Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

'The Afrikaners are used to defending corruption and bigotry in the old government. They will easily adapt to the inefficiencies of the new.'

  When a group of right-wingers launched a white 'homeland' east of Pretoria they claimed that kindred spirits would come flocking from all over the country. The headquarters was a farm called 'Loneliness'. In the valley below, just visible through the trees, was a cemetery of Boers, mainly women and children, who died in a British concentration camp at the turn of the century. The founding ceremony was brimming with Old Testament rhetoric. But it was very much the soft underbelly of separatism. The 'homeland' was a 400-acre co-operative whose modest aims showed how aspirations for a homeland had withered. The founders shied clear of talk of independence. Taxes would still be paid. Most of the members would be weekenders.

  'A republic? Oh no,' said Andries Campher, a bearded farmer who organized the project. 'This is a place for likeminded people.'

  The Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), a modern red-brick sprawl on the edge of Johannesburg's city centre, epitomizes new Afrikaner pragmatism. The university was founded by the Broederbond as an Afrikaner academic beachhead in the English speaking world of mines and business. Professor J. C. van der Walt, the university's post-apartheid rector, is determined RAU will retain its Afrikaner ethos, but to do that he is convinced it has to embrace the new order, that in order to survive it has to learn when to fight and when to give ground.

  Defying precedent and the advice of some of his colleagues, he travelled to Soweto and forged a link with the township's premier football club, the Kaizer Chiefs. When America's black Howard University sent a delegation to South Africa looking for a twin, the delegation's ground rule was to ignore Afrikaners. They had not reckoned with the rector, who intercepted them midway in their schedule, gave them a guided tour of his campus and ended up signing a twinning agreement.

  'You see the image of the granite Verwoerdian is not correct,' he said. 'We Afrikaners are very adaptable. The coming of the new dispensation has for many of us been a huge relief.'

  The exemplar of the post-apartheid Afrikaner was Koos Bekker, the chief executive of the gian media company, Naspers. He transformed what under apartheid was a sleepy publisher of broadly pro-Afrikaner Nationalist newspapers into a dynamic multinational with interests in China, India, Russia and across Africa, in short the very model of a Bric company.

  On the other end of the social spectrum, Frans Campher long ago stopped expecting government largesse. He started work as a freelance security guard soon after the 1994 election. His scarred and short-cropped head hardly mark him out as a man of enlightenment and yet his experiences suggest that a new co-operative spirit can take root.

  'Soon after I came here, this guy Alan dumped a whole load of blacks here and told them to park cars. We had to fight them and we did. We chased them off. But then they started to come back in ones and twos. Last night there were three of them in my street desperate for work. I told them I don't want to fight. So we divided the street in two and we each took one side ...' Many whites who matured under apartheid will probably never again feel that South Africa is their country. As Mandela's spirit of reconciliation gave way to a more confrontational administration under his successor, Thabo Mbeki. Four years into the 'new' South Africa he gave warning that whites and blacks were two separate nations, accused whites of having done nothing to redress the situation, and warned them of a growing 'rage among millions of people'. But as long as the ANC is prepared to curb its frustration at the 'lack of white reciprocity' and the racism, which still underpins many whites' world-view, and as long as it resists the temptation to use whites as scapegoats for its own mistakes, a new generation of white South Africans may emerge who feel part of their country.

  In the small town of Vryburg, nearly 300 miles west of Johannesburg, two years after the high school opened its doors to non-white pupils, armoured cars were trundling through its streets to keep the peace. The trouble began when scores of black pupils demonstrated to protest after classmates had been sent home for supposedly disrupting classes. For the white parents that was enough, and they set upon black pupils with rawhide whips. It was ugly confrontational politics, reviving memories of the bad old days. Brendan Gous, the head boy, was, however, unconcerned, relations would improve.

  'The past still runs deeply through us. We don't mix. We don't want to be friends; we don't want to be enemies; we just don't want contact. But my little brother will be fine. Young children don't have memories.'

  Not all Afrikaners felt able to leave the laager. Some opted to confront Africa as in the early days of whites on the continent, although with mixed results as I was to see in a small town court where Eugene Terre'Blanche, the white extremist, was sentenced for attempted murder.

