The laager is almost derelict
The ideas of a murdered racist leader are almost dead too
OUTSIDE the magistrates' court in Ventersdorp, a one-horse town in the rural north of the country, where two black men were accused of murdering Eugene Terre'Blanche, the leader of South Africa's far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement, stood a small stand decked out in the blue, white and orange colours of the country's apartheid-era flag (see article). The people manning it, from another Afrikaner outfit with similar views to Mr Terre'Blanche's, were collecting registrations for an all-white election next year. Once an assembly has been chosen, it will ask the country's government to give them a separate homeland for the volk, descendants of the mainly Dutch pioneers who trekked north from the British-run Cape Colony in the early 19th century.
“You must be part of our people, our cultural identity” in order to take part, says Paul Kruger, a proponent of the homeland idea. “It's not about skin colour,” he adds with a straight face. “It's about ethnicity.” White Afrikaans-speaking Protestants can automatically join. But if any blacks, Coloureds (as South Africa's 4.4m people of mixed race are known) or Catholic whites ask to register, “the people must decide whether such applicants are part of the people or not”. So far none has done so. After a year, fewer than 30,000 people have enrolled. South Africa's white population is around 4.5m in a total of 49m.
That shows how fast the far-right has fizzled out. In the last whites-only poll, in 1992, more than 875,000 white South Africans voted no in a referendum on reforms that would lead to a multiracial democracy two years later. Nearly 2m whites said yes. By the time of his death Mr Terre'Blanche, who once embodied the threat of a race war in South Africa, was a fringe ideologue, more of a figure of ridicule than of terror after serving a prison sentence for trying to murder a black security guard, and falling off his horse at a rally. Last year, when he sought to relaunch the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (better known by its Afrikaans initials, AWB), only a few hundred people turned up. Steyn van Ronge, its new leader, says that “thousands” of people have applied to join since Mr Terre'Blanche's death but declines to reveal how many members the AWB now has. Its supporters' blood-curdling rhetoric after the murder was quickly retracted, replaced with promises of non-violence.
Most whites, including Afrikaners, who still make up more than half the white total, now back the Democratic Alliance (DA), the biggest opposition party, while another 147,000 plumped for the Freedom Front Plus, a mainly Afrikaner outfit, in last year's poll. Some irreconcilables refuse to vote at all. The New National Party, which succeeded the old one that had run the show under apartheid since 1948, announced in 2004 that it would merge with the ruling African National Congress (ANC), enabling its head, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, to join the cabinet. But he failed to take his former voters with him. Nowadays maybe 15% of whites—a mix of old liberals and radicals and young whites who like the ruling party's officially non-racist, non-sexist stance—back the ANC.
Most South Africans still vote for people with whom they most easily identify, partly on the basis of race. That puts the DA in a tricky position. In last year's general election it got 17% of the vote, four percentage points more than in 2004. But it is still widely seen as a party for whites and Coloureds, and is still failing to make big inroads among black voters.
Mr Kruger is among the irreconcilables who refuse to vote at all. “I don't want to legitimise the process of my right to self-determination being trampled,” he says. Few whites these days agree.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "The laager is almost derelict"
From the April 10th 2010 edition
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