Murder case underscores inequality in South Africa
White supremacist bludgeoned to death over wages, not race
JOHANNESBURG— When a leading white supremacist was found bludgeoned to death in his bed on his farm outside Johannesburg in April 2010, the Rainbow Nation shuddered. The death of Eugene Terre’Blanche, the leader of the militant white separatist group known as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, seemed an ominous sign that the era of racial harmony — which began in 1994 with the end of apartheid and the beginning of non-racial democracy — was in peril.
But when a farmhand was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison for murdering Terre’Blanche, his death seemed a symbol of a problem that may be more intractable than racial disharmony: the stubborn economic inequality of post-apartheid South Africa and the violent rage that it engenders.
Race had nothing to do with the killing, concluded a court in Ventersdorp, 130 kilometres west of here. Chris Mahlangu, a young black man who worked on Terre’Blanche’s farm, killed him in a dispute over wages.
Terre’Blanche, a barrel-chested man with a bushy beard and a penchant for Nazi-style salutes, had led the flagrantly racist separatist group, more commonly known by its Afrikaans initials, AWB, for decades. He was famous for his dramatic flair: he liked to arrive at rallies astride a stallion, and his organization’s emblem looked like a swastika. But his militant group generated more light than heat.
Its attempt to take over the black homeland of Bophuthatswana just before the 1994 elections that brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power ended in humiliating defeat. Three members of the AWB were shot and killed in front of television cameras by a black police officer.
Terre’Blanche was later sentenced to six years in prison for assaulting a black worker. By the time of his death he had fallen into relative obscurity, as has much of the racist right wing in South Africa.
His killing raised fears that longdormant racial tensions would be reignited. It came as the firebrand leader of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, was reviving the anti-apartheid struggle anthem “Shoot the Boer.” Boer is an Afrikaans word meaning farmer. But those fears amounted to little. Right-wing threats to avenge his killing failed to produce the promised violence. Since then Malema has also met his comeuppance: he was expelled from the ANC this year for sowing divisions within the party. Mahlangu claimed that he killed Terre’Blanche in self-defence when the two got into a tussle over wages. But the court rejected that defence. A teenager who had broken into Terre’Blanche’s house with Mahlangu was convicted on a burglary charge. Tension and violence over deepening inequality and the slow pace of economic redistribution have weighed heavily on South Africa. Last week, police opened fire on thousands of machete-wielding miners engaged in a wildcat strike, killing 34 of them. The miners, who had demanded that their wages be tripled, hacked two police officers and two security guards to death in the days before the shooting. A report by the World Bank released last month said inequality and joblessness posed a serious threat to South Africa’s stability.