  6 - White Man's Magic

  Eugene Terre'Bianche - Militants and Mercenaries

  The Mercedes skidded to a halt in the centre of the amphitheatre. The doors swung open and four young white women in neatly pressed designer khakis threw themselves on the ground. In the moonlight you could just see their faces taut with anger and fear. In a flurry of Afrikaans commands two went down on their knees behind the passenger doors and pointed their revolvers into the shadows. Their muzzles quivered in the direction of the squat totalitarian outline of the Voortrekker Monument, Afrikanerdom's holiest shrine; their imagined black attackers were at bay. The clear night air resounded to the cheers of the spectators who had gathered in their thousands in the amphitheatre in the lee of the monument to have their myths reinforced and their ardour fuelled. They would not go home disappointed.

  There are few more emotive images in Africa than the white man with his gun. For Africans it stirs barely healed memories of subjugation and fear, conjuring up stories of Henry Stanley shooting his way through the Congo jungle for King Leopold of Belgium, or Cecil Rhodes' pioneers annexing the lands of the Shona and Ndebele. Ever since the battle of Blood River on 16

  December 1838, when the muskets of a band of trekkers and their black retainers annihilated a vastly superior Zulu army, the message has been clear: the white man's magic will win the day.

  If you are white, however, the image has a very different resonance. The gun has long symbolized safety and civilization; it is all that keeps the barbarians from the gate. Stanley and Rhodes were dogged and determined adventurers who let nothing stand in their way to open up the continent. The battle of Blood River was a victory of right over wrong, Christianity over barbarism, avenging the fate of their leader Piet Retief and some seventy fellow trekkers who were impaled at the royal Zulu enclosure as they tried to wheedle a concession of land. The savagery of Retief's end represents starkly the fear that many whites continue to live with in Africa. The victors handed down from father to son the tale of how King Dingane, Shaka's successor, uttered the fateful words 'bulala abathakhathi' (kill the wizards). Zulus, however, remember Retief as a confidence trickster who came seeking their land and was only just kept from annexing a chunk of their kingdom by a timely spilling of blood.

  The myth of the white man with his gun endured even as Africans displayed astonishing bravery in defying the logic of science, or more pertinently the bullets of the Martini Henry rifle and the Maxim gun. At the battle of Isandhlwana in January 1879 Zulus armed with spears, rawhide shields and phenomenal courage out manoeuvred and annihilated an entire British column in one of the Empire's heaviest defeats in the Victorian era. Zimbabweans still mark the Ndebeles' victory over Major Allan Wilson's advance patrol across the Shangani River. The Ashanti fought long and hard to keep the British at bay in the Gold Coast in the 1890s. But these successes were short-lived and hard-won.

  The tide turned a little in the twentieth century as Africans proved able and willing to take on the white man, and latterly with his own weaponry too. The Mau Mau rising in Kenya in the 1950s, the anti-colonial wars in the Portuguese colonies and the rape and murder of white nuns in the Congo in the Sixties, and most of all the liberation war against the white R
hodesian government in the Seventies, shifted the balance of fear. Successive waves of white refugees fleeing to South Africa from black rule in the rest of the continent, the Belgians from the Congo in the Sixties, the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique in the Seventies, and Rhodesians from Zimbabwe in the early Eighties, reinforced the convictions handed down from the Boer trekkers. But the symbol of white might was still pre-eminent.

  South African forces supporting Savimbi were checked in Angola in the Eighties only when they met a superior Cuban force. France regularly sent troops to former colonies to support its allies and puppets. Belgian and American forces at different times restored the status quo in Mobutu's Zaire. In the starkest example of all, in nearly thirty years of the 'struggle' the ANC's armed wing inflicted barely a pinprick on South Africa's white led army. It was with such memories and traditions at the back of their mind that the four Afrikaner Amazons were practising their 'anti-ambush' routine.

  Built as the totem of Afrikaner Nationalism to mark the centenary of Blood River, the Voortrekker Monument is white Africa's equivalent of a Roman triumphal column. Its stark profile is visible thirty miles away across the veld. The marble friezes which line the interior are as uncompromising as the rocky hillside on which it stands looking out over Pretoria. The panels show trekkers heading into the unknown with their ox-wagons, the slaughter of Piet Retief's advance party, the massacre of their women and children at Weenen, the place of weeping, and finally the whites' revenge at Blood River with mounds of dead Zulus lying in front of victorious Boers giving thanks to God.

