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Title: Death and the Mielieboer
Author: Michael Schmidt
Date: April 18, 2010
Language: en
Topics: South Africa, racism, white supremacy
Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/16353

Michael Schmidt

Death and the Mielieboer

The murder, apparently at the hands of two black farm-labourers, of

thuggish AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche on March 20 in what was once

South Africa’s white supremacist Western Transvaal heartland, was

celebrated by anti-racists the world over.

Inside South Africa, it had the expected result of dire, unfounded panic

over a looming race war, and the unexpected result of the rush by

mainstream parties to defend the ultra-right’s “right to exist in a

democracy”.

We hear a lot about race and continuing racism in post-apartheid South

Africa, but who are the Boers, what function did the AWB serve the

nationalist elites, and what does the debate over the killing reveal –

or obscure – about the country’s forgotten poor whites?

The death of the AWB

Sixteen years ago, as impoverished, browbeaten South Africans of all

races were herded towards the slaughterhouse mass betrayal of their

liberation dream by the African National Congress (ANC) and their

midwives the National Party (NP), in the first multiracial elections

aimed at propping up the teetering neo-liberal state, armed groups of

the 70,000-strong far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner

Weerstands Beweeging, AWB) played their last desperate hands. These

outriders of an ever-receding dream of ruling their own conservative

white God-fearing state on the African highveld, the AWB embraced its

Götterdämmerung.

The AWB’s pre-election bombing spree failed to derail the relieved, yet

lemming-like rush to the bourgeois polls, and its attempt to rewrite the

1900 Relief of Mafikeng by, unasked, coming to the aid of conservative

black bantustan boss Lucas Mangope backfired as an outraged

Bophuthatswana soldier gunned down three AWB members who had been

wounded in the kaffirskietpiekniek (“black shooting picnic”) they had

embarked on. The AWB callously celebrated their “glittering victory”

with a claimed five dead AWB for 50 dead and 285 wounded blacks – and I

callously celebrated the public murder of three AWB whites – one of

whom, Nico Fourie, I had met and interviewed while covering an AWB rally

on the Natal South Coast several years before. An inexperienced young

anarchist militant, I took a photostat of the picture of the three dead

men, scribbled across the top ‘n Boer sien sy moer! (an Afrikaner farmer

sees his ass!), stuck it up on the wall at work and congratulated myself

for my daring and wit. Because despite the imbalanced death toll, it was

those images of white supremacists shot down like dogs in the dirt by an

ill-trained banana republic soldier right in front of media

photographers that truly put paid to the AWB. It was a spent force

thereafter.

Crucially, right-wing General Constand Viljoen, lauded as a “soldier’s

soldier” for his frontline actions against Cuban/East Bloc-backed forces

in Angola, whose Afrikaner People’s Front (Afrikaner Volksfront) forces

had been called in by Mangope, took heed of the lessons of the failed

incursion and told his substantial private army to stand down. He formed

the Freedom Front – ironically today in cabinet alongside the ANC,

without Viljoen – and threw his weight behind the democratic elections.

This was the vital component in ensuring a relatively peaceful

transition, and proved the salvation of the neo-liberal project of the

ANC’s Nelson Mandela from the stalemate between anti- and

pro-establishment forces.

Demystifying the Boers

But who are the Boers, truly, beyond the cartoons of black-bearded

back-countrymen, scarecrows in the corn, leaning on ancient muskets?

Afrikaners today are often are the sons, daughters, granddaughters and

grandsons of the tens thousands of women who were deliberately starved

to death in British concentration camps a century before as their farms

were put to the torch. Do not brush aside this key fact because of the

whiteness of their skin: their women-folk and children were deliberately

exterminated in an imperialist war that generated so much global

opposition at the time that it was the Iraq of its day: Scandinavians,

Irishmen and Russians gave their lives on the far-away veld; angered

Québécois burned down public buildings; and awed anti-American

guerrillas in the Philippines learned their tactics by night. Scratch a

highveld Boer and you will likely find a bitter hatred of British

imperialism – based on living-memory family experience of the camps. And

that war was provoked by the imperialists because Britain lusted after

and finally burgled the goldfields of the highveld from a frontier

people who had progressively retreated into the African interior away

from the claws of the bankers, into the spears of the Bantu.

