Kill All White Farmers: South African Farmer’s Murder Blamed On Black Hate Speech

Apr 4, 2010 6 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

VENTERSDORP, South Africa (AP) – A South African farmer was bludgeoned to death by two of his farm workers in an apparent wage dispute, police said, and his followers on Sunday blamed a fiery youth leader for spreading hate speech that led to his killing.

Eugene Terreblanche’s violent death on Saturday came amid growing racial tensions in the once white-led country and underscores an ongoing controversy over African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema’s performance last month of an apartheid-era song that advocates the killing of white farmers.

Terreblanche, 69, was leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, that wanted to create three all-white republics within South Africa in which blacks would be allowed only as guest workers.

Andre Nienaber, a member of the group and a relative of Terreblanche, said he believed his death was “as a result of Julius Malema’s hate speech and direct orders in the media to ‘shoot the Boers dead.’”

Boer means white farmers in Afrikaans, the language of descendants of early Dutch settlers, or Afrikaners.

Nienaber also called for calm.

Malema is often in the news for his fiery rhetoric. Last month, he led college students in belting out a song that includes the lyrics “shoot the Boer.” Malema did not mention Terreblanche or any other person in his performance.

The song has sparked a legal battle in which the ruling ANC party has challenged a high court that ruled the lyrics as unconstitutional. The ANC insists the song is a valuable part of its cultural heritage and that the lyrics—which also refer to the farmers as thieves and rapists—are not intended literally and are therefore not hate speech.

Malema arrived in neighboring Zimbabwe on Saturday and could not be reached immediately for comment on Sunday. But on Saturday, at a youth rally in the capital of Harare, he defended his decision to sing the song.

“We are not being allowed to sing liberation songs in South Africa, but we are not going to stop,” he said. “We are prepared to go jail and get arrested again. This is the court ruling of the white men in South Africa, but we are not going to obey it.”

Relatives and friends of Terreblanche gathered near his homestead Sunday morning to pay their respects. They gathered in front of a house with an oxwagon parked on the front lawn, a symbol of South Africa’s white settlers. Terreblanche’s family and the AWB invited the press into one of their homes to hear a brief statement. But later, as journalists outside the house tried to interview people who came to commiserate with the family, several AWB members carrying pistols in hip holsters, threatened the press and ordered them to leave immediately.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party blamed increasing racial tensions for the killing.

“This happened in a province where racial tension in the rural farming community is increasingly being fueled by irresponsible racist utterances” by two members of the governing African National Congress, said the Democratic Alliance legislator for that constituency, Juanita Terblanche.

Terblanche, no relative of the far-right leader, said her party did not share his political convictions but warned that the attack on him could be seen as an attack on the diverse components of South Africa’s democracy.

President Jacob Zuma appealed for calm following “this terrible deed.” In a statement, he asked “South Africans not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fueling racial hatred.”

The killing comes 10 weeks before South Africa prepares to host the first World Cup soccer tournament on African soil, with massive expenditures on infrastructure being questioned as hundreds of thousands of tickets and hotel rooms remain unsold.

The South African Press Association quoted police spokeswoman Adele Myburgh as saying that Terreblanche was attacked by a 21-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy who worked for him on his farm outside Ventersdorp, about 110 kilometers (68 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.

Myburgh said the alleged attackers have been arrested and charged with murder. She said the two, whom she did not identify by name, told the police that there had been a dispute because they were not paid for work they had done on the farm.

“Mr. Terreblanche’s body was found on the bed with facial and head injuries.” She said a machete was found on his body and a knobkerrie—a wooden staff with a rounded head—next to his bed.

Terreblanche’s brother Andries Terreblanche urged reporters on Sunday to appear at the suspect’s first court appearance, scheduled for Tuesday.

“Everyone must come to court to hear what is the truth,” he said. “It isn’t about wages.”

Terreblanche and other AWB members later clashed with police as they tried to enter a press conference at the mayor’s office. Police refused to let several men enter with their pistols and stopped a woman who attempted to enter the building with a switchblade.