The death of Eugene Terreblanche

The debate and analysis in the media following the death of Eugene Terreblanche once again reflects the penchant for de-linking race from class dynamics. Some of the analysis also betrays the proclivity to equate the legitimate anger and violent rebellion of the black working class – who are victims squeezed at the intersection between race and class – with the oppressive and de-humanising racism of the white farmer abetted by unbridled capitalism.

The mother of the 15-year-old boy, who is one of the accused, told the press that her son told her that when he and his co-worker asked Terreblanche for their money, he told them first to bring in the cows. After they had brought in the cows, the right-winger still refused to pay them. According to the boy’s narration, this refusal by Terreblanche to pay the workers even after making them run around and fetch his cows is what provoked the 28-year old farm labourer to hit the white racist four times with an iron rod. The boy also confessed to also taking the rod and giving Terreblanche three blows with it.

This case should focus the attention of the world on the exploitative, oppressive and de-humanising conditions of the landless peasants and farm workers in a South Africa in which a few whites, foreign firms and the white church still own chunks of the land, while the black majority are squeezed into slums and ghettoes or live in perpetual fear and in squalid conditions on white-owned land.

It should have brought to the attention of the world – especially proponents of flexible labour regulations and free marketeers – that without tight labour regulation and the effective enforcement of labour regulations, the lives of the majority of black farm workers and domestic workers in particular, and workers in general, will continue to be an eternal hell and unending gloom.

It should have highlighted the fact that without radical transformation of landownership patterns, equitable allocation of land and wealth and a labour friendly labour policy regime, the relationships between white people and black people on the farms will continue to be master/serf, owner/slave, baas/boy relationships and white superiority/black inferiority will prevail.

This story therefore should have elicited calls for government to:
- Rein in white Farmers – and all employers – to ensure fair and just labour practices
- Review its land redistribution policies to a design policy programme that ensures a radical and drastic transformation of landownership patterns in this country
- Review its flexible labour policies.

Predictably, this has not been the case. The media, experts, analysts and political parties and political gurus have focused our attention on the possible link between ET’s murder and Julius Malema’s ranting of ‘Dubula iBhunu’ (‘Kill the Boer’).

This is the safest thing for our black and white liberals to do. Not pronouncing that wage-dispute or rather a rebel against non-remuneration of workers’ labour is central to this murder saga will ease the conscience of many black and white liberals – including some radicals and ‘socialists/ communists’ – who pay their workers peanuts and treat their domestic workers and gardeners as slaves.

Terreblanche’s ill-treatment, abuse, and exploitation of workers were informed by his racist regard of black people as sub-humans and appendages of white society. But he and his ilk would have little space for manoeuvre if we were to have a government that meant business as far as pursuing an egalitarian political economy and social policy trajectory was concerned.

ET and his kind tasted the smell of victory when the court declared that it is illegal for black journalists to have a platform only for black journalists to deal with issues peculiar to them, away from interference and intrusion by white voices, while finding nothing wrong with white-only platforms like AWB, and white labour union solidarity.

It is the surface modification of apartheid-capitalism that has allowed and continues to allow space and a breeding ground for white supremacists and the super-exploitation, denigration and de-humanisation of black farm-workers and domestic workers.

Merely harping on incidents of racism without linking them to the historic marriage between race and class and the failure of the current dispensation to confront class and racial disparities, will be a matter of dancing under a burning roof.

But – of course – we are a nation of mythology rather than facts. We choose to hide in the security of songs and dance, rhetoric and folklore, rather than deal with bitter realities. Instead of doing away with the socio-economic, structural and institutional arrangements and impediments to the creation of an egalitarian and anti-racist society, we prefer to sing old struggle songs or blame everything on the singing thereof.

The stubborn fact of the matter is that the murder of Eugene Terreblanche – the Neo-Fascist leader of the ultra-Afrikaner nationalist Nazi-style paramilitary far right outfit, Afrikaner Weerstande Beweging (AWB), had more to do with black labourers’ outrage against super-exploitation, denigration and de-humanisation by a supremacist white racist than with the out-of-tune singing of a political elite black nouveau riche fat-cat called Malema. After all it is the politico-economic dispensation of which Malema is a proponent and beneficiary that has retained the structural inequalities and institutional arrangements that maintained unequal power and social relations between black people and white people, thereby perpetuating the structural racism and elitist disregard for the dignity and rights of the labourers upon which the attitudes and practices of white and non-white owners of capital, landlords and madams thrive.

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* Mphutlane wa Bofelo is a South African cultural worker and social critic.
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