"ET is gone home", what about us?

While the rest of the world was celebrating Easter holidays, South Africans were unexpectedly flashed with the news that Eugene "ET" Terre'blanche, a leader of a small rightwing Afrikaaner extremist grouping in had been brutally hacked to death by two young black farmworkers. The announcement came late on Saturday night. South African airwaves, social media sites and private conversations have since been littered with this story. On Sunday morning I switched on to CNN and BBC International to see if this story was being carried internationally, and indeed it was.

All government spin machinery was in full swing, even the President had to interrupt his Easter holidays to calm the nation, you got a sense that something significant had just taken place. It was reported that a 16 year old (later revised to 15) and a 21 year old workers employed at the Terre'Blance farm had a dispute with the AWB leader over R300 (some channels said R600) that he owed them. The squabble ended up with the pair attacking him with a panga and stick, killing him in his bedroom. What was striking was that the young pair then informed the police about their deed and handed themselves over. Thus there was very little room for speculation about who killed ET.

South Africa has been forced to revisit the legacy of the man called ET, which I will not go into in this blog (visit the link earlier). The bottom line is that; ET was a rebel without a sensible cause. Many sensible white Afrikaners in South Africa considered him a buffoon for his stance, however there is still a small group that still look up to him as a leader. Most of the talking point was around the song that Julius Malema, the radical leader of the ANC Youth League, had sung a few weeks earlier at the University Of Johannesburg. The song called "Ayesaba Magwala" (the cowards are scared), has a line that says "aw dubul' ibhunu [shoot the boer] 'a magwala [the cowards are scared] dubula dubula [shoot shoot]". Some have argued that this song is linked to the ET's death or the song has created a context in which this murder occured. This off course is far from the truth in my opinion.

Up until we hear from the alleged killers, it is a matter of speculation whether Malema and the song influenced them. The irony of this whole situation is that President Jacob Zuma's signature song, "Awulethu Mshini Wam", is not very far from Julius' song. It is a struggle song that calls for the machine gun, to do what exactly? To shoot the bloody enemy off course, the same cowards that Malema is threatening to shoot. It will be very interesting to see how the case develops and whether references are made to this song.

What is clear however is the reality that these songs are offensive to a lot of South Africans, black and white, who are still committed to reconciliation. The ANC argues that these songs are part of our heritage, that is fair enough, however the question that we need to ask is whether this aspect of our heritage needs to be rehashed at the expense of offending and ultimately reversing the gains of the negotiated settlement.

Now that ET is dead, now that the struggle songs have been brought back to the fore, what is South Africa going to do? Will we all dig in and hold on to our polar views despite of the divisive nature of our views? Was reconciliation in SA perhaps a farce? Shall we rise above these glitches and seek for a better country? Are we ready to painfully deal with this situation for the sake of the future?