The murder of Raymond Buys: 'I think they knew they were going to kill my boy'
The South African teenager was 15 when he was enrolled in a training camp that claimed to ‘make men out of boys’. Was the resurgence of the far right to blame for his death?
Raymond Buys, aged 15, with his mother Wilna, on the day he went to Echo Wild Game Rangers camp.
In their final family photograph, Raymond Buys looks as awkward as any 15-year-old boy standing next to his mother. He’s nearly 6ft tall and the harsh South African sun glints off his newly cropped blond hair. Despite the heat, he wears teen regulation black. Soon he’ll be in khaki.
Wilna Buys pulls her son close, knowing there are only minutes before she must send him through the gates behind them into Echo Wild Game Rangers camp. An electric fence almost seems to buzz in the background. Giant fake tusks guard the gates, giving the impression of a mouth. Raymond narrows his eyes, maybe at the sun, maybe at the man taking the picture – Gys Nezar, his mother’s boyfriend. Nobody smiles for the camera.
It is 12 January 2011. This place is supposed to be a fresh start. Raymond, who was diagnosed with learning difficulties, aged nine, has been removed from yet another school. Wilna can’t cope, the family is fracturing. Gys found the camp, run by Alex de Koker, a former soldier known as “the General” who promises to “make men out of boys”. Gys trusts him. Wilna just wants everyone to get along. Raymond has no choice.
Three months later, on 20 April, Raymond will be pronounced dead by doctors so traumatised by his injuries they require counselling. When he is admitted to hospital, Wilna does not recognise her son: he is skeletal and has more than 60 separate injuries including a broken arm, broken ribs and chemical and electrical burns. The tips of his ears are missing and his hair has been scoured off. His kidneys are failing and his brain is damaged. He never regains consciousness. During the subsequent trial, which runs from 2012 to 2015, Wilna is vilified on social media and forced to relocate.
This is the story of how Raymond ended up at those gates and what happened inside Echo Wild Game Rangers camp. Of the General, and a network of secret training camps linked to the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) – a white, neo-Nazi paramilitary group arming itself for war in South Africa. And of how Britain’s actions in South Africa over a century ago – sparking the Boer wars, then “concentrating” a whole nation into hellish camps – sowed the seeds of hate greedily harvested by far-right groups today. These are the camps Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP, recently defended on BBC Question Time, trumpeting: “You’ve got to understand the history.” Indeed, you have. Especially if you want to stop it repeating itself.
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I first read about Raymond in a British newspaper article; other coverage suggested he was gay and that Echo was a conversion therapy camp. In the picture at the gates he looks just like a long-lost pal of mine, a boy who came to my primary school in Scotland in 1985 from South Africa. My pal went back after a year and we lost touch. It wasn’t him in the picture, of course. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to this boy who looked so much like him.
As I followed the case, it threw up more questions than answers. Was Raymond a normal teenager or a lawless reprobate, as some claimed? Was Echo a conversion therapy camp, a paramilitary training facility or a legitimate business? Who was the General? And what mother sends her son to a place like that? Most coverage was in Afrikaans, and in a country besieged by violence even a case as appalling as Raymond’s soon stopped being reported. The search for answers would eventually take me to South Africa, to Wilna, and to those gates.
Raymond Buys was born in the mining town of Boksburg.
Raymond Buys was born in the mining town of Boksburg, not far from Johannesburg, on 2 June 1995 – the year after Mandela was elected president. “Ray was always a good boy,” says Wilna, unable to look up from the baby picture she holds. “His father wasn’t around. But we did OK. I know I wasn’t always a good mother but I did my best. I should never have sent him there. I have to live with that.”
Her thoughts tumble out with her tears. Now 43, she has a soft, almost girlish voice. I spent three days talking to her and Gys, mainly at their home, a modest bungalow in a gated development in Johannesburg. Wilna is an administrator in a steelworks. She never really knew her father and her mother married four times. “I wanted a more stable life for me and my boy,” she says. “For the first nine years, it was just us.” Then she met Gys, 49, a car salesman who, like all Afrikaner men his age, had done national service. Afrikaans is the couple’s first language. They chatter back and forth in it but answer me in English. Yes is always “ja”.
“It was hard for Ray at first,” says Wilna, tears getting the better of her mascara. “But eventually they got along.” The arrival of a brother, Little Gys, helped. “Gys spoiled us. We used to struggle but he got Ray cricket stuff, rugby kit, all these expensive things. But Ray always lost interest.”
“We couldn’t keep him in school,” says Gys. “He kept running away or not turning up. We tried everything.”
At one stage Raymond was given Ritalin, but Wilna says he woudn’t take the pills. Just before secondary school, they sent him for private treatment. “Doctors attached electrodes to his brain and it worked for a while,” says Wilna.
Raymond attended at least three different schools and was often bullied. “One time someone held a knife to him. He soiled himself when he was stressed,” says Wilna. Just before his last school could expel him, Wilna took him out. “Then he was disruptive at home,” says Gys. “Disrespectful to me and his mother – smoking, swearing, always on his phone. We had to do something. It’s not like it used to be here [in South Africa], you can’t just walk into a job. It’s tough. Then I heard about this place, a buddy said it fixed his cousin’s boy. It was 22,000R (£1,200) for three months, so we had to get a loan, but at the end he gets a job.”
