The killing of Eugene Terre’blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) in Occupied Azania (South Africa), allegedly by two Africans who worked for him, has sparked an upsurge of militant protests from Africans in defense of the accused African workers.
Terre’blanche’s death highlights the ongoing resistance against the neocolonial government led by the African National Congress and renewed demands for African workers’ control of African land.
Arrested for the April 3 killing was a man in his 20s and a 15-year-old juvenile. As farm workers for Terre’blanche, the accused men worked in brutal semi-enslaved conditions making only $40 a month.
The majority of African farm workers on white settlers’ stolen farms continue to be brutalized with impunity.
Following the Terre’blanche death, the South African trade union federation “demanded that the provincial police commissioner release all statistics of assaults and killings of farm workers” on record, according to an article in the South African Mail and Guardian.
The article states that even as the accused Africans were in court, a white farmer on that same day, in the same town assaulted seven farm workers.
In 2001 Terre’blanche was convicted of beating farm worker Paul Motshabi with an iron pipe nearly to death, yet Terre’blanche spent only four years in prison.
Terre’blanche’s sentence was a mere slap on the hand for his colonial violence, while Motshabi is an invalid today, incapable of working and living in poverty.
Terre’blanche’s brutality regularly included sexual attacks against men on the farm, and the accused African men have stated that they were assaulted in this way, according to news reports.
African workers in Occupied Azania have the right to resist by any means necessary the colonial conditions imposed on them on their own land.
Terre’blanche, whose name means white land, was an Afrikaner and an active member of South African’s white nationalist party for most of his adult life.
In retaliation for the murder of Terre’blanche, the AWB is threatening “war” and violence in attempt to further repress the African working class.
The Afrikaners, also known as Boers, a Dutch word for farmer, began to colonize South Africa when they first arrived from the Netherlands in the 1600s.
Most of the present-day Boers, however, include non-English people from all over Europe who came to South Africa during the height of British colonialism for a piece of Africa’s stolen bounty.
The Boers took over the land in the Eastern Cape region and fought a war with the British during the colonial era in the early 1900s over who would be the head colonizer.
Terre’blanche represented the particular interests of one sector of the white settler population in South Africa who want to keep their plots of our stolen land.
However, Terre’blanche was no different than all other white settlers whose wealth, jobs and land are stolen and come at the expense of African workers.
ANC fronts for imperialist masters
After 400 years of struggle for our liberation in Azania, imperialism ushered in a neocolonial government in 1994 led by the African National Congress (ANC), with Nelson Mandela at the helm.
The ANC leadership has left the former colonial structure in place to continue to suck African blood.
Under the flag of the “Rainbow nation,” the ANC has allowed white people and foreign corporations to continue to own the vast majority of the land and resources in Azania, and created power and wealth for the African petty bourgeoisie while African workers face conditions worse than under Apartheid.
This situation exposes the fact that conditions for Africans on our own land have worsened significantly under the leadership of the ANC.
Today, after 16 years of black administration of white power, 87 percent of the land is still owned by white people in South Africa and 4.1 million Africans in Azania live on less than a dollar a day, up from 1.9 million in 1996.
The ANC-led process of Truth and Reconciliation was an imperialist farce in which some of the greatest war criminals of all time such as former Apartheid president De Klerk and his government were given amnesty, while Africans continued to exist in the same colonial conditions.
The family of slain Azanian freedom fighter Steve Biko who was killed by the Apartheid security police in 1977 described the TRC as a "vehicle for political expediency," which "robbed" them of their right to justice when Biko’s murderers were allowed to go free.
The Afrikaners, neocolonial president Jacob Zuma along with most of the white population are blaming the killing on “inflammatory statements” by Julius Malema, leader of the ANC youth league (ANCYL).
Malema has been publicly singing a banned popular song from the 1970s liberation struggle — a song that includes the words “Kill the Boer.”
Quoted on South Africa’s IOL news site, Malema recently stated, “We will drive the white man from the land. We will drive him from the mines. We will drive him from the boardrooms. Africa for the Africans."
But despite Malema’s militant statements, the ANC Youth League leader is a strong supporter of current South African president Jacob Zuma.
Malema is a neocolonialist and an opportunist whose interests lie in gaining more control of Africa’s resources for the benefit of the African petty bourgeoisie at the expense of the masses of African people.
Since his election to the ANCYL in 2008 Malema has made millions of dollars through deals and contracts available to him through the ANC’s proximity to the colonial wealth gained at the expense of the poverty of millions of African workers.
Malema’s construction company, for example, secured government contracts and made huge profits building roads and bridges in his home province of Limpopo. These structures were of such poor quality that they almost immediately washed away.
According to the South African Times of March 1, 2010, a bridge built by Malema’s company in one town in Limpopo province “is effectively a hill of soil covered with pavement. It has no concrete layers.
"Residents said heavy rains in January swept it away just a few weeks after it was finished."
This week Zuma censured Malema for his statements and has been calling for “calm” on the part of African workers in the face of the World Cup soccer games which will be held in several South African cities in June.
Zuma is trying to make it clear that white people will be “safe” and greeted by a quiet and repressed African working class.
World Cup for white visitors; “Tin Can Town” for African workers
To make way for new stadiums and hotels for white visitors to the World Cup games, thousands of African workers were forced into a “temporary relocation area,” (TRA), known by the residents as “Tin Can Town,” or “concentration camp.”
According to the UK Guardian on April 1,
“’It’s a dumping place,’ said Jane Roberts, who lives in the sparsely furnished structure known as M49. ‘They took people from the streets because they don’t want them in the city (Cape Town) for the World Cup. Now we are living in a concentration camp.’
“Roberts, 54, added: ‘It’s like the devil runs this place. We have no freedom. The police come at night and beat adults and children. South Africa isn’t showing the world what it’s doing to its people. It only shows the World Cup.’
“President Jacob Zuma’s government insists that sports’ biggest showpiece is already benefiting the whole nation, creating jobs, improving infrastructure and transforming its image abroad…
“Yet a short drive from the city’s expensively upgraded airport, a drive few tourists are likely to make, boys kick up dust and stones in Blikkiesdorp because the spending spree failed to provide them with a park.
“Campaigners argue that this bleak place in Delft township shows that Africa’s first World Cup has become a tool to impress wealthy foreigners at the expense of its own impoverished peoples. Residents say it is worse than the townships created by the white minority government before the end of racial apartheid in 1994.”
It’s clear that African workers on the Continent of Africa and wherever we have been dispersed around the world are finished with neocolonialism in all its forms.
Imperialism was built on our backs, and Africa and all its resources belong to African people. The African Revolution has not been completed and must be led by the African working class organized through the African Socialist International.
We are fighting for unconditional power in our own African hands. Imperialism must go. White colonizers must go.
Justice for the African workers imprisoned for the death of the white colonizer!
Build the African Socialist International!
Forward to the 5th Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party!
