Security tight as mourners gather for funeral for prominent South African white supremacist

South African white supremacist to be laid to rest

VENTERSDORP, South Africa — Hundreds of mourners sang South Africa’s apartheid-era anthem at Friday’s funeral of a white supremacist killed in what has been described as a wage dispute with two young black farmworkers.

Men in camouflage with pistols at their waists and little girls in their Sunday best gathered in northwestern South Africa to mourn Eugene Terreblanche, whose body was brought into the church in a closed coffin covered in red and white flowers.

Terreblanche’s death has not sparked wider violence. South African leaders have acknowledged that racial tensions remain 16 years after apartheid ended, but have played down any threat to the World Cup that starts in June, the first time football’s premier tournament will come to Africa.

White militants who considered Terreblanche their leader say his death proves whites aren’t safe under majority rule. Black leaders say controlling crime — whether its victims are white or black — is a priority in a country with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world.

Terreblanche’s coffin was draped with a flag — red, black and white, with a Nazi-like symbol in the center — belonging to the white supremacist movement he led. Two men wearing the group’s military-style uniform stood at each end of the coffin.

The 500 or so people in the church rose and sang Die Stem, an Afrikaans-language song that was the national anthem during the apartheid era. One verse of the song, which translates to “The Call,” is a verse in the modern, multi-lingual South African national anthem, Nkosi Sikeleli Africa.

Hundreds of mourners gathered on the grass outside, some in lawn chairs, listening on speakers set up around the church.

Security for the funeral was tight, with a police helicopter circling over the squat, blond-brick church where a few hundred mourners gathered hours before the funeral was to begin.

The one-and-a-half hour service also included hymns, Bible readings and impassioned rhetoric. A motorcade then wound its way to Terreblanche’s farm, where he was to be buried within sight of the disused farmhouse where he lived. Mourners on motorcycles, in cars and trucks — some of them flying the group’s flag — followed a white hearse that carried the coffin.

On Friday, some mourners linked Terreblanche’s death to the fiery rhetoric of the youth leader of the governing African National Congress. In recent weeks, Julius Malema, leader of the ANC Youth League, has been reviving an anti-apartheid era song that refers to killing white farmers.

Among the speakers at the service was Steve Hofmeyr, a well-known Afrikaans singer who alternated between Afrikaans and English — evidence he intended his words as much for the Afrikaans speakers gathered in and outside church as the broader audience he would reach through journalists covering the service.

Hofmeyr, who was interrupted several times by applause, accused Malema of hate speech and government of failing to control crime.

“Our government’s paralysis here will afford us many sad days like this, black and white,” he said.

Another mourner, Kobus Rothmann, a Ventersdorp clergyman who described himself as a friend of Terreblanche, said Malema was spreading hate speech, and should be reined in by more senior ANC leaders.

“They just hate us, Malema hates us,” Rothmann told reporters as he waited for the funeral service to begin.

Malema says the song has nothing to do with Terreblanche’s death. While the ANC insists the song is part of its heritage, following Terreblanche’s death it asked its members to refrain from performing anti-apartheid anthems that could be divisive.

On Thursday, Malema was accused of fanning already high tensions by hurling racially tinged insults at a white BBC reporter before ejecting the reporter from a news conference. That followed a television appearance Wednesday by the new leader of Terreblanche’s white separatist group that ended with the leader, Andre Visagie, storming out of a live discussion about race relations. Visagie told a fellow guest, a black analyst: “I am not finished with you!”

For all the shouting, the aftermath of Terreblanche’s death has shown how far South Africa has come. White militants first vowed revenge, but later joined President Jacob Zuma in calling for calm.

Earlier this week, whites and blacks faced off angrily in front of a heavily guarded courthouse where a teenager and another farm worker who allegedly confessed to killing Terreblanche were charged with murder in a closed hearing. But white leaders then asked their followers to go home, and the day ended calmly.

On Friday, the country’s largest trade union called a meeting to coincide with the funeral in the part of Ventersdorp where most of the town’s poor blacks live, ensuring there would be no racial confrontations.

Also among the mourners Friday was Bojosi Isaac Medupe, a black minister who said he visited Terreblanche in prison after the white leader was convicted of beating a black farm worker so badly the man was left brain damaged.

Medupe said he believed Terreblanche mellowed in prison, and was no longer committed to racial separatism or white supremacy when he left.

“I believe there was a change in him,” Medupe said, adding Terreblanche later helped him buy land in Ventersdorp.

Terreblanche’s Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, seeks to create an all-white republic within mostly black South Africa. The group’s red, white and black insignia resembles a Nazi swastika, but with three prongs instead of four.

The movement always has been on the fringes, estimated to have no more than 70,000 members at its height in the early 1990s out of a population of nearly 50 million.

Terreblanche was sentenced to six years in jail in 2001 for the attempted murder of former security guard Paul Motshabi in March 1996. Terreblanche was released in 2004. Motshabi suffered brain damage, and was left paralyzed and unable to speak for months after the attack.