Here’s the teaser. It’s called Unhinged and it looks interesting.

No related posts.

One of the first articles I wrote as Mhambi – in fact I think it spurred me on to start Mhambi – was prompted by Nick Broomfield’s second movie about Eugene Terreblance, His big white self. Read it and see why I had a massive problem with it: It further entrenches centuries old cycles of prejudice and violence.

One thing I did not rail against was the allegations in the film that Terreblance and the AWB has been responsible for the murder of ANC Ventersdorp Mayor Kabelo Mashi. I knew little about the case and back then newspaper archives were not readily available to be searched online.

When Terreblance was murdered 3 weeks ago Andile Mngxitama in City Press defended the alleged murderers as heroes in an article titled Blacks in Bondage.

In it he makes much the same claims made in Broomfield’s documentary.

“Until his death, Eugene Terre’Blanche and his gun-toting men were allowed to spread terror. ­Almost every black person who lives around ­Ventersdorp knows the wrath of the AWB. In 1997, a young black mayor of Ventersdorp, Kabelo ­Oupakie Mashi, a staunch member of the SACP, stood up against the bullies of Ventersdorp.

He transformed budgets, cajoled the local criminal justice system to take racist violence seriously, and attempted to bring freedom to Ventersdorp.

Mashi was abducted and murdered, his body left in the veld. Witnesses were openly intimidated and the murder remains unsolved. If a mayor can be killed for challenging white power and the ­perpetrators can get away with it, what chance do ordinary mortals have?”

In Broomfield’s documentary Terreblance had just been let out of prison. Broomfield meets local black traffic cops who laughs that he going to meet ET. Broomfield tells of how different Venterdorp feels since his previous visit just before the first fully democratic elections, gone the white racists. They still want to enforce the use of Afrikaans in the local school he laments without any pause to reflect about this, but now the town is black. Raucous Kwaito can be heard booming from its streets.

But in Andile Mngxitama’s article black serfdom was a reality in Venterdorp until recently:

But that changed with the killing of Terre’Blanche. I went to Ventersdorp this week in solidarity with the accused to ensure that they were not lynched.

We stand sandwiched between the local ­magistrates court and the Boer monuments that bear the names of the Afrikaner patriarchs who inspire the AWB. They are ugly, cheap and fragile. It’s as if they represent a memory that is slowly fading away.

Young blacks stand on top of the monuments with the hope of getting a glimpse at the accused. We wait for hours in the sun. Then, as the first accused, barefoot like Jesus Christ, is pushed into the Casspir, the crowd breaks out as one: “Amandla! Hero! Hero! Hero!” It was a moment of total identification with those accused of murdering ET. They were saying: “If you didn’t see the faces of the accused,it’s OK, you have seen our faces. We are the accused!”

“Ugly, cheap and fragile” are the monuments of Afrikanerdom. Perhaps they are, but my your being offensive and insensitive.

I had read the story, but I’m a bit jaded and just registered it. The claim of ‘a reign of terror’ seemed at odds with recent reports I have heard of Terreblance’s activities of late. But I presumed the claims about the murder to be true. After all City Press and Broomfield would surely do their research before such a claim is made.

Then a good friend of mine sent the same article to me after we had a heated email argument whether whites and Afrikaners were over egging claims of their victimisation.

Yesterday evening I was reading Politicsweb and found an article called Dangerous falsehoods in City Press. And wow.

Policticsweb points out that this article has become a rallying post for those seeking an explanation of ET’s murder:

This article seems to have impressed a number of commentators. The credulous BBC correspondent, Andrew Harding, said on his blog that Mngxitama’s piece summed up well the “anger I’ve heard from black colleagues.” In The Times meanwhile Richard Pithouse, of Rhodes University, described the AWB as “like the Ku Klux Klan in some dismal Mississippi town, partisans of a brutal regime of white terror that, as Andile Mngxitama argues, has never released Ventersdorp from its grip.”

Except of course it is based on a lie of which City Press should have been aware. In fact it should have struck me as odd as well.