True, they were and often remain an austere, narrow people: one of their

Calvinist sects, the Doppers, is deliberately named after the tin cap or

dop used to extinguish a candle, the message being the need to

extinguish the Enlightenment. And true, they often beat “their blacks”

with an offhanded cruelty, and at best established a paternalistic

overlordship over them known as baasskap (boss-hood). But in their

warfare with, suffering at the hands of, and eventual enslavement of the

Bantu, a strange relationship developed: alone among all white settlers

on the African continent, they self-identified en masse as Afikaners, as

Africans, not Europeans, and severed their ties to their distant

motherlands. The they and their black neighbours lived, ate, thought and

died, merged and became inextricably intertwined: well over 10-million

more black South Africans today speak Afrikaans, the slave’s idiom-rich,

story-telling pidgin-Dutch of old, than do whites; while platteland

(big-sky farmland) Afrikaners are fluent in African vernacular

languages. For the British-backed English-speaking elites, the mining

bosses and big land-owners, this closeness was worrisome; something had

to be done to divide and rule them. Racialised divisions worked

successfully among the working class until multiracial revolutionary

syndicalism mounted a challenge from 1917 – a challenge undermined and

dissipated within five years by the black nationalist mystifications of

the aspirant bourgeois party that became the ANC. It may be that despite

their progressive approach to the racial question, the syndicalists lost

their grip on the labour movement because of the allure of politics of

racial polarity that pitted whites and blacks against each other, a

politics seized on with fervour by the NP on its ascension to power in

1948.

Demystifying the AWB and poor rural whites

And who are the AWB other than strutting cartoon neo-Nazis spouting dire

eye-for-en-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth rhetoric? Well, despite the childish

shock-value of their swastika-like flag, they aren’t neo-Nazis (pagan

Nazism gained little purchase in Protestant South Africa); no, they are

ultra-conservative Calvinists who dream of a separate white bantustan of

their own – this being the same stolen dream of generations of Boers;

but no, they are not quietist, having established a violent armed outlaw

militia presence since their formation in 1973, and yes, they attracted

the admiration of many on the international far-right including

neo-Nazis. When hood-eyed charismatic leader Eugène Terre’Blanche (his

surname meaning White Earth), famous for his outdated horseback parades

and thunderous Old Testament oratory, exited jail in 2004 for a vicious

assault on a black worker, an AWB Brigadier told me the movement was

transforming itself from a militia into an Afrikaner cultural

organisation. Terre’Blanche was viewed by the radical right – and most

anarchist-communists in SA probably can only concur – as a conservative

buffoon, useful to the “New South African” political-economic

establishment as a scary outsider, patrolling the perimeter like an

underfed, mangy Rottweiler on a chain, proof of their own smug

centralism and “moderation”, of the palatability of the extremist shock

doctrine of neo-liberalism they peddle to the poor.

