Paul Holmes: White anger highlights dark factors

Something very bad is happening in South Africa.

The murder this week of Eugene Terre'Blanche, the loathsome ultra-right-wing white supremacist by, it is thought, a couple of farm hands upset that their wages had not been paid, seems to have been a spark to ignite what was obviously building as a racial storm.

Terre'Blanche will not be missed by anyone halfway intelligent or decent, either outside or inside South Africa.

Most of us had long forgotten him from the days before the election of Nelson Mandela when he formed his Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) party in the 1980s to fight the ascension to power of the ANC.

Terre'Blanche wanted a separate country for the Afrikaner, nothing less.

He was a brutal clown, Terre'Blanche. He fancied himself as another Paul Kruger, the Afrikaner Boer War leader. He railed against change, railed against the government of FW de Klerk.

He addressed rallies from a horse, in the manner of the old Boer campaigners. For a few years, he was a real worry for those dreaming of a new South Africa.

In 1988, there were allegations that he had been seen deshabille with a blonde journalist at a sacred Afrikaner monument. It was a bad look for him amongst the God-fearing Afrikaner volk.

In fact that, and the tide of history, more or less finished him. He served six months in 2000 for assaulting a petrol attendant and setting his dog on him and then did three years of a six-year jail sentence imposed in 2001 for beating a farmworker so badly that the man was brain-damaged.

But, as I say, his death this week seems to have sparked something. His followers are vowing revenge. They will have a meeting in a month to work out exactly what form that will take.

A Mr Visagie from the AWB says darkly, "They attacked him in such a way it was difficult to recognise the face of Eugene Terre'Blanche."

The two men accused of his murder are alleged not only to have bludgeoned him savagely, but also to have removed his trousers after they had killed him to enhance the insult.

Then strangely, almost poignantly, you would have to say, they waited by the body for the police to arrive. How can a person ever work out Africa?

Having vowed revenge, this Mr Visagie offered a warning to the soccer nations not to send their teams to the World Cup. "Don't do it if you don't have sufficient protection for them." Then he declared that the murder of Terre'Blanche was a declaration by blacks of war upon the whites.

Actually, the London newspaper the Times interviewed Terre'Blanche in October last year. His line had not changed from 30 years ago.

He told the Times, "Our country is being run by criminals who murder and rob. This land was the best and they ruined it all. We [the Afrikaners] are being oppressed again. We will rise again. Our people are being slaughtered. The whites are being chased out of the country."

But what Terre'Blanche's death has highlighted in such a shocking way this week is South Africa's breathtaking violent crime statistics. The South African Police say there are 60 murders a day in the country.

The Department of Home Affairs puts the figure at 83. Interpol believes the murder total in the Republic is 149 a day. That means, depending on whom you believe, that South Africa has as few as 21,000 murders a year or as many as 55,000 a year.

Now, South Africa is a nation of 50 million people. But in a per capita comparison with other countries South Africa is the second most murderous country after Colombia. The United States, interestingly, is 24th on the list, with New Zealand coming in down the table at 54.

Although lately, God knows, you could get the feeling that we are creeping right up the table.

But where the Terre'Blanche killing is a worry is that it highlights another terrible statistic and that is that since 1994 and the birth of the Rainbow Nation, some 3000 farmers have been murdered - and nearly always they were tortured before they were killed. The farmers, of course, are white. The farmers, of course, are Afrikaner. And the farmers were Terre'Blanche's base.

Other stats. Between April 2005 and March 2006 there were in South Africa 18,500 murders, 20,500 attempted murders and 55,000 rapes.

There were a quarter of a million assaults with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Ten per cent of South Africans live with HIV/Aids - over five million people. Average life expectancy in South Africa is 50 years.

Unemployment is some 25 per cent - a figure that is roughly unchanged since 1998, and that kind of rate, as we know here, is a recipe for violent disaster.

Having said all that, South Africa has always been a country of gifted leaders, eternal hope and faith and immense goodwill between blacks and whites, despite it all.

It has, after all, produced Nelson Mandela, the man who, along with Mahatma Gandhi, remains one of the most remarkable leaders of the 20th century, one of the greatest leaders ever.

Who will ever forget the sight of Mandela at Ellis Park meeting the teams in his No6 Springbok jersey and what that meant to the Republic that day.

But Mandela's time has passed. Mbeki seemed to achieve little and the jury is still out on Jacob Zuma, the current president. The ANC is so powerful as to be unchallenged from without.

This may be South Africa's main handicap; a party that no one can get rid of.

The killing of Terre'Blanche and the crime statistics it has alerted us to are a bad, sad look, coming as they do just a couple of months before South Africa's hosting of the soccer World Cup.

Just when the country will be hoping to show the best of itself to the entire international community, the new South Africa seems not to be working.

The AWB may be hurt and bloodied this week, but they are nevertheless a fringe group of old-guard separatists. They have no appeal in the cities and few outside the old rural Afrikaner communities will feel inclined to too much anger over his murder.

No one is going to rise up over an old farmer who won't pay his men. But one senses a new and sudden anger, a new frustration in that most beautiful of lands from which so many of the talented and go-ahead people have long since departed.

Cry, the beloved country.