Why would the ANC let the AWB get away with a murder like this? The next mayor on the ANC council was bound to be ANC himself. I mean were talking about two years into Mandela’s tenure as president. The ANC at the height of its popularity and power. The AWB at its lowest ebb after the recent humiliation in Bophuthatswana.

It would only not strike you as odd of you believe that black South Africans – even a mayor of the party of power – are powerless and helpless. It’s the same old absence-of-imagining-black-agency ‘tendency’ displayed by lefties word wide that seems to have infected our thinking.

Politicsweb continues to lay out the facts, and it seems that the mayor that transformed budgets was also buying diamonds:

According to contemporaneous press reports Mashi went missing on Saturday March 20 1999. He had told family members that he was going to pick up an associate, Johannes Bota Monatle, to take him to a farm in Lichtenburg. He did not return. On Sunday the police launched a search for him and Monatle after a farmer in the Elandskuil area reported seeing his car abandoned in a mielie field.

There was concern expressed in the immediate aftermath of the disappearance that there may have been a political motive behind it. Shortly before Mashi went missing the ANC caucus on the Ventersdorp council had acted to terminate the services of a security company with links to AWB leader, Eugene Terre’Blanche after a series of robberies (The Star, March 25 1999).

The North West police were clearly under pressure to solve the case. They offered a R20,000 reward for information. And by Wednesday, March 24 1999, 80 police officers – on horseback, motorcycles and in helicopters – had been deployed to search for the two missing men.

On Thursday, March 25, police detectives tracked down Monatle to a farm in the Lichtenburg vicinity. He was found with R1,020 in his possession which police suspected came from the R4,000 that Mashi had withdrawn from the bank shortly before his disappearance. Following his arrest Monatle led detectives to the location of Mashi’s body, in a sunflower field about 2km from where the car had been abandoned. The police found the murder weapon, a knife, in the vicinity. A subsequent post mortem found Mashi had died after being stabbed in the heart and lungs.

At 5pm the same day Monatle appeared in the Ventersdorp Magistrate’s Court on a charge of murder. The Sunday Independent (March 28 1999) reported that following the announcement of the arrest 300 protestors marched to the Tsing police station to demand that Monatle be handed over to them. One elderly resident of the township told the newspaper “This thug who killed our mayor should pay.”

In November 2000 the case came before the Pretoria High Court’s circuit court in Potchefstroom. Monatle pleaded guilty before Judge van Oosten to one charge of murder and one of robbery. According to the account presented by Monatle to the court Mashi had owed him R2,000 in connection with a transaction involving some rough diamonds, but had refused to pay him the money. This dispute had reached boiling point on the day of the murder, when the two men were sitting together in Mashi’s vehicle.

Mashi had climbed out of the car, opened the door on Monatle’s side, pulled him out and thrown him to the ground. Monatle had then pulled out his knife and stabbed Mashi in the chest, killing him. Monatle took the deceased’s ID book, which contained R2,000, as well as his cellphone. He made his escape in Monatle’s car which he abandoned in the mielie field. He threw away the car keys in bushes in Ventersdorp somewhere.

On November 27 2000 Judge van Oosten sentenced Monatle to twenty years in prison for murder and five years for robbery.

To sum up it had taken five days for the police to solve the murder of Philip Kabelo Mashi and a year and eight months to secure a conviction. This story was extensively reported on in most of the Johannesburg newspapers. The Star, Beeld, Citizen, Sunday World and Sunday Independent all ran reports about the disappearance of Mashi and the arrest of Monatle. However, his eventual conviction and sentencing seems to have gone unreported.

Why did the press loose interest and not report the denouement of this case? Perhaps because the press was only really interested in a story that showed the mayor was murdered by the AWB.

For a while I was one of the only bloggers writing about the killings of black foreigners in South Africa. It got my goat that the press did not report on this xenophobic violence. I saw a similar pattern in the under reporting of violence against lesbians.

Like lesbians and foreigners, white farmers are a vulnerable minority. But the fact that their murders don’t get column inches in the newspapers is not a consequence of their identity.

It is a consequence of the identity of their attackers and the dominant discourse that seeks to consistently pin responsibility to western colonialism and deny black responsibility.

