An exercise in futility: trying to hitch a ride up the long dirt track to Eugene Terre’Blanche’s farm for his burial. With two black men by my side.
No surprises, you’re thinking. But after a full day of being surrounded by the old South African flag, swastika-like symbols and the large angry Afrikaans men, I’m still reeling.
I joked with concerned colleagues that I’d be absolutely fine attending the AWB stronghold, despite my dark skin. After all, I grew up in Pretoria, I laughed. I even practised my very faded high school Afrikaans: “Ekskuus Meneer, mag ek u ‘n paar vrae vrae, asseblief?”. It was going to be great.
I was ready to approach the event with an open mind. Despite a more-than-usual allergy to all things racist, I have a strange compassion for Afrikaners and their increasing identity crisis. I would try to understand their rage and helplessness.
Our entry into the town at about 7am boded well. The police cast a casual eye over us as we stopped at a petrol station and I got my first glimpse of Die Manne: suited up in every shade of khaki, dotted with the old South African map nogal. Trying to enter the shop at the same time I was pleasantly surprised when one stopped and allowed me to walk through first, with a courteous smile.
“He probably didn’t want to touch you,” joked the photographer. I laughed. As if.
It was only when I was stranded on that damn road that I realised how right she was. My two colleagues, both white and female, had taken our car to Terre’Blanche’s farm just outside the town while I stayed on at the funeral. They wanted to avoid the traffic and get photographs of the casket while I wanted to make sure I captured every word Steve Hofmeyr would care to utter. I agreed to find a lift with another journalist, as is easy to do in these situations. I sat next to two lovely guys from Avusa who readily agreed. I only realised the colour of their skin as the rest of the church started filling up.
The fact that the Afrikaans Protestant Church in Ventersdorp was whites-only didn’t particularly bother me. For me, it was indicative of how far we’ve come that this fact was an anomaly rather than the norm — as it was for my parents and grandparents. But engulfed by the nationalistic fervour of Die Stem bouncing off of the walls of the brick church building and shrinking under the malevolent gaze of an AWB youth to my right, clutching the red swastika-like AWB symbol in his hand, I felt a wave of nausea come over me. I fought it down and tried to concentrate on the sermon, the hymns, anything. But even that didn’t work. This was my faith, my songs, my Bible being used hand in hand with a philosophy that was making me literally ill.
We made our way outside as the packed crowd rose to their feet to cheer Hofmeyr on as he declared an end to tolerance. As we stumbled into the bright daylight outside the church the friendliness I had encountered earlier had evaporated. In the place of the townsfolk who had earlier surrounded me with frantic but non-violent outpourings and questions there was a wall of what seemed like sheer malevolence. Following in the wake of a black man suddenly made things very different.
For the four hours before the service I had chatted to people at leisure with my white colleagues by my side. They had been eager, desperate even, to bring me on to their side. “We’re not racists,” they’d say. One even added the killer; “My neighbours are Indian”.
There was a distinct hierarchy at play here. I was drawn into a strange complicit solidarity. “They’ll come after your people next,” whispered one woman to me, indicating a black man nearby.
The minute my newly-found friends and I pulled over near the entrance to the farm I knew that the tenor had changed towards me with my companions. The long track was extremely muddy and we couldn’t take our cars in. White journalists hopped on to one bakkie after the other, driven by the locals. I was confident. “Stand back guys,” I announced. “I’ll handle this.”
So much for my friendly smile. Some of them kept driving halfway through my “Ekskuus meneer”. Others deliberately swerved to splatter me with mud.
We eventually started the great trek to the burial place. A bakkie stopped. I looked up eager, but it was there for a white journalist ahead of me. With each passing car the sense of dehumanisation grew. I cannot fathom how the people of colour hold their heads up in that town. After a lifetime of reading, hearing and knowing about apartheid and its policies I experienced a tiny taste of it firsthand for the first time, and it sucked.
Eventually a man did stop but once we were in the back of his bakkie it became clear why. He immediately questioned my companion on Malema’s motives. It was a popular theme of the day. Every person of colour was asked to speak on behalf of the ANCYL president.
I got to the burial grounds eventually and finally found my own kin — a crowd of small journalists: multicoloured, deeply cynical and the only ones with a sense of humour in the place. The Avusa reporter and I ended the day squeezed in the car of two friendly journos from the Daily Maverick: Jewish rebels in a sea of right-wing goy-ism. Stuck in a stream of bakkie traffic brandishing ever higher old SA flags, twisted swastikas, and a weird outstretched hilter-esque greeting, Toby Shapshak stopped the car, yanked a kippah on his head and started pumping the most curiously incongruous Jewish kletzmer music, enthusiastically waving at all the shocked faces. It was my ride back to sanity.