A popular white supremacist leader, who once opposed the end of South African apartheid, was murdered in his home over a dispute about wages with two black farmhands.
South African President Jacob Zuma is trying to calm the rising tide of racial animosity in wake of Eugene Terreblanche’s killing, who was bludgeoned by a 21-year-old and 15-year-old. Terreblanche reportedly refused to pay the men. Police officials state that Terreblanche was found on his bed with multiple facial and bodily injuries on Saturday, April 3. A machete was also found on his body along with a knobkerry club next to the bed.
The murder reignited old racial wounds in a nation that ended apartheid in 1994 after decades of white racist rule. Members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) movement, for which Terreblance was a hero and leader, planned to march to the police station on Monday, April 5 and demand the police bring out the two black murder suspects, The Associated Press reports.
The timing of the murder was also bad as South Africa becomes the first nation on the African continent to host the World Cup soccer tournament.
Terreblanche, 69, became a beloved figure in white South Africa prior to apartheid’s end. He was considered the most divisive figure in South African politics in the ’80s and early ’90s and his Weerstandsbeweging party was linked to multiple attacks on white South Africans who sympathized with blacks and wanted to end white minority rule.
Citing Hitler as a role model, Terreblanche claimed that democracy was unwise for South Africa and repeatedly called for the return to white rule. During the first multiracial elections in 1994, he was linked to bombings that killed 21 people. After attempting to murder a gas attendant in 2001, he was housed in a majority-black jail. When he was released in 2004 he said he’d become a born-again Christian and had amended his views toward blacks.
He apparently did not moderate them very much. In 2005, the AP reported Terreblanche had this to say: “I have always been made out as a racist, someone who hates black people. I don’t hate them. I grew up with them. I just know there are many differences between whites and blacks and I will always believe it.”
Like a stretched rubber band, Terreblanche eventually reverted back to his previous ideology and, in 2008, re-established the murderous, racist AWB.
–terry shropshire
