Eugene Terblanche- An Alternative Obituary

By Terry Lacey

(April 07, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) He met his end on his farm, an Afrikaner extremist, hacked to death reportedly after a dispute with employees over wages. Jackson Mthembu of the African National Congress (ANC) condemned his murder on 3rd April and appealed to South Africans to avoid polarization.

The ANC statement effectively defended the civil rights of Terblanche, reminding South Africans that the government provided the means to protect farm workers from unjust employers, implying they must not take justice into their own hands.

But civil rights organizations report more than 3,000 white farmers have been killed in South Africa since the end of apartheid.

Terblanche formed the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB). He was the product of his times and of Afrikaner history. In a sense he was also made in Britain, since Afrikaner history is rooted in their struggle with the British.

There will always be those who will seek political power by telling old stories and singing old songs. To a minority of Afrikaners Eugene Terblanche on his horse was an inspiration. To most of them he was an idiot. Now the ANC youth leader Julius Malema is in the spotlight for singing old songs about killing the Boers.

The British Empire achieved a lot but it also has a lot to answer for. When the British in the 1930s laid the foundations of modern South Africa, of mines and industry, they crushed the emergence of the small black farmer and of black small business.

So the British with their careful gradations of which jobs could go to blacks or coloureds or whites created a special economic system based on the interweave of race and class.

All things bright and beautiful. All creatures great and small. All things bright and beautiful. The Lord God made them all. The rich man in his castle. The poor man at his gate. God made them high or lowly. And gave them their estate.

So when Ghandi was in South Africa in the 1930`s he saw the reflection of the Raj.

In the Caribbean Islands with their history of slavery, it was a little different.

The building of the Panama Canal pulled West Indians together into one giant building site. The first hints of Rastafarianism and black consciousness combined with religious revivalism in the Canal zone were strangely reminiscent of South African townships.

The labor movement got going, organizing strikes throughout the Caribbean in 1938, building the nationalist movement that would bring freedom after the Second World War.

And in East and West Africa the small farmers and small businesses started to grow, and the churches tried to break free from their colonial past. And so was built the small but vital middle class that would lead Ghana and Kenya and black Africa to freedom.

But in South Africa it was different. The number of whites, the strength of the imperial links, the needs of modern industry all conspired so that the British would build apartheid in all but name. But one other ingredient had been needed so this could happen and to prepare the way for the apartheid regime.

The British Empire had had to crush the Afrikaners. This was the crucible where Eugene Terblanche and apartheid were made, but many years after the defeat of the Boers by the British.

The main resistance to the British Empire in South Africa in the 19th century had come from the Zulus, the Afrikaners, and the German Empire, which almost succeeded in cutting off South Africa from British imperial possessions to the North.

But the ones who put up the best fight against the British were the Boers. With their settler ideology, Bibles in one hand and Mauser rifles in the other. They were good shots and courageous. They were the first anti-imperialist liberation movement in Africa. And they were fighting for their homes, not for some far off corner of a foreign field.

Of course the Afrikaners lost. A vastly superior force carved up the Transvaal and the Orange Free State with forts and fences, driving Afrikaner civilians into concentration camps. Thousands of their women and children died, while their men were hunted down.

Had the Afrikaners circled their wagons with their rifles and Bibles and mowed down Red Indians while rolling into Oregon then they would have gone down in Hollywood and history as the good guys.

But the Afrikaners circled their wagons in Africa. And when their political chance came they used the racial theories of apartheid to help them seize and keep political power.

Inevitably apartheid collapsed, brought down by the rise of the African National Congress and black consciousness, but also by global social trends and modernity.

Israelis with their settlers, with guns and Torah in hand, should read the history of the Afrikaners and not follow any modern Moses into the wilderness for forty more years.

The Afrikaners and the Israelis are both indelibly marked by the concentration camps of the past. But this is not resolved by creating new kinds of prisons and camps for others. The cycle of oppression that leads to more oppression and aggression has to be broken.

The Afrikaners learned this and deserve acceptance as anti-imperialists and as a white tribe of Africa, helping to build the new South Africa. The Israelis have yet to learn this lesson and the tribe of Israel has yet to be accepted in the same way.

Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.