die koppie” — the cake tin on the hill.
Initially, the monument struck me as a bizarre venue for alleged sexual grooming. But the more I learnt about the Afrikaans Protestant Church (APK), the more it started to make sick sense.
Are you familiar with the day when the Voortrekkers (the so-styled Afrikaner pilgrims) were brutally outnumbered by the Zulus whose land they were there to take? On a scary night, trapped in KZN, they prayed to God, promising forever to hallow his name if He helped them to decimate the Zulus.
On December 16 1838, God complied. A covenant was formed and a people were chosen. With the help of God (and also guns), the Afrikaners wiped out the Zulus. That’s why the victors called it the Battle of Blood River, on account of the volume of Zulu blood that was said to stain the water.
When the altar-shaped Voortrekker Monument was completed in 1949, the architect had achieved a marvel. He had made a clever hole. In the crypt at the bottom of the monument, there’s a red granite cenotaph with the inscription “Ons vir jou Suid-Afrika” (Us for you South Africa). Every year, on December 16, the sun catches the hole in the dome at just the right angle and, at noon, casts its rays straight onto the slab.
To this day, and this year again, a few thousand faithful will assemble in the morning at the amphitheatre outside the monument. Soon, there will be sermons; in the meantime, everyone is on camping chairs fervently praying the day won’t turn cloudy.
Last week, looking down on the cenotaph, I asked the guiding lad, 23, why God is always mentioned, but never the guns.
“There were 15,000 of them and 500 of us!” he roughly said, though he was more specific about the numbers; this is a broad account of our Afrikaans dialogue I noted down back in Joburg that evening.
Like everyone at the monument, he’s dressed as a Voortrekker. Before reaching the monument’s interior, your ticket will be issued by a young woman with a “bonnet”, who will charge two of you R430 for the pleasure. And, even before her, when you park, there is a car guard. He is black and also dressed as a Voortrekker.Inside the monument, the young man said he doesn’t mind wearing Voortrekker-style suspenders — people come here for the experience.
I asked him to tell me about Blood River and he seemed pleased. He had been to the battle site just the week before and he bore vivid anecdotes. I hear of 1838; of a dark and misty summer’s week; of a people outnumbered while fighting for their place in the sun (Zululand).
And of a miracle. Of the brilliant, clear dawn of December 16, which finally enabled the Afrikaners to see their enemies.
“The guns must have been particularly useful then,” I said, but his narration barely wavered: the Zulu princes were observing the battle from a hill that wasn’t supposed to be in range of the cannons, but …
“We also had cannons?!”
“Only two cannons!” he said. “Some people say three, but there were only two.”
Zulu people should also celebrate the Battle of Blood River, says the APK. They’re just not trying hard enough.
“Primarily, this wasn’t a battle between Voortrekker and Zulu,” writes ds Schalk Strauss, who edits the APK’s monthly magazine, Die Boodskapper.
“It was a battle between light and darkness; between Christianity and the heathendom. During this battle, God did not protect a people, but his people. He did not protect the Voortrekkers because they were Afrikaners, but because they were Christians. The victory at Blood River was a miracle and, as such, a consequence of the victory at Golgotha,” he writes in a special Day of the Vow edition in December 2018.
When the altar-shaped Voortrekker Monument was completed in 1949, the architect had achieved a marvel. He had made a clever hole
“In his mercy, God destroyed the heathen pride of the once mighty Zulu empire. With the victory at Blood River, the reign of terror of the Zulu empire, which was specifically rampant under Mefecane [sic], was ended. To a large degree, the interior of South Africa was stabilised. In so doing, God did not just create room for the Voortrekkers to flourish, but also for the other nations of South Africa.”
He adds: “Irrespective of their ethnicity, Christians who believe in the victory of Light over dark should celebrate the day as an indigenous confirmation of the events of Golgotha.”
But, lest isiZulu readers of Die Boodskapper start assembling their presumed crumbs and tissues for an inclusive morning at the monument, ds Strauss quickly points out that they must not: “I do not hereby plead for joint celebrations. Just like God’s church has a unique character under various population groups, so the celebrations would also display a unique or exclusive character under Christians of other population groups.”
But he does strike a more conciliatory note elsewhere in his piece: “Still, we don’t mind when the Germans or the English or the French or even the Portuguese who have assimilated with the Afrikaner nation and associate with its history, celebrate the day with us.”
Ask most right-wing Afrikaners what they think of the APK and they’d tell you it’s a bit right wing. Reverend Adriaan Swart is currently celebrating 25 years on the pulpit of a church that believes women can’t be ministers, apartheid was a good idea, and the problem with the NG Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) is that’s it’s too bleeding-heart liberal.
