The hacking of an old white supremacist hand poignantly brings home the historical predicament tearing at the heart of South Africa as the country prepares to host the World Cup, warns Gamal Nkrumah Returning ghosts haunt South Africa. Last week, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) Youth League President Julius Malema was banned from singing the anti-apartheid battle cry liberation song Ayesaba Amagwala (The Cowards are Scared) which a regional high court ruled incited violence against whites. The ruling outraged blacks, many of whom see Malema as the "voice of the voiceless" and as articulating the anger of the underdog, the poor, disfranchised and black masses of South Africa. Almost to prove the judge's point, this week, while Malema was being feted in neighbouring Zimbabwe, South Africa's most vociferous white supremacist Eugene Terre Blanche was killed by his farm hands in his own homestead. Born in 1941, Terre Blanche founded the Afrikaner Resistance Movement or Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) in 1970, proudly proclaiming the banner of hatred and segregation. His mutilated body was found symbolically with the traditional African farm tools and weapons -- knobkerrie and panga machetes -- next to it. Two black African suspects were detained. They were workers on Terre Blanche's farm who had recently had an argument with the racist leader over unpaid wages. Sometimes sordid details tell us salubrious things. People are questioning whether the white racist leader's gory ruin was politically motivated. It comes at an inopportune moment for South Africa. The country is preparing to host the football World Cup, the first to be held on African territory. South African President Jacob Zuma urged restraint and calm. "We are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma," the controversial Malema threatened recently, much to the consternation of the country's white minority who constitute 10 per cent of the population. Zuma is widely viewed as being at best too lenient and at worst secretly sympathetic to Malema's sentiments. Many whites are indignant that a firebrand such as Malema could hold such high profile public office. During his fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe Malema was greeted with thunderous applause and hailed as a "true revolutionary" and "freedom fighter". He professed interest in Zimbabwe's indigenisation programme and the "land grab" policy of confiscation of white-owned agricultural property. Malema expressed the wish that South Africa would emulate Zimbabwe. "We want the mines. They have been exploiting our minerals for a long time. Now it is our turn to also enjoy these minerals," Malema, in reference to the white-owned farms and mines in South Africa, addressed cheering Zimbabwean crowds. Malema's critics at home are systematically dismissed as "counter-revolutionaries", "racists" and "white settler colonialists". There are growing calls in South Africa for the ANC to emulate the "land grab" policy of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. More than 3,000 white farmers have been killed in South Africa since the end of apartheid in the country in 1994. Terre Blanche, the descendant of French Huguenots, had prophetically warned of his own death. "It is clear that the South African police cannot stop the rape, murder and robbery of our people," he said recently. His optimism in championing the white cause was, however, misplaced. "We fought the British Commonwealth, we can survive the ANC," he was quoted as saying. "Our country is being run by criminals who murder and rob," Terre Blanche lamented. It is perhaps not so ironic that he met his end at the hands of his own black employees, those he derisively derided as "criminals, murderers and robbers". Alan Paton's classic Cry The Beloved Country was a novel that graphically depicted life in South Africa under apartheid and few could have foreseen how things would have unfolded in the post-apartheid period. The crux of the matter is that even though black Africans gained considerable political clout with the end of apartheid, they have yet to experience economic emancipation. The sad reality is that income differentials between blacks and whites in South Africa have not narrowed significantly in the post-apartheid period. This disparity of incomes between blacks and whites has led to widespread resentment among blacks and might lead to a political backlash similar to the land grab policy adopted in neighbouring Zimbabwe. In short, Terre Blanche's assassination has a forceful topicality. So what made him so emblematic? Dhubula Ibhunu (Shoot the White Farmer) is the rallying cry of the farm labourers and landless peasants in South Africa and Terre Blanche's killing has brought into sharp focus the increasingly polarised perspectives regarding the country's future. South Africans are bitterly divided as to whether Terre Blanche's death was a farm murder, an act of political assassination or a case of class struggle. The debate has opened a Pandora's Box in the run-up to the World Cup. This is the significant South Africa moment. It is a tortuous trial for the Rainbow nation. Terre Blanche's life and death, like the protagonist in Too Late The Phalarope, Paton's contemporary Greek tragedy set in South Africa, unravels the predicament of white moral bankruptcy masquerading as moral superiority. Like Pieter van Vlaanderen, the villain of the piece, Terre Blanche failed to reconcile his fundamental character flaws with the charade of his moral uprightness in the hearts and minds of his people. In the end both fictitious hero and the slain Afrikaner martyr brought about their own destruction and that of their people whom the portended to defend. At this point we inevitably reflect on the current controversy surrounding the demise of Terre Blanche in South Africa. He was a man incapable of deep retrospection. White racists hanged on his every eccentric pronouncement. For those white South Africans who have kept an ever hopeful eye on the revival of white supremacy and racial segregation, his cries for help had an added, poignant resonance. Where, I wondered on first hearing it, did the years go? Terre Blanche represented the naked wickedness of white South Africa, the cruel and callous survival instinct that thrives on the obliteration of the indigene. He looked gaunt and decrepit long before his time. He was an anachronistic political animal in every sense of the word. His political trajectory has, in many ways, run diametrically counter to that of the black Africans who now run the country. In spite of his incessant protestations, he has seen "Black Power" spiral out of control into parliament in Pretoria, into the corridors of power in Cape Town. From the halcyon days of the 1960s and 1970s to the uncertainties of the 1980s and the New South Africa of the 1990s, Terre Blanche was systematically losing ground to those who ultimately destroyed him and who he despised when still alive and kicking. Then all of a sudden his political career was over. He was rudely awakened, so to speak, from his dream of white supremacy. There is an allegory lurking here. Terre Blanche's sorry end sounds the death knell for his ilk. Again the resilience, the bluff optimism and dogged determination disguised the true extent of his failure. His life was in shreds. The irony conceals a great deal of heartbreak for him and for his people, or at least for those whom he professed to represent. He had no conception of changing times, no regard for the contemporary. His politics epitomised the turbulence, uncertainty and the increasing pessimism of white supremacists of the times. His pronouncements sounded by turn choleric, defiant and uncompromising. Terre Blanche tried in vain to synthesise the cataclysmic social trends challenging South Africa into a coherent political platform that exclusively serves the interests of whites. His bloody death re-opens old wounds even though it is, by the same token, a very symptom of the apartheid legacy. How much could he get away with and still triumph? It was the madness in his method and message, the man revered by millions of racists in southern Africa and around the world, whose very name epitomises the notion of European settler colonialism. The omens were not good. There is a moral to the grisly story of the life and death of Terre Blanche. The old cliché, who lives by the sword dies by the sword, springs to mind. Southern Africa will continue to spout the Malemas and Mugabes until the injustices of the past are redressed, and the question of social justice is seriously addressed. That is what I call a history lesson.