  Under apartheid, every 16 December thousands of Afrikaner Nationalists gathered at the monument to mark the 'covenant' that the victors at Blood River were said to have made with God. In its early years the occasion had a religious intensity that hinted at the Afrikaners' need for historical props for their young nation, and also at the tortured complexity of their emotions for Africa, a love-hate relationship for a continent which they felt part of and yet which they also feared and despised. The climax comes on the stroke of midday when a ray of sunlight arches through a specially designed hole in the roof and comes to rest on the holy of holies, the trekkers' cenotaph.

  By the early Nineties the 'Day of the Covenant' had been hijacked by the militant white right wing in their desperation to turn back the clock and rekindle the spirit of the days when whites ruled Africa and blacks knew their place. The ceremony became an opportunity for a crude display of white supremacist and militancy by the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstands beweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement). As the 'Valkyries' skidded across the grass stage of the monument's amphitheatre on 15 December 1993, the eve of the last 'Day of the Covenant' under white rule, the AWB leaders were determined to send a message that white power was not a spent force.

  Buoyed up by the spectators' full-throated applause, the four 'armed avengers' were heading for the shadows when their car stalled. Keen to prove their versatility they jumped out and started to push, with the exception of the most buxom of them, who got stuck in. one of the doors. She was still straining to join her companions when the car lurched into life and spluttered into the shadows dragging her, half in and half out, in its wake.

  The AWB had struggled to be taken seriously ever since its foundation in the basement of a garage in 1973. With its eye catching uniforms and clownish units, including an Underwater Commando and an airborne squadron, it smacked more of pantomime than paramilitary politics. Even the Ystergarde (Iron Guard), its most disciplined unit, was hard to take seriously. They marched into the amphitheatre after the women had departed, with military precision. With their black uniforms and cap badges they had unpleasant echoes from Europe in the 1930s; their namesake, Romania's pre-war fascist movement, led bloodthirsty pogroms of Jews. But many of the sombre traditionalists in the audience struggled to remain straight-faced as the Ystergarde began a display of high kicks and mock karate chops. These were not the descendants of the white pioneers who had hacked their way through the bush. They were the usual rabble of social outcasts and misfits who are seduced by fascism- some indeed were neo-Nazis from Europe- and their cameo display was patently light entertainment intended for the television cameras.

  But a hush descended on the stadium when the leier (leader) strutted into view. Consummate performer that he is, Eugene Terre'Blanche, founder head of the AWB, gazed around him at the packed benches. Then, without notes, he launched into an apocalyptic diatribe about the 'horrors' of black rule. He had long contended he was born for war. He was christened Eugene Ney after the Napoleonic general whose reckless bravery so nearly won Waterloo. He closed with a choking pledge to fight black rule, with, if necessary, the last breath in his voluminous body.

  'Mandela does not want peace,' he bellowed. 'He wants war. If he wants war, he'll get it. No government can govern without the Boers. No government can govern without God. The Afrikaners have been asked: whom would you rather have? Jesus Christ from Blood River or Barabbas from Robben Island? The people have chosen Jesus Christ ..'

  Throughout his career Terre'Blanche had been regularly written off as a loud-mouthed bully and buffoon. He fell off his mount, a large black stallion, at one public rally, shattering his pretensions to be the heir of the brilliant horsemen of the Boer commandos. He had a high-profile affair with a white news paper columnist in a blow to his quest for the support of the Calvinist Afrikaner mainstream. And yet, even though his rants had little contact with reality, he posed a threat to a peaceful end of white rule in Africa.

  With his flowing beard and powerful oratory he had an extraordinary presence. His fighting talk inspired right-wingers and confused conservatives all over South Africa. His voice ebbed and flowed with a sensitivity that was all the more remarkable given his bully-boy appearance. You had only to shut your eyes and ignore his racist vitriol to be swept away by the poetry of his language. I could understand how his admirers claimed he could read a telephone directory and bring his audience to tears.

