I INTERVIEWED Steve Hofmeyr for a Sunday newspaper some years ago just as his quixotic brand of political activism began to attract national attention. At the time a back injury had put paid to his lunatic ambition to father more children out of wedlock than President Jacob Zuma and, given all the time he now had on his hands, he was able to throw everything into his new-found role as motormouth for the volk.

And Hofmeyr, as I recall, certainly had a lot to talk about. One of the issues troubling him was Pretoria's proposed name change. Among his less splenetic opinions on the matter was that we knew little of this Tshwane person other than that he was a nomadic pastoralist whose only historical link to the region may well be that he once stopped there on a cattle drive to urinate under a tree.

I was, admittedly, struck by his passion and lack of guile. There was something quite compelling about his conviction that ours was a society that, were it able to just listen for a single moment to what he had to say, would soon be changing for the better. Maybe even buying up yet more copies of Pampoen and Ou Kraalliedjie.

It was for this reason, I told the Mahogany Ridge regulars as we discussed Red October, that I had dubbed Hofmeyr the "Boer Bono". It wasn't meant as a compliment, but I believe he was flattered by it. This was some years, I should add, before the incident in which Hofmeyr purportedly threw his U2 concert tickets into the Jukskei River in protest at Bono's alleged support for the "Kill The Boer" song.

I mention this because it seemed as if a completely different Hofmeyr led Thursday's march of the usual suspects on the Union Buildings to protest the "white genocide". Gone was all the innocence, and in its place goggle-eyed raving about conspiracy theories and ethnic minorities. Then there was that terrible beard. What was that all about? The Hell's Deacon look? And the zombie make-up? Clearly our Steve's gone all Kurtz on us.

If it was attention they were after, Red October certainly got it. True, most of it was jeering from the chattering classes who would laugh at anything anyway. Especially a group of men who looked as if they all came from a time and place where meat was still cheap. And let's not forget the red balloons they were holding.

The comic writer Tom Eaton had a field day on Twitter with his bulletins from the killing fields: "White genocide hotting up. Long line of whites shuffling bleakly towards a black woman interrogator who says, ‘Do you have a MySchool card?'" "Oh no. Just caught glimpse of starving white women, all bones, strapped to torture machines by large black man called ‘personal trainer'." "Shit, just saw lot of whites being herded into a bus and driven away. White genocide? It said ‘Hotel Shuttle' on door, but was it a trick?"

But the laughter was a little disquieting. If they had any sense, Red October would just ditch the genocide and race cards and ‘fess up that Thursday's protests were really all about farm murders.

And they're justified in saying that many of the attacks on white farmers are racially motivated. This is is South Africa. Race has "infernalised" and corrupted everything we know about ourselves. And of course they're hate crimes. It's murder, isn't it?

Late on Thursday afternoon, long after the last balloons had disappeared, police in Klerksdorp announced the arrest of two men accused of murder and robbery on a North West farm. The body of Henrietta van der Schyff, 73, was found in her bedroom. Her wounds were reportedly so severe that police could not say with any certainty whether she died as a result of being shot or battered with a blunt object.

Her husband, Frans van der Schyff, 76, who suffered severe head injuries in the attack, is in intensive care in a Johannesburg hospital. The two suspects were arrested at a neighbouring farm. They were in possession of the Van der Schyff's car and three stolen firearms.

That's about all you'll read of the Van der Schyffs for a while. We're not really interested in them. When the matter comes to trial there may be more reports. The thing is, they've become so commonplace, these farm murders, and we've grown to accept them as part of the social fabric. There could be five a year, there could be 50, but it makes no real difference to our lives. We just plod on - and laugh at the silly buggers with the balloons.

This article first appeared in The Weekend Argus.

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