The country’s President Jacob Zuma, has appealed for calm following the death of Eugene Terreblanche—who gained notoriety for campaigning against the end of the racist system of apartheid in the 1980s.
Police in South Africa said that Terreblanche was found on his bed with facial and bodily injuries on Saturday. A panga machete was found on his body and a knobkerry club was lying next to the bed.
Officers have arrested a 21-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy who worked for him on his farm outside Ventersdorp, northwest of Johannesburg.
“The president appeals for calm,” Zuma’s office said in a statement on Sunday, “and asks South Africans not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fueling racial hatred.”
At the peak of his notoriety, Terreblanche was one of the most divisive figures in South African politics and his organization—the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB)—was linked to attacks on white politicians and academics who publicly stood against apartheid.
In recent years, he had faded into relative obscurity as a farm owner but still held extreme views, which he frequently voiced.
In a recent speech to supporters, he said about post-apartheid South Africa, “Our country is being run by criminals who murder and rob. This land was the best, and they ruined it all. We are being oppressed again. We will rise again,” according to the Telegraph.
Opposition politicians have blamed the ruling African National Congress for heightened racial tension in the province in which he was killed.
Last week, Julius Malema, leader of the youth wing of the ANC was banned in Pretoria high court from singing an apartheid-era song, which contained the lyric “shoot the Boer”—a reference to the Dutch word for white farmers.
It is argued that the song Ayesaba Amagwala (The Cowards are Scared)—which was once a rallying call against apartheid—is these days more likely to incite violence against South Africa’s white minority.
Regarded with degrees of seriousness, Terreblanche—who claimed Hitler as a role model—once said that democracy was not appropriate for South Africa and called for the reinstatement of a Boer republic from the days of the early Dutch settlers.
The 69-year-old assumed the dress of a 19th-century Voortrekker, Dutch pioneer, and rallied large groups of hard-liners under a flag resembling a swastika.
His organization, the AWB, was behind the tar-and-feathering of a liberal Afrikaans professor in 1979, and later accumulated a stash of arms and set about attempting to destabilize the transition from apartheid rule.
The AWB was linked to a series of bombings ahead of the country’s first multiracial elections in 1994, which killed 21 people and wounded dozens of others.
Terreblanche was jailed in 2001 for the attempted murder of a gas attendant, and found himself in a majority-black jail. After being released in 2004, he said he had become a born-again Christian and had moderated his views.
Speaking in 2005, he said, “I have always been made out as a racist, someone who hates black people. I don’t hate them. I grew up with them. I just know there are many differences between whites and blacks and I will always believe it.”
In 2008, he again re-established the AWB and began to hold public rallies on horseback.
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