Doomsday preppers: South Africans preparing for darker days

While the average Joe is going about his usual day, there are groups of people anticipating and preparing for the worst.

Modern-day doomsday preppers are gearing up for a total blackout should the conspiracy theories of petrol, diesel and food shortages be realised.

Wynand Bezuidenhout from Pretoria West considers himself a doomsday prepper.

“We already have a plan in place to flee and to set up camp should the paw-paw hit the fan. It’s coming,” he said.

Bezuidenhout said Africa was a great example of what could go wrong. “Every time a government switches from colonialism, unrest follows,” he said.

Total blackout

Bezuidenhout said if load shedding stage 8 was implemented, a blackout was imminent within hours.

“Everything will go out within three hours, including the network and fuel. Everything is pointing to that we are headed to a total blackout,” he said.

“I’ve been part of civil groups for the past five years. The main goal when the chaos erupts is to get everyone out of the cities and safeguard them in the Karoo,” he added.

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Bezuidenhout said he has basic grab bags stocked with first aid kits, survival kits and other essentials.

“Many preppers made the mistake of over preparing. It can result in more vehicles being needed to flee because they overload themselves,” he said.

Bezuidenhout belongs to self-care groups, where members post tips on surviving the bush.

“The others are more organisational and militant groups who are planning to take action,” he said.

He said he was one of the many members of the Suidlanders, which describes itself as a South African right-wing ethnonationalism Afrikaner survivalist group with an ideology based on prophecies.

The members all form part of the emergency plan and are part of the six-phase system to evacuate, regroup and administrate once out of danger.

Suidlanders leader Wynand du Toit warned his 25 000-plus followers in a YouTube address last week that trouble is on its way.

Preserve food

Lucinda Stander said she doesn’t believe in the blackout conspiracies but that her brother-in-law’s family had been preparing for five years.

“They dry out and preserve food such as fruit, vegetables and meat. They pack all the essentials in a trailer that’s ready to go,” she said.

Stander said her in-laws had other essentials for bush survival in the trailer, which stood ready to be hooked to flee.

The trailer gets cleaned out and restocked annually.

“His wife taught herself to dry foods and preserve them. She recently started drying milk,” she said.

Stander said her in-laws had bought two dehydrators for R5 000 each to preserve food.

“Even when they have a difficult month financially, they will not remove food from the trailer; they would rather go without,” she added.

Stander said the in-laws also belonged to various WhatsApp groups and watched YouTube videos about surviving doomsday.

“They have a grab bag in the house with power banks and other essentials which they might need to go on the run,” she said.

Stander said she told them preparing trailers was useless if they were to go on the run because if chaos broke out, they would likely get robbed of the items.

“I don’t see the goal in it,” she said.

Conspiracy theorists

Criminologist professor Jaco Barkhuizen said doomsday preppers were a subgroup in a subgroup of conspiracy theorists.

“These are usually people in the world who believe a government will end or some supernatural event will take place and only a select few of the preppers will survive an apocalypse,” he said.

Barkhuizen said the problem with doomsday preppers was that the paranoia could become so severe it could become criminal.

“They believe so strongly that if the disillusion was challenged, it may turn violent and misinterpretation may lead to the detrimental effect [similar to] what happened at Ruby Ridge, where anti-government establishment preppers misinterpreted actions by the government which led to shootings and deaths,” he said.