Murder of Eugene Terre’blanche

Murder of Eugene Terre’blanche

Phil Hall wants me to write something about the death of Eugene Terre’blanche. It will have to be fairly rough.

“ET” was attacked while he was taking a nap at his farm “Villanna” near the small farmland town of Ventersdorp at about six o’clock in the evening, yesterday, Holy Saturday, by two young men, aged 16 and 21, who battered and cut him to death with a panga, a club and maybe a pipe, such that his face was not recognisable. He was still alive when the police got to him but he died soon after. He was 69 years old.

The police have the two cowardly killers under custody. Contrary to what the BBC’s Africa Editor, Martin Plaut, wants people to think, it is not a surprise that the killers would have been picked up quickly in a place like Ventersdorp.

The police said that the killers had a grudge against ET because they had done farm work for him for which he had not paid. Other motives have not been ruled out.

Phil wants me to nail ET as a fascist but I think that the President of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, currently in Zimbabwe, is much more of a fascist than ET ever was. ET was a farmer, sometime actor and poet, and not a monopoly corporate capitalist by nature or aspiration. ET was taken up with nostalgia for the hard pioneering past of the rural Boers. He did not consider himself a racist. His politics were naïve.

For myself, I would like to say that when I first saw film of ET and his AWB on TV in Britain in the late 1980s I knew that the end was nigh for the “system”. Most Afrikaners, who were by then urban, and suburban, were, I could easily see, going to find this man as comical as I did. This was history as farce. Not that several people did not die as a consequence of the AWB activities. One of them was a member of my ANC branch, Susan Kean, who was killed by the Bree Street bomb just before the 1994 election.

The ANC has issued a good statement deploring the murder and offering condolences to the Terr’blanche family, his organisation, and his friends. The Presidency has issued a similar statement, and President Zuma made a special broadcast to the nation at the beginning of the 7 p.m. TV news, asking for calm and for a concerted opposition to violent crime of all sorts, as well as expressing condolences.

A lot of politicians gave their views. Some rode their political hobby-horses past ET’s coffin, so to speak, but most simply said that people must be calm and that the police must be allowed to do their job.

I regret the murder of Eugene Terre’blanche. He had been imprisoned for three years in the early 2000s for beating a farm worker and leaving the worker with a permanent disability. Our ability to contain and to deal with delinquents like Terre’blanche, in my opinion, was a good measure of the kind of serene democratic power that our democracy can at times have and needs to hold on to. The pacification of Terre’blanche was a token for the pacification of all the wild men. His murder opens up that can of worms again, so that his passing is more dangerous than his survival would have been.

Unlike President Zuma, Julius Malema, when asked for his view on camera in Zimbabwe, said coldly “we do not have to say anything about such people”. Malema is a very rich young man who is involved in multiple business deals. He began his current charge with an attack on the South African Communist Party, which rebuffed him. Malema's project is undoubtedly to fight with all kinds of defeatable forces before he turns on the communists again. He relishes the confrontation that he is going to have with the supporters of Terre’blanche and others like them, who have associated Malema’s singing of “Dubula Ibhunu”, a war song of the past, with Terre’blanche’s murder and with other murders of white farmers, of which there have been very many.

Fascism loves a heads I win, tails you lose situation and Malema has contrived to hazard a struggle song that he knows we are going to defend. The song has been banned by a court. How can you ban a song? It is like banning a book, or even more foolish than that, because this song is known by heart by millions of people.

Malema is a true demagogue. He claimed to be more communist than the communists, while wearing a R250,000 Breitling watch. He now appropriates a struggle song. He is talking of nationalising the mines, but admits that what he really means is a “public-private” partnership – a socialism for the capitalists. He is talking of taking the farms from the Boere, who include significant numbers of motivated and efficient farmers, whereas most people, and even most Boere, shun farming and want the city life.

Malema hits cheap targets. Terre’blanche was also a cheap target. The murder of a 69-year old man in his sleep by two young cowards is a disgusting atrocity.

We have a struggle against fascism in this country, but it is not with the AWB. If the AWB tries anything it will be smashed. The fascists we have to fear are young, and black, very arrogant and very foolish.