‘The farm attack brought me closer to the Lord,’ says Free State farmer

[Nat Quinn]

 

 

 

 

Hennie Cronje (73) still gets emotional when he talks about the question the Lord asked him 30 years ago. This was two weeks after he and his family survived a farm attack near Paris. They were robbed by three gunmen, and Hennie was kidnapped on top of that.

He was still a young and fresh 43 at the time, and he remembered the details as yesterday.

“I wanted to kill them afterwards,” says the born and bred Free Stater, “but the Lord kept me from it.”

Hennie’s faith journey went from hatred to forgiveness during a very turbulent time in South Africa.

The newspaper article where Hennie and Frandri looked out the bathroom window through which she and the children could escape from the robbers. Photo supplied

‘I was horribly angry’

Over lunch, this father of five tells me his whole story. How the three men stormed into the house one Sunday afternoon. How he experienced the Lord speaking to him reassures him that they will get through this. How his family was able to escape and he was able to seek help after the robbers dropped him off on Sasolburg’s outskirts.

He recalls how traumatised he was after these events: “I was afraid of the night and the dark. I was horribly angry, so angry that I would murder them if I got hold of them.”

But then, one morning, everything changed. He heard the Lord ask him: “Hennie, my child, if I send them now, and they stand at your security gate when you walk out, and they put their hands in the air and ask you ‘help us so we can get to heaven too’ – what will you do?”

He drinks a sip of water, then says: “I always get emotional when I talk about this. I lost all my hatred at that moment, all my persecution delusions. I was never angry with them again after that. The Lord changes a person’s heart.”

Today, he says, looking back on it, he’s grateful that the robbery took place. Because that experience brought him closer to the Lord. “But,” he adds on a lighter note, “I also said to the Lord, ‘Please, not again!’ It wasn’t very nice, it was a little sticky…”

Hennie Cronje and his wife Frandri. Photo supplied

“Dad, what now?”

All three robbers were arrested, for which Hennie and his family were grateful. Hennie says he also realised during the robbery that he knew two of them. One grew up on the farm with his sons, played football together. And the other famous was a brother of one of his workers.

The court case that followed was even more traumatic for Hennie and his family than the attack. He recounted how, during a scouting parade, he could see the hatred in the eyes of the men standing in front of him. Unlike what one sees in American TV shows, where the witness stands safely behind one-way glass, he had to touch the shoulder of the man he recognized as one of the robbers with his left hand.

It was a messy, uncertain time for many people at the time. It was the nineties, and the country’s first democratic election lay ahead. Many white people wondered if they shouldn’t leave the country; others hoarded canned food.

Hennie remembers their one son coming up to him and his wife Frandri and asking, “Dad, what now? What now?” This was shortly after Nelson Mandela was elected as the country’s first black president on 27 April 1994.

He remembered what he answered. “My child,” he said, “this country does not belong to FW de Klerk or to Nelson Mandela, it belongs to the Lord.”

Then he told his son that after the farm attack he and their mother decided that they would emigrate. Not to another country, but from the old South Africa to the new South Africa.

“That’s why we’re still here,” said the father, who has two children living overseas today. The farm has since been sold, and one of the sons has taken over the family’s transport business.

What does its type of emigration mean? I asked him.

“That means we left the old stuff behind. Apartheid, a white government… We have accepted the changes that have come with an open heart and we will make the best of them.

“Where we can do our part, we will do it regardless of who is in power. We decided we were staying in South Africa. Here’s room for us. We are part of this country.”

 

source:‘The farm attack brought me closer to the Lord,’ says Free State farmer – LiG Magazine

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