White Earth No More.

Back in the waning days of Apartheid, Eugene Terre'blanche was the bearded white power face of the militant right wing in South Africa.  With a name whose Huguenot origin translates as "White Earth", how could he not be? 

I remember watching images of him and his boer commando riding in on their horses prior to the so called "Battle of Ventersdorp" in 1991.  They were beefy men in bush hats and khaki camouflage, emblazoned at the shoulder with the three armed emblem of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a blunt knock off of its near relative the swastika. 

Terre'blanche and the AWB remained militant during the years since South African independence.  In 2001 he was convicted of attempted murder of a black security guard and served three years in prison.  After his release, he revived the AWB and announced plans to apply to the UN to form a breakaway Afrikaner republic.

A violent man, a fascist anachronism in the New South Africa, he met a violent end last Saturday, reportedly at the hands of two of his black farm workers in a dispute over wages.  A predictable death, perhaps, but a martyrdom that South Africa does not need. 

Racial tensions were already elevated after the leader of the ANC youth league publicly sang an old resistance song with the lyrics "Dubula amabhunu baya raypha", which in Zulu means "Shoot the boers, they are rapists.", although South Africa's Human Rights Commission has ruled the song hate speech.  Concerns about the country's high crime rate are already a challenge in advance of the World Cup which South Africa will host in a few months time.  And President Jacob Zuma , who has appealed for calm, himself lacks credibility.  He sang the ANC song "Bring me my machine gun" to supporters during his trial for rape in 2005.  The court found him not guilty, declaring it was consensual sex, and the woman involved was subsequently granted asylum in the Netherlands.  Mandela, he is decidedly not.

A CNN story puts it this way:

For many here, the atmosphere now smacks of those scary, dark days before South Africans voted for a new democratic South Africa in 1994 -- when the white man and the black man were so suspicious of each other that many thought this country's transition to democracy would be violent and bloody.

But South Africans were led out of the twisted spectre of racial hatred by Nelson Mandela -- whose leadership and calm management prevented a potentially explosive conflict.

Mandela is now an old man, who cannot be expected to quell another rising tide of hatred and it is now left to a new generation of South African leaders to heed the lessons which he taught them 16 years ago.

But the bonds of nationhood that Mandela strived to build are still fragile and many in South Africa fear that Terreblanche could be even more divisive in death than he was in life -- and tear apart a nation still struggling to let go of the past.

I sincerely hope not.  But I would look for some gesture from Mandela in the coming days, particularly if things do not settle down.  Old habits die hard, for good or ill.

Comments

[Davod]

Genocide of White South Africans is the subject of an April 5, 2010 blog entry at AtlasShrugs2000 (http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/04/white-genocide-in-south-africa.html ):

"...Malema, head of the ruling ANC's (African National Congress) Youth League, sings the racially charged apartheid-era song with the words "kill the Boer." South Africa's High Court ruled that the song was hate speech, although the ANC is appealing. The African National Congress (ANC) has been South Africa's governing party, supported by its tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), since the establishment of non-racial democracy in April 1994. It defines itself as a "disciplined force of the left".

Under ANC rule (which is communist party rule), the government has stopped reporting the race of murder victims and the race of the murderer. This is because the international community (mainly GenocideWatch.org) was noticing that there was a disproportionate amount of whites being murdered in South Africa -- so the ANC stopped reporting the race of victims of murder, so that there would be no way to track if murders were race based. Problem solved.

Boer is Afrikaans for a farmer, but is sometimes used as a disparaging term for any white in South Africa.

The genocide of Boers taking place in South Africa is never spoken of. Particularly the Boer Farmers -- it is called Plaas Moorde. In America you find little to no dialogue about the genocide of thousands of farmers in South Africa, because it's black against white. It is politically incorrect to call attention to the deaths of these human beings. And we have been taught to believe that the ANC and Nelson Mandela are the "good guys." The western media has made all whites in South Africa out to be racist monsters. This is simply not the case, and I would remind people that one of the steps to genocide is to dehumanize the target -- dehumanize the Boer. (more)

What is happening in South Africa against the White population is a crime against humanity. Savage. And no one will speak of it.

I must warn you that the following two links are xtremely graphic. The vet that sent them to me said, "even with 20 years in the US Military, I was shocked at what I saw. So horrific as to almost be unbelievable..." Go to linkforphotos.

[Tim Abbott]

You, sir, haven't a clue about what I know about SA. But your paranoia shines through. Thank you for proving my point.

[Stephen M Lawrence]

Oh my God!
You are really that clueless about SA? Try reading www.mysasucks.com and also read of their links to other SA sites. The white genocide is happening NOW while the liberals of the world pat themselves on the back and set their gaze on some other hapless country to destroy like these United States. The violence is incomprehensible; especially that done to the white farmers who are slaughtered in the most horrible ways imaginable. Read it if you dare, and then cry for civilization as it is quickly coming to an end.