And who are those poor? Of course, they are overwhelmingly black,

coloured and Indian, in this, the world’s most economically unequal

country, one skewed by more than 300 years of racialised

divide-and-rule. And yet a detailed study currently underway of early

slave revolts in the Cape by veteran South African anarchist-communist

Nicole Ulrich shows that Irish sailors, Malay slaves and indigenous

cart-drivers launched combined, multiracial assaults on parasitic

capitalist baasskap, a hidden history that refutes both black and white

nationalists’ view of our history as a classless struggle of white

against black and black against white. These days, when the laid-off

mine-workers of deindustrialised small towns like Stilfontein

demonstrate, they do so shoulder-to-shoulder, poor blacks and whites

together. Multiracial working-class consciousness is slowly rebuilding,

but it is also seriously challenged by the ugly racialised climate in

the country at the moment in which all questions of class, culture,

transformation and so forth are always reduced to a crude

white-over-black narrative. Not only does that narrative deliberately

shut down any possibility of multiracial working class resistance, but

it fails to address the fact that, genuine racist prerogatives aside,

the NP elite could only make minority rule work if the majority, the

poor, could be sub-divided, and this they did with substantial success,

fragmenting working class black, white, coloured and Indian identities

into different laagers, and fragmenting the black identity further into

Zulu, Venda, Xhosa, Tswana, Pedi etc ethnicities. A 2009 University of

Pretoria study shows that out of probably 50-million South Africans, the

white elite consists of a mere 310,000 individual parasites – with poor

and working class whites accounting for a staggering 3,3-million out of

4-million people.

So apartheid was about all whites oppressing all blacks? No, the paltry

racial privileges given to poor whites under apartheid were a pitiful

pay-off with the cynical intent of dividing their interests from those

of poor blacks. Of course the apartheid state was an explicitly racial

state (although the NP pretended they were separatists, not

supremacists) in a way that few others outside of Nazi Germany were. I’m

not saying that outright racism was not their motivating factor; in fact

every NP leader until PW Botha had been pro-Nazi during WWII. But white

supremacism was more than a motive for the Broederbonders and the

elites: it was a divide-and-rule tool, a class-war tool, useful to run a

smokestack economy by playing workers off against each other. Poor

Afrikaners had been so utterly economically destroyed by the Anglo-Boer

War that much of the later apartheid apparatus was solely directed at a

partial social upliftment for the millions of malnourished poor

Afrikaners – as part of a winning-hearts-and-minds strategy for

maintaining the tiny Afrikaner elite in power. In no way can the

brutality, torture, killings and mass dehumanisation of South Africa’s

poor blacks be compared to the more comfortable experiences of its

relatively shielded poor whites. And yet poor whites were the

canon-fodder of the elite’s wars (no, really: drafted into the apartheid

army in 1985, I met whites who had never seen cutlery before), their

precarious livelihoods as mechanics, fitters and boilermakers constantly

threatened by millions of cheaper, underpaid poor blacks. In other

words, their class vulnerability was used to keep them racially loyal to

the apartheid state. And when the NP slowly liberalised, they proved

easy to scare into ultra-con organisations like the AWB. The racist

class structure was forced to change in 1990–1996 not only by a

partly-ANC-led internal insurrection and the collapse of ANC-backing

Soviet Russia, but by the fact that the elites had no way to modernise

the economy and to build a manufacturing sector without breaking the

colour-bar and upskilling black labour. In other words, the apartheid

racial state deracialised for reasons of capitalist class survival. To

fail to recognise the primacy – but not exclusivity – of class in this

situation, class rule wearing racial armour, is the weakness of both

black and white nationalists. And the use of white extremist

organisations to the elite? To book-end the frightened middle-class

whites (and later, blacks too) between two false options, racist white

nationalism and racist black nationalism, a scare tactic that continues

today. The rush of the mainstream political parties from the South

African Communist Party (SACP) on the left to the Freedom Front Plus

(FF+) on the right to condemn the killing of Terre’Blanche perhaps

betrays the dead man’s true usefulness to our parasitic elites.

The death of the Boers

Unlike the killing of Fourie and his cohorts sixteen years ago, when I

heard of the death of Terre’Blanche, which many heralded as poetic

justice, I was not seized by a celebratory fever, although there was

merry-making in many townships, especially by those like Martha Mokone,

a victim of an AWB bomb who commented that he should “burn in hell”. I

understand the need for ghoulish celebration: after all, I’d done it

myself before. But this time, I felt strangely quiet and troubled.

