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.