South Africa On Fire

The murder of a hated man brings tears to few eyes but in South Africa Eugene Terre’Blanche’s untimely demise may yet have a country all too familiar with sorrow drying their communal eyes once again. A violent white supremacist who clung to the iconography of the Nazi Party, and served a prison sentence for beating a black security guard almost to death, Eugene Terre’Blanche was another sad reminder of a troubled past. It is perhaps to the nation’s credit that he had sunk largely into obscurity in recent years. An obscure figure at his death and if he had simply sunk into his deepest sleep there would be little remark on his death, such is the damage an ill advised push for independence for Afrikaners did to his reputation.

Instead he was brutally murdered by two black employees in a row over unpaid wages, an act that has inflamed the extreme right. It has been taken as a sign of rising racial tension in the country, with Terre’Blanche’s organisation, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), claiming that he is only the latest in a pattern of murders of white farmers. Adding to this racial maelstrom is the ANC’s youth leader’s repeated performances of an old resistance song called “Shoot the Boer”. Boer being a commonly used name for white farmer and a term that Terre’Blanche took up as a trophy. The performance of this song marks a new long in the attitude of the ANC to South Africa’s white minority and its general failure to push South Africa forward is coming back to haunt them. Now the AWB are able to make sweeping statements, accusing South Africa of being too dangerous a place for a World Cup, a “land of murder”. Such is their lack of faith in the system that they are planning their retribution rather than wait for the courts.

One party states don’t work as a rule, competition is the oxygen of democracy, it fuels creativity and imagination. The ANC is simply too powerful to properly examine its actions, evidenced by their election of an oaf as President, and their continuing failure to act as a leader in African affairs. Jacob Zuma now has a chance to prove himself, can he be the leader he was elected to be? Can he manage this crisis so that outrage does not spread from the extremists to the wider white population? Most of all, can he act like a statesman in reaction to a high profile murder and prove that South African politics are about more than race? If he does it would be an achievement to match anything Mandela managed.