A motorcyclist wearing a Scream mask pierced the deceptive calm outside the homestead of murdered Eugene Terre’Blanche near Venterdsorp on Sunday afternoon.
The man walked up to a wire fence outside the farm, ignoring the flowers laid in sympathy beside the long grass, and hung up an Israeli national flag. On it were the spray-painted words: “Ethnic cleansing. Afrikaner genocide.”
Ever since the Anglo-Boer war more than a century ago, when an estimated 28,000 perished in Lord Kitchener’s concentration camps, the descendants of Dutch and other European settler farmers in South Africa have felt a heightened sense of vulnerability.
PHOTO: AFP
Today, the threat is perceived as coming from the country’s black majority, which gained power with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, following the demise of racial apartheid.
Mandela’s creed of reconciliation seemed distant on Sunday as the violent death of Terre’Blanche focused fear and anger on rightwing Web sites, where feelings were already escalating in reaction to Julius Malema, leader of the African National Congress (ANC) youth league.
Malema’s persistent singing of an apartheid-era protest song containing the line “Kill the Boer” — Boer is Afrikaans for farmer — led to a media storm and a gagging order from a provincial court on the grounds that it could incite violence.
Malema has been described by the Freedom Front Plus party as “an accessory to the wiping out of farmers in South Africa.”
Last month, the civil rights group AfriForum took a list of more than 1,600 victims of farm murders to the ANC’s headquarters, Luthuli House. Members of the ANC youth league pushed them away and scattered the list on the street. AfriForum said the youth league deliberately trampled on the names and tore the list to pieces.
“It is extremely perturbing that they actually trod on the names of the murder victims,” said Ernst Roets, national chairman of AfriForum Youth. “It might just as well have been [Zimbabwean President] Robert Mugabe meeting us today.”
Indeed, the sum of all fears for South Africa’s white farmers is that the country will go the way of Zimbabwe, where Mugabe’s land reform policy has seen white farmers murdered, beaten and kicked off their properties in the name of black empowerment.
With unfortunate timing, Malema spent the weekend in Zimbabwe, lavishing praise on Mugabe and whipping up crowds with more renditions of Shoot the Boer. Tipped as a possible future president of South Africa, Malema also promised to copy Mugabe’s model of land and mine seizures.
“In South Africa we are just starting,” he was quoted by South Africa’s Sunday Times as saying. “Here in Zimbabwe you are already very far. The land question has been addressed. We are very happy that today you can account for more than 300,000 new farmers, against the 4,000 who used to dominate agriculture. We hear you are now going straight to the mines. That’s what we are going to be doing in South Africa.”
Never shy of racialized rhetoric, Malema said: “We want the mines. They have been exploiting our minerals for a long time. Now it’s our turn to also enjoy from these minerals. They are so bright, they are colorful, we refer to them as white people, maybe their color came as a result of exploiting our minerals and perhaps if some of us can get opportunities in these minerals we can develop some nice color like them.”
A source at the opposition Movement for Democratic Change told South Africa’s City Press: “When Malema comes back from Harare, expect him to speak like a younger Mugabe. Expect the push on nationalization and land redistribution to intensify. Expect the hate speeches to grow.”
Frans Cronje, deputy director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, said the number of commercial farmers had dropped from 60,000 to 40,000 in the past decade and the trend was set to continue.
“They do have a perception they’re under siege,” Cronje said. “This has been reinforced by the ANC’s recent comments.”
However, many South Africans, black and white, concede that Malema is right to say that political liberation has not translated into economic liberation for millions of black people.
Last year, South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said that some of the country’s farm murders were committed not because of racism, but because of conditions on some farms where migrant workers are exploited and unpaid, as if still under apartheid.
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