In a week of crude and violent rhetoric it is the starkest of ironies: Julius Malema has granted Eugene Terre’Blanche in death what he could no longer achieve in life, relevance and a national platform.
The AWB leader was a faded presence when the Mail & Guardian interviewed him late last year, trying pathetically to muster the storm troops once again to his banner. If they are now forming a khaki phalanx outside the Ventersdorp Magistrate’s Court, it is Juju’s call they have answered, not Terre’Blanche’s.
Rightwingers know a good demagogue when they see one, so it is not surprising that Malema’s zero-sum racial sloganeering sets their heartstrings aquiver.
In the days after the murder Malema and ET have come to dominate the national discourse, and to set the terms for our engagement with one another.
Malema’s resurrection of “dubula ibhunu”, hardly one of the great struggle songs, had, before the killing, already served its purpose, reducing the terms of a long, complex and painful discussion on race to a confrontation between the crude oppositions of apartheid. To be black, in this analysis, was to struggle against whiteness, reduced to the caricature, fascist boer that Terre’Blanche embodied. To be white was to fence yourself off on your farm, or behind a team of lawyers, and to defend your privilege.
The question of how, as South Africans, we confront the task of freedom while freighted with a terrible history, disappeared amid the clash of arms.
President Jacob Zuma and ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe, despite their professed devotion to nonracialism, were unable to articulate any kind of positive alternative, or, indeed, to answer a clear need in our society for a discussion of what they prefer to call “the national question”.
Malema fills that gap for a large constituency of angry and disappointed people desperate for clear answers to the frustrations of liberation. So, for conservative whites, does Afriforum, the group that has emerged from the ashes of Afrikaner nationalism to build a sophisticated legal and political strategy around “minority rights”.
Of course for Malema all this serves a clear purpose: to keep the discussion at a level he can easily manage and to raise an idiot wind that roars so loudly in our ears that we are unable to hear how his rentier cronies are ripping off the poor, and how the promise of a better life for all is being stolen.
The symmetry between the ANC Youth League leader and the white right was strikingly clear when on Wednesday night AWB leader Andries Visagie stormed out of an e.tv interview in a rage at being badgered by a black political analyst. On Thursday morning Malema ejected from a press conference a BBC correspondent who had tried to interrupt him, calling out “bastard” and “bloody agent” as the British hack left the room.
Of course there are remnants of the right that continue to be dangerous, men who nurse deep resentments, crackpot racial theories and a knowledge of firearms and explosives built during their apartheid military training. They were outliers before the death of Terre’Blanche and they remain outliers, albeit more motivated. The appropriate response to them is policing and intelligence, rather than behaving as if they represent an important constituency. We should not be wasting much time on what they tell us about race politics broadly — the answer is “not much”. There are more challenging questions for us to deal with.
A court will determine whether Terre’Blanche was killed by the two people who have been taken into custody. If he was, then we need to know what it is in our democracy that is so broken that a 15-year-old boy can find no other recourse when his miserable wages go unpaid than to bludgeon to death his violent, racist employer.
If our Labour Department cannot protect a poor black child from exploitation by a boss such as Terre’Blanche, and if our social welfare department cannot ensure he goes to school, just what are they doing with their time and resources?
And where are the accountable local politicians who should be assisting the poor and marginalised of Ventersdorp, ensuring that government agencies are responsive to their plight, that they have channels of redress that do not involve sudden violence?
Why are the president and those around him such as Mantashe reduced to reaction, to calling for calm rather than setting out a clear course of their own?
With Terre’Blanche’s death we bury a monster — both literal and figurative — but South Africa needs to figure out ways to live with a past that isn’t so easily put in a coffin.
One way to do so is to create a present in which people don’t have to use pangas and kierries to deal with labour disputes. That means constituency representation, political, government and civil society work in communities and a commitment to ensuring that the beasts of the past don’t spawn new monsters, who, like the alleged killers, are also tragic victims.
It also means leadership that acknowledges openly the complexity of our race discourse and is unafraid to speak about that complexity in human terms.
Why are these things so hard? Perhaps because they have nothing to do with Breitling watches, Range Rovers and fighting off would-be successors.
The rebirth in death of Terre’Blanche is a warning to all of us: this is the worst of you; remember him well and leave Malema and the AWB to bellow from the graveside. We are stronger, stranger and braver than they could possibly imagine.