Introduction: Dark Tales, White Wolves

Abstract

On 15 November 1988, in a humid square near the centre of Pretoria, the legislative capital of South Africa, a 21-year-old white Afrikaans man named Barend Hendrik Strydom took out his pistol and began to shoot black people. He shot one man outside the State Theatre and a man and a woman on the corner of Church and Prinsloo Streets, and then continued down Struben Street, shooting every black person who crossed his path. By the time he was overpowered by a taxi driver named Simon Mukondoleli, Strydom had murdered eight people and seriously wounded sixteen. When questioned he claimed to be the head of a white supremacist group called the Wit Wolwe, the White Wolves, who were fighting a war for the survival of white civilisation. While some commentators believed that the Wit Wolwe were a product of Strydom’s imagination, others claimed the group was real and had arisen in the 1970s (Welsh and Spence 2011, 53). In either case, the name was adopted by other far-right factions in the wake of Strydom’s killings. The murders appalled South Africa and, as a metaphor for the barbarity of the apartheid system that had bred him, the world at large.