Now, I’m not saying that on some farms their are not near feudal conditions. And I’ sorry to say, the AWB is full of racist baffoons.

But as Fanie de Villiers pointed out to me recently. Their are shocking reports of the mistreatment of servants and lack of observing of the minimum wage by the madames of Soweto. This is entirely unreported. Why, because the perpetrators don’t fit existing narratives.

This justification of ET’s murder is not helping a rational and considerate debate.

If you like this post you might also want to read why I think its a gross oversimplification to compare Afrikaner racism found in the West like that of the Klu Klux Clan.

Related deployments:

1. Eugene was gay? Is this still a hate crime?

Do you see the future leadership coming from the poor?

FM: No, I can’t say that I see the future leadership coming from there. My assessment is that our Constitution, which we boast so much about, is flawed to the extent that it gives power to the parties, not to the people. The people haven’t achieved democracy in this country. Democracy has been achieved by the party. People nominate nobody, they cannot nominate their officials, they cannot nominate their leaders, the people remain powerless.

I work in Chatsworth, which is an Indian township, and I’ve tried very hard to get the leadership to emerge from the people; we even put up candidates at the last election. It’s impossible to put up candidates outside the party. Now if you don’t like the party, you’re upset with the party, you can’t be in the party.

Where do you see South Africa going forward?

FM: The Constitution will have to change, for one, and I don’t know how that can happen. We have to give more power to the people so that they can be involved in electing their own leaders. You can’t enter an election without some financial resources. Now as things stand, the parties are financed but the people aren’t. If there is a civic organisation that wants to put up a candidate, that civic organisation will not get any financial support to do so.

Related deployments:

1. Being Bakkies Botha
2. Will democracy eat itself?

This was also the time of spies like Mark Behr (author of Die reuk van Appels) and Joy Harnden, who caused the death of an ANC member, even after Gavin had reported her to the ANC.

Related deployments:

1. A beer with Gavin Evans
2. A beer with Gavin Evans (Part 7 – The ECC, Brett Myrdal)

Brett Myrdall in Zimbabwe

Related deployments:

1. A beer with Gavin Evans
2. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 9 – Spies and lies)

Gavin Evans and Janet Cherry were in the same underground ANC unit
Photo Gavin Evans.

This video includes the lead up to the ECC launch with the help of organizations like Black Sash. It also includes the story of Brett Myrdal’s conscription.

Related deployments:

1. A beer with Gavin Evans
2. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 8 Carl Niehaus & assault)

This was against the established position of NUSAS and caused a lot of trouble. They were also encouraged to send others out on recommendation to Zimbabwe, and Brett Myrdal was one of them.

Gavin also talks about some close calls.

Related deployments:

1. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 8 Carl Niehaus & assault)
2. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 9 – Spies and lies)

Gavin had instant training in sending reports and worked alone for a year. He dying to tell people that he was part of the ANC, and he went hitch hiking with student activist Janet Cherry, but manged not to tell her.

He Kate Phillip and Richard Goode went back to Zimbabwe a year later. The policy initiated by Auret van Heerden (See part 3) of strategic participation had started to cause real problems within the ANC.

Gavin and Richard were now put together to work in a Unit. And they were trained in code making which was really useful.

Related deployments:

1. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 6 – Hani, Mbeki – close calls)
2. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 3 – NUSAS – Conscription)

But the open way they did it also presented risks, Including the recruitment of spies.

Gavin went on the study trip to Zimbabwe where the more circumspect Pete Roussos recruited him into the ANC. Zimbabwe was a strange place to be because the ANC at the time was aligned to Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU (also backed by the USSR) while Mugabe’s ZANU was (backed by CHINA) was in the same camp as the PAC.

Related deployments:

1. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 9 – Spies and lies)
2. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 8 Carl Niehaus & assault)

He talks about the rebuilding of community movements after the 1976 uprising had been crushed. He talks about his involvement in the Wages Commission, the General Workers Union, the Food and Canning workers Union, and how it made him feel being involved in something important.

Related deployments:

1. A beer with Gavin Evans (part 8 Carl Niehaus & assault)
2. A beer with Gavin Evans