EUGENE TERRE’BLANCHE AND THE RACIAL APOCALYPSE

On a stifling Friday night, with the homeless screaming stray-cat songs and the billboard outside my window lit up with the words "One nation--one Cup", I lie there and dream of war. A war, starvation, riots, a nuclear explosion--I look at the three men holding neon vuvuzelas outside, a black, a white and a coloured, and instead of the textbook picture of unity I see whites killing blacks, blacks killing whites, Xhosas killing Zulus, Tik-crazed Coloureds firebombing anyone in sight. I see the ANC elite gassing townships, jet fighters--unexplainably bought in the Arms Deal--shooting down commercial planes full of immigrants and Malema-led hordes of the semi-dead convulsing in festivals of rape. Tonight I think that all of this would be better than being a nation of Janus-headed liars.

The problem is that South Africa has been in limbo for the past 16 years--hanging between the desire to bury its shameful past, the inability to responsibly face the present, and the impotence brought on by fear of the most evil word of all: racist. That is why the ANC has run unchecked for this long. That's why it is now OK for the president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, to openly incite racial violence. And that's why the murder of Eugene Terre'Blanche on Saturday morning--something that should have slipped through social cracks unnoticed--has brought this country to critical tension levels. Needless to say, that morning I was a very happy man.

To the outside world, Terre'blanche might have been just another pissed-off white guy whose dirt sandwich was way, way overdue, but in the Rainbow Nation (with all the fallacies that come with this term), he was the archetypal bad guy, our own version of Darth Vader as a Ku Klux Klan Dragon-Wizard or whatever the hell they call themselves. Very few would be grieving if he'd just quietly Christopher Reeve'd himself like many of us had long hoped for, but hacking apart a 69-year-old man in his bed is not the way you want to see the villain go--it's the kind of death that could generate sympathy for Vader himself.

It doesn't help the situation that Terre'blanche's murder is stained with typical South African flavor--a 15-year-old murderer, a panga and knobkiere left carelessly at the crime scene, and Terre'Blanche's pants pulled down to his ankles in post-mortem humiliation. The country is now torn between those that see his death as a direct result of the "Shoot The Boer"-hymn revival by Malema and those that say that Terre'Blanche got what he deserved for all the violence his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging dealt out in the early 90s, as well as his brutal mistreatment of his farm workers.

One thing you've got to give Terre'Blanche is that he had major balls hiding under those khaki shorts. Sure, he propagated some retarded policies and that Nick Broomfield documentary made him look like a righteous puss, but compared to his contemporary ANC equivalent, Eugene comes away by far the nicer and less terrifying of the loud-mouth race radicals.

Looking at the black and white battle-lines drawn outside the courthouse where Terre'Blanche's murderers are being tried, one has to wonder what it's going to take for the ruling liberation party to rein their war hound in. Scary thoughts creep into my head--an Afrikaaner symbol is butchered and the ANC is quite alright with Malema hanging out with Robert Mugabe, "taking notes" on land reform and nationalization from the guy that led Zimbabwe into utter ruin and was responsible for hundreds of farm killings. Get ready, South Africa, here comes the race war we missed out on in 1994.