Gys passes me the contract from Echo Wild Game Rangers camp. “X Military Leaders” is emblazoned on the front and beneath a set of cross-hairs: “STRENG VERTROULIK – HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL”. It claims: “We instil: faith, discipline, rules and regulations, respect, hard work, hard education, tough physical exercise, bearing, literacy, numeracy, efficiency, reliability, team work, animal care and conservation and community defence.” After three months, the idea was that Raymond would go off to a safari job and start his new life.
Raymond with Alex de Koker in 2011.
Gys and Wilna visited the camp. It’s barely an hour from Johannesburg in Mooilande, which means Beautiful Land. It was beautiful once. Now it’s struggling smallholdings and former farms. “In the General’s study he had all these photos of himself,” says Wilna. “He was a big man, handsome, same age as Gys. He said he had trained over 300 boys and they had all got jobs, out in the country.” What jobs? “Like safari guides,” says Wilna, hopefully. “Now, I think maybe they were to be guards, for the farms,” admits Gys. “You know, all the farmers are being murdered.”
The “large-scale killing of farmers” in South Africa was highlighted by Donald Trump in an August 2018 tweet – his first since taking office to mention Africa at all. The contrarian former reality TV contestant, Katie Hopkins, hurried to South Africa later the same year to report on “anti-white racism” and was temporarily detained by police for “spreading racial hatred”. In 2017, Pieter Groenewald, leader of the Afrikaner party Freedom Front Plus, claimed the murder rate on white farms was 133 per 100,000 (the national average is 34.1). Africa Check, a non-profit that scrutinises such figures, disputes this. Their calculation, including all family members and smallholdings like the General’s, is 0.4 per 100,000. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, identifies the claim of a “genocide” of white farmers as “a lodestar for white supremacist groups at home and abroad”. De Koker sought to profit from these fears by turning vulnerable boys into armed guards employed by alarmed farmers.
Born in 1964, De Koker had done at least his two years’ compulsory national service in the apartheid-era South African Defence Force, but there is no record of him attaining a rank anywhere near general; afterwards he continued to wear the SADF uniform. Wilna says she did not recognise the black, white and red flag of the AWB in his study but Gys did. The AWB was founded by Eugène Terre’Blanche in 1973, to resurrect the lost Boer Republics as a whites-only homeland. Its logo resembles the swastika. The group, once disbanded, is resurfacing as part of a wider revival of the South African right. Gys also identified the man smiling in photos with the General as Terre’Blanche. “It didn’t trigger any alarms as such,” says Gys. “So what? He knew the man. It was well set up. I knew it would be tough but the army made a man out of me. That’s what I wanted for Raymond.”
More visible and vocal than the AWB, but avowedly “non-aggressive”, are the Suidlanders. Their spokesman, Simon Roche, says the group is now more than 130,000 strong and represents “the white people of South Africa who are presently being told that they can expect to see a genocide against them”. He portrays Afrikaners as victims-in-waiting and their trump card is a chapter of colonial history many in Britain remain ashamed to acknowledge.
The Boer wars (there were two) are no longer on the school curriculum. The second Boer war (1899-1902) was the last fought on horseback, and made household names of Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. Britain deployed nearly 500,000 soldiers against 50,000 fighters from the two Boer states, almost all farmers (“Boer” means farmer in Dutch). But Britain was losing, outwitted by new “commando” tactics. Faced with defeat, Lord Kitchener enforced “scorched earth”, torching 30,000 farms, ostensibly to cut off supplies. Salt was ploughed into the soil. Britain created a nation of refugees, mostly women and children, and then “concentrated” them into camps.
Bloemfontein was the first, and is now home to the Anglo-Boer War Museum. A wall inlaid with black marble slabs greets visitors. It’s inscribed with the 26,370 women and children who died in the 42 official white camps – there were at least as many official black camps, about which we know pitifully little. Nearly 80% of victims were children, so British propaganda portrayed Boer women as bad mothers. In an attempt to besmirch them, Conan Doyle published a photograph of a seven-year-old girl called Lizzie van Zyl. Even now it hurts to look at her. She appears ancient, her eyes sunk grave-deep in her skull. She holds her doll close. Lizzie died of typhoid on 9 May 1901, shortly after her picture was taken. She has no headstone; most bodies were buried in mass graves. Yet her face still stares out from Afrikaner nationalist sites, her suffering hijacked in a bid to portray Afrikaners as noble victims. The last Boers to surrender, the bittereinders, helped to form the government of the new Union of South Africa in 1910; they were the bedrock of the National Party on which apartheid was built. This bitterness has only grown in the post-apartheid era as stability and growth have collapsed. The Suidlanders say civil war is inevitable; men like the General believe they must prevent another Boer genocide. Raymond was to be an unwitting soldier in this war.
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