I believe that the death of Eugene Terreblanche was perhaps the inevitable consequence of his life and beliefs. The Afrikaner white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche was bludgeoned to death in his bedroom.
Terreblanche was an unabashed racist. Astride his great black stallion Atilla, rifle in his hand, white beard and steely eyes glittering from his weather beaten face, he cuts a pretty formidable figure. He was a man who preached violence, and practiced it. He’s done prison time for setting his dog on a petrol attendant, and for beating his farm workers so badly that one of them ended up with brain damage.
On Saturday night, two young men – aged 15 and 28 - in his employ beat him to death. His body, found in his blood drenched bedroom was so badly beaten that he was virtually unrecognisable. According to the Bible, a favourite reference in the chatter of white supremacists, his end was justified. An eye for an eye and all that.
But Terreblanche wasn’t killed because of racist revenge. At least not directly. He was killed because of a dispute over unpaid wages.
His unshakable belief that blacks and whites could not live together has been mulled over enough and it is not what concerns me here. Rather, let’s look at his treatment of his employees. In South Africa, as in South Asia “employee” is a word used for the privileged white collared middle class. There are other words for the rest: servants, serfs, maids, drivers, peasants, villagers, farm workers. And there are also two different attitudes towards them. Employees such as IT engineers, bank staff, medical personnel have salaries, contracts, bosses – kind or unkind – but ultimately they are considered human. When the words used are servants and serfs, well then the way they are generally viewed and treated changes accordingly to something slightly less than human.
So housemaids, women from slums and and villages are considered to be the property of the men of the house/village/district. Little children sold or put to work by desperately poor parents can be worked to death, beaten, starved. Men can be treated like livestock, to eke out a living while their masters - feudal lords, landowners, saabs - pay next to nothing for their labour and think nothing of beating, kicking or occasionally killing them on a whim.
I have witnessed a 19 year old girl boxwallah princess scream at her 67 year old driver, 30 years in her father’s employ, for a minor infringement. I’ve heard a fat middle class woman explain in reasonable tones why she couldn’t possibly pay for a daily glass of milk for the 7 year old girl who has come to scrub her floors because the child’s mother, the regular maid was too sick with TB to do it but was afraid of losing the job; I’ve seen a stick thin farmer bring the harvest he reaped after a 14 hour day in the fields, to the local landowner’s and walk off with less than 40% of it because he only had the privilege of working the land not owning it.
It’s a constant wonder to me that there aren’t more violent and bloody bashings every day in South Asia and any part of the world where a few people feel they have a right to treat another human being like a dog because of an accident of birth.
on Apr 10th, 2010 at 3:35 am
It has been recently reported that South Africa has 12 per cent of it’s white population living in poverty as it is defined there. Why don’t AWB farm owners develop an employment plan for some of these people to work on these farms for better pay and conditions, whereby the farm owners will feel secure in their imediate environment. The status quo is just begging for more trouble whereby the present strife can only escalate. The obvious remaining question is what becomes of the black South Africans already employed on the farms. They would have to be re-employed under a South African government plan either to other non-white farms (if there are enough) at better pay and conditions, and where their experience and knowledge of farm work would help accelerate the quality and yield of non-white farming. This plan might also produce a plan to help these workers begin to purchase land for farming themselves, and thereby employ other black South Africans into farming. There are no perfect solutions to this mess, but killing on farms is the last and worst of all possible solutions. If white farmers and the government could find some way to co-operate practically on this issue, then at least some bloodshed being saved in future may be possible. These ideas may not be palatable to some readers of this forum, but the reality of the situation is that something along the lines of new thinking has to start somewhere.