Eugene Terre’Blanche: Nazi Loser
April 6, 2010
Marc Lizoain
On Saturday, Eugene Terre’Blanche, South African Nazi leader, was killed in his sleep by two of his farm workers. It is an unsurprising end for a man who made the abuse of black Africans his life’s work.
The response to Terre’Blanche’s murder has been educational. His political party, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), immediately laid the blame on one man, Julius Malema, and vowed vengeance. The English-speaking press has thoroughly investigated this line. Articles in the Telegraph, the BBC, the South African Sunday Times, the New York Times, and the Globe and Mail, have all repeated comments about Malema’s perceived role. This raises two questions. Who is Julius Malema, and what has he done to deserve this?
Julius Malema is the 29-year-old leader of the ruling ANC’s Youth League. He is the loudest critic of the continuing and disproportionate economic power held by the nation’s white minority. This stance, together with his apparently flashy lifestyle, has won him hatred, fear, and ridicule from the South African elite. It has also made him hugely popular among the nation’s poor, and given him a large power base within his party. The current president, Jacob Zuma, would never have been able to oust the very business-friendly Thabo Mbeki without Malema’s decisive support.
Lately, Malema has has been in the habit of singing an old anti-Apartheid song whose lyrics include a call to shoot Boers. To criticize his song-selection as inappropriate is fair, but those who do so should remember that the violent political song has a long and noble tradition in Western democracies, as anyone acquainted with the Marseillaise or John McCain’s cover of the Beach Boys would know. Malema might be making a political error, but to blame him for creating a culture of violence in South Africa is to attribute to the young man powers he does not possess. When he sings “shoot the Boer,” he is doing nothing more than representing a powerful sentiment in South African opinion.
In fact, if anyone wants to complain about a culture of violence in South Africa, perhaps they would benefit from a slightly longer memory. A culture of violence was precisely the foundation of the Apartheid regime’s power, which ruled from 1948 to 1994. That government, racist as a policy, brutalized its citizens at home, assassinated its opponents abroad, and waged wars that killed millions in Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. By the 1970s, South Africa even held nuclear weapons ready to vaporize any army that stood against them.
The culture of violence had no more dedicated a defender than Eugene Terre’Blanche. The Apartheid state was cruel in defence of white power, but not militant enough for Terre’Blanche. In 1973, in an attempt to drag his country further to the right, he set up the AWB, an armed, disciplined organization with a modified swastika for a logo. His comrades called him Die Leier, the Afrikaans word for Führer.
The major activity of the AWB was committing violence against non-whites. In 1993, when the Apartheid government was finally discussing a transition to democracy, the AWB attacked the venue hosting the negotiations and disrupted them by force. In 1994, the AWB tried to sabotage the nation’s first free elections with a bombing campaign. They failed to achieve their goal, but succeeded in killing twenty-one innocent civilians. Terre’Blanche later publicly accepted responsibility for the attacks and was rewarded with amnesty by the new South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission in 1998.
The end of Apartheid left Terre’Blanche free to farm his land, but did nothing to diminish his love of hurting others. In 1996 he beat and shot a black security guard in the head, leaving the man permanently disabled. He served three years for this crime, his first and only prison term.
Terre’Blanche met his end after a wage dispute. Two workers, aged 28 and 15, reportedly confronted him to demand months of withheld pay. According to the Associated Press, Terre’Blanche refused and threatened to kill the two. The young men struck first, and left Terre’Blanche’s corpse beaten and hacked until it was unrecognizable. The alleged killers then turned themselves in to the police.
The same publications that find such importance in the Malema connection take great pains to paint Terre’Blanche as a buffoon, a farcical figure. His obituary in the Financial Times mentions an episode where he fell off his horse at a rally, gossips about an alleged extramarital affair, but somehow omits any mention of a role in the 1994 bombings. There is much absurdity and little humor in the story of a man who aspired to be South Africa’s Hitler.
The Guardian called Terre’Blanche “a relic of a bygone age.” If only it were so. Sixteen years after the end of Apartheid, there has been no significant progress on the issue of land reform. The vast majority of South Africa’s best land is still owned by men like Terre’Blanche, who live well at the expense of their underpaid workers. Fighting this injustice will only become more popular in the years to come.
A day after promising revenge, the AWB’s leadership retracted the statement. They are a non-violent political party, they say. Perhaps they realized that promoting ideas of retribution in the minds of Julius Malema and his many supporters will not make their lives any easier. Eugene Terre’Blanche reaped what he sowed. There is still time for South Africa’s landowners to avoid the consequences of the culture of violence they created. But not much.
Southern Africa
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Originally Posted by Rooikat
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