Terre’Blanche was so diminished from the terrible, looming figure of the

past that my hatred of he and his ilk had all but drained away. The

scrappy farm-house with the bare walls and boarded up front window in

which the white supremacist was killed over Easter Weekend – seventeen

years after the Easter Weekend when a right-winger assassinated SACP

leader Chris Hani – was hardly the home of a wealthy man, although

wealth is relative in this, the world’s most unequal society.

Yes, he was a white baas to his alleged killers, two young black

labourers, Chris Mahlangu, 27, and a 15-year-old youth, and yes it

appears this was not a political assassination but a wage dispute with

that spiralled out of control. Yet that clock-spring spiral which turned

dispute into murder must have been wound tight by a potent combination

of racial friction and class antagonism. And the way Terre’Blanche died

was the way so… ordinary; it was the way many poor rural whites die,

hacked to death in their beds for reasons grand and petty, criminal and

(despite strong government denials) racial. It’s not that there is a

“Boer Genocide” (as yet) as many on the far right already proclaim, but

some powder-keg combination of race and class is killing our white

farmers at an alarming rate. This race/class volatility is nowhere more

apparent than in the ANC government’s complete failure to meet its own

benchmark of redistributing 30% of the land to land-hungry rural blacks

in order to ameliorate the apartheid ownership pattern whereby 80% of

the population owned only 13 % of the land. Against this tense backdrop,

the murder rate of white farmers is four times higher than the rest of

the population – in a country with the highest murder rate in the world

of any country not at war – and the viciousness which accompanies many

killings belies purely criminal motive.

This is not to say that there have not been numerous well-documented,

well-publicised cases of Boers torturing and killing poor rural blacks –

but the point is that extreme violence committed on the Boers is almost

totally ignored by the mainstream media which props up the

statist-democratic farce. In one grim example, when two elderly white

women in a small Free State town were gang-raped a year ago, allegedly

by a black gang, tortured to death and the severed breast of one woman

used to paint anti-white slogans on the wall, not a single media outlet

named this a hate crime. Only one newspaper even covered the atrocity,

the Afrikaans-language Volksblad – and then only to decry the

“hate-speech” of the women’s traumatised relatives calling for a return

of the death penalty for murder. Only with Terre’Blanche’s death is the

mainstream belatedly making a tentative link between ANC hate speech

calling for the killing of the Boers and, well, the actual killing of

Boers. Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous statement of his own ethical

failing – that when the Nazis came for the communists he did not speak

out for he was not a communist – runs naggingly around and around in my

head. Did the white supremacist idea of the AWB deserve to die?

Unquestionably. Did Terre’Blanche the racist thug, awful poet and great

orator deserve to die? Quite possibly. Will I not speak out merely

because I’m not a Boer? No; I’ve said my piece.

Racist, brutal Terre’Blanche may have got his well-deserved

come-uppance, but there is little to genuinely celebrate for the

country’s desperately poor blacks and whites for whom his death is

insignificant and irrelevant; their circumstances of exploitation and

exclusion are not likely to be improved anytime soon by the country’s

ANC elite.

Glossary

Highveld - the high-plateau grassland prairie / steppe of central

South Africa which is the country’s primary grain-farming and mining

region

Götterdämmerung - zero-sum political end-game

1900 Relief of Mafikeng - the lifting by the British in 1900 of the

Boer siege of the city of Mafikeng – once situated next to the

Bophuthatswana capital of Mmabatho

bantustan - nick-name for the patchwork of quasi-“independent” black

ethnic states, or “homelands,” in which half of all South African blacks

lived, separated from white-controlled apartheid South Africa, from the

mid-1970s to the mid-1990s

Bophuthatswana - a bantustan in the north of the country near the

Botswana border, designated by apartheid South Africa for the separate

settlement of the Tswana ethnic group and claiming “independence” under

Lucas Mangope between 1977 and its reincorporation into South Africa in

1994 after the defeat of Mangope and the Afrikaner Volksfront

baas - boss