  *

  In the best tradition of his Boer War idols, Terre’Blanche was a farmer’s boy who can trace his origins back to early Afrikaner stock. His family is said to be descended from an Etienne Terre Blanche from Toulouse who is believed to have emigrated to South Africa in the 1760s as part of the Huguenot diaspora, which infuses Afrikaner genes. The white supremacist sentiment for which the family is now best known may date back to this time, since the Terre’Blanches pointedly did not simplify their name to Terblanche, as did many others of the clan. Instead they treasured the distinctive ‘white earth’.

  Contrary to popular belief, the invocations of a heroic past, which peppered Terre’Blanche’s speeches, do have a historical foundation. Terre’Blanche’s grandfather was one of the ‘Cape rebels’, the Afrikaners who fought with the Boers in the Anglo Boer War despite not living in one of the two Boer Republics. After the war he settled in a farm at Ventersdorp, a typically drab soulless Transvaal small town, eighty miles northwest of Johannesburg. It was there that he raised Terre’Blanche’s father, who was to become an army colonel, and it was there that E.T., as the AWB leader is known, was born in 1941.

  E.T.’s interest in politics is said to have started at an early age in Ventersdorp, where he was chairman of the high school debating society, founded his own cultural organization, long Afrikanerharte (Young Afrikaner Hearts), and was also captain of the school’s first rugby fifteen. The combination of leadership roles, academic, cultural and sporting, was a sure route to success in the heady era of Afrikaner nation-building. In those days of jobs for each and every Afrikaner it was merely a matter of deciding which ladder to climb, and Terre’Blanche opted for the police, a fruitful soil for his incipient right-wing beliefs.

  He soon rose to serve in the bodyguard of John Vorster, South Africa’s hard-line prime minister between the assassination of Verwoerd in 1966 and 1978, when he had to resign in a political scandal. Terre’Blanche’s aides played down the claim that E.T. had high-level connections and said he me
rely served with the special cabinet protection unit. Whatever, by the time E.T. left the force in the late Sixties he would have made some useful contacts for his later career.

  Terre’Blanche was also chairman of what many South Africans would regard as the ultimate oxymoron – the Police Cultural Group. He acted in many police dramas. He tried his hand at writing poetry and historical plays, including one that was briefly a set text in white schools. He is even said to have won three awards from a conservative Afrikaans cultural foundation. These threads infused his rhetoric and style from the start of his career: as with so many extreme nationalist organizations, culture and history were the oxygen for the AWB. His supporters’ sometime defence that he was merely a poet gained him little sympathy from any who had been following the Balkans descent into chaos: Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was a published poet who long before the Bosnian war wrote an apocalyptic poem about Sarajevo in flames, a vision which his supporters were later to bring hideously to life.

  The right wing’s gain was the stage’s loss. Terre’Blanche’s sense of timing and his ability to vary his delivery make him a natural actor. From the moment he founded the AWB in the basement of a suburban garage his story took on the dimensions of a low-brow farce. His affair with Jani Allan, a leggy Johannes burg journalist, titillated South Africa when it emerged that they had been caught by the police late at night trying to break into the Paardekraal, another of Afrikanerdom’s totems. The colourful details spread to Britain in 1992 when Channel 4 successfully defended a libel case against Ms Allan. Terre’Blanche became synonymous with his ‘holey green underpants’, which one of the witnesses told the court he had spied through a keyhole.

  As Terre’Blanche blundered through these colourful episodes it was tempting to dismiss him as a Falstaffian character were it not for the vicious racist attacks by his supporters against blacks which had marked his rise to prominence, and also that South Africa was all too fertile ground for his ideology. Afrikaner Nationalist extremists had long flirted with fascism. The Osse wabrandwag (Ox-Wagon Fire Guard) movement, which originated in the 1938 centenary commemoration of the Great Trek, openly backed Hitler in the Second World War. The support was partly motivated by anti-British feeling but also by empathy for the Nazis’ search for racial purity, anti-Semitism and quest for lebensraum (living space). Many OB members were interned by the government of Jan Smuts, and then went on to play an important role in National Party politics, among them the future prime minister, John Vorster. The AWE’s clowning and violence was abhorred by the Afrikaner Nationalist mainstream, but the organization’s views were shared by a significant white minority, even if few would have voted for them at the polls.