VENTERSDORP, South Africa - Followers of South Africa's slain white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche said Sunday they blamed a fiery youth leader for spreading hate speech that led to his killing, amid growing racial tensions in the once white-led country. Terreblanche was bludgeoned to death by two of his farm workers Saturday in an apparent dispute over wages. The 69-year-old 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.'" Nienaber also called for calm. Malema heads the African National Congress Youth League and 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. Boer means white farmers in Afrikaans, the language of descendants of early Dutch settlers, or Afrikaners. 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. 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.
