Thousands of followers of the murdered South African white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche, many wearing combat fatigues, thronged to his funeral today in the rural north-western town of Ventersdorp as racial tensions ran high.
Two black farm workers have been charged with beating and hacking Terre'Blanche to death last Saturday in what police suspect was a pay dispute, but which his party sees as politically motivated.
Terre'Blanche (69) had been marginalised after his failed efforts to preserve apartheid in the early 1990s, but the killing has exposed the racial divide that remains 16 years after the end of white minority rule.
"We think it was an assassination, not a murder," said Andre Visagie, Secretary General of Terre'Blanche's Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) outside his farm.
As the coffin was wheeled into the church, mourners sang the apartheid-era national anthem. With space limited, a few thousand supporters filled the streets of the small farming town of Ventersdorp, 100km west of Johannesburg. The old South African flag and the party's flag - which resembles the Nazi swastika - fluttered from pickup trucks.
Police were out in force and helicopters hovered above streets where few black South Africans were to be seen. The church lifted its usual "whites only" restriction to allow in black journalists.
President Jacob Zuma has called for calm after the murder, barely two months before South Africa is due to host the soccer World Cup finals, and the AWB has ruled out violent reprisals, but the mood among some at the funeral was militant.
The murder has heightened a sense among its supporters - a tiny minority of the 10 per cent of whites in a population of 48 million - that they are being targeted by the African National Congress (ANC), which has ruled South Africa since 1994.
Julius Malema, leader of the militant ANC Youth League, caused controversy last month when he sang a black liberation struggle song that includes the words "Kill the Boer" (Afrikaans for farmer) - now banned by the courts as hate speech.
Mr Malema was told by the ANC to avoid inflammatory comment over the Terre'Blanche killing. The ANC today condemned Mr Malema's comments at a news conference yesterday, as well as his expulsion of a British journalist with a barrage of expletives. It said he would be summoned to a meeting to discuss the issues raised.
The country’s largest trade union called a meeting today to coincide with the funeral in the part of Ventersdorp where most of the town’s poor blacks live, ensuring there would be no racial confrontations.
Also among the mourners today was Bojosi Isaac Medupe, a black minister who said he visited Terre'Blanche in prison after the white leader was convicted of beating a black farm worker so badly the man was left brain damaged.
Mr Medupe said he believed Terre'Blanche mellowed in prison, and was no longer committed to racial separatism or white supremacy when he left. “I believe there was a change in him,” Medupe said, adding Mr Terre'Blanche later helped him buy land in Ventersdorp.
Agencies