And not just even of late. The NG Kerk turned away from God in 1986, we learn from professor Koos Adendorff on the APK’s YouTube channel. In a lecture posted in February 2022, he reminds us that, until 1986, the NG Kerk believed in separate churches for the Afrikaners, brown people and black people.
“And then [the NG Kerk] came and said, just hold on, separate churches for separate people is a sin,” he explains in Afrikaans. “They said apartheid is wrong and therefore a sin. So everything people believed and did for years is now suddenly wrong and sinful and it must be confessed and we have to say sorry and change it. They also said separate churches for separate nations is sinful and every church must be open to people of all races.”
This, he says, would have led to the collapse of worship in Afrikaans. “Now, all of a sudden, sitting right here in the church, there’d also be a bunch of, um, Indians who don’t understand Afrikaans, and a bunch of people from, uh, of the black nations who don’t understand Afrikaans either, and this means we’ll have to find a language that everyone understands and normally that’s English, so all of a sudden we would have had to start praying and reading the Bible and preaching in English.”
To my mind, there are two readings for this. Either the APK genuinely believed that, um, Indians and, uh, the black nations have nothing better to do on a Sunday than passive-aggressively sitting in Afrikaner churches just waiting for something to give; or else they went to staggeringly fallacious lengths to justify the fact that they just can’t stand sitting next to non-whites, or “nie-blankes”, as some right-wing folk call them to this day.
If you drive from Brits in North West to the Voortrekker Monument, like I’ve never done, it will take you an hour, says Google Maps. If you drive from Brits to the APK’s outpost at Sanddrift, like I did this month, it will take another 20 minutes or so.
Right next to the church is Sanddrift Primary — the school of which Lizette is headmistress, and where both the first and second complainants met the dominee from next door.
By the time he was in high school, the first complainant testified, the reverend often pulled him out of school early to take him on adventures — to the Voortrekker Monument; to restaurants; once, on the Gautrain. In between, the high court heard, the reverend wrestled the boy, grabbed his penis and pinched his buttocks. Then the situation deteriorated.
They take what they’ve wanted all along. They have access to a child who has nowhere to go now that their hero has turned on them
For an adult to seduce a child, a gradual approach is required. Sexual grooming is the process whereby a child is deceived into complying with an adult’s sexual demands. “It has nothing to do with what the child wants,” says Luke Lamprecht of Women and Men Against Child Abuse. “It’s all about what the adult wants.”
A person in authority — like a teacher, a coach, a reverend or a rabbi — tricks a child into sexual contact. The groomers take the kids on outings; they buy them gifts; they make their targets used to their touch by, say, lingering hugging or frequent wrestling.
And then the predator pounces. They take what they’ve wanted all along. They have access to a child who has nowhere to go now that their hero has turned on them.
Most children tell no-one, obviously. They have learnt to rely on their heroes, so the only way through is to separate the sex stuff from the bulk of the relationship. What children do not understand is that the sex stuff is the relationship. Everything else — the gifts, the good times, the words of encouragement — only exists to hide the real relationship from view.
It takes extraordinary courage to tell someone once; to keep telling them while they do nothing, even though they should — that takes a spine most of us could only dream of.
According to the now young man’s testimony, he confided in his former teacher — the reverend’s wife, Lizette. Last month, the court heard that he disclosed his alleged abuse to her on at least four occasions.
All adults in South Africa are legally compelled to report the abuse of a child to the police. Lizette did not, the charge sheet states, and so she is charged under the Sexual Offences Act, the Criminal Procedure Act and the Children’s Act.
I think I get the Voortrekker Monument thing now. When I was sexually groomed in high school, my hero was a journalist; he took me to a newspaper’s offices. If your hero is an APK reverend, there is no site holier than the Voortrekker Monument. It’s like taking a Muslim kid to Mecca.
It is in this spirit that I hereby pray that we think of something glorious when we drive past the strange aesthetics of the monument on the hill. May we see a monument to the children who, despite the shame and the sorrow they feel, tell someone that they’re being abused. A monument to the bravery of children whose heroes had feet of clay and hands that wandered. And, to me now, a monument to the bravery of one boy from Brits. If a thousand of us will salute him when we drive past the Voortrekker Monument, that gives us a thousand great uses for the Voortrekker Monument.
An hour’s drive away, in North West, the house that dominee Swart shares with his wife of 26 years has been up for sale. I trekked my way through the photos online. I could see the bedroom of alleged sex crimes; the living room of alleged sex crimes; and then the reverend’s study.
The walls are crammed with framed Afrikaner memorabilia — pictures of stern men with beards; a painting of Voortrekkers trekking; a porcelain plate commemorating something invisible from here. And then, on the shot’s edge, a historic-looking black-and-white picture. From its thick black frame, a photo of the Voortrekker Monument smiles among its masters.
• Wiggett is an investigative reporter, podcaster and the author of ‘My Only Story: The Hunt for a Serial Paedophile’
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