NEWS & ANALYSIS

Eugene Terre'Blanche: What's going on?

Jeremy Gordin asks whether someone is peddling disinformation about the murder

A friend of mine (not Jacob Zuma) sent me a SMS a week or so ago in which he wrote: "I see you are competing [presumably in the pieces I had written on Politicsweb] with Bill Johnson and Attila the Hun these days. Try to find your Inner Ubuntu."

I can sort of see what he means. And fat okes such as I need to be careful about anger. We could topple over and die. But it's so hard to keep one's cool. I can feel that I am just waiting for someone to check me just a little bit skeef or touch me on my studio and I'm going to punch him (or her - I believe in gender equality) on the nose.

One sees that enormously irritating bozo Little Julie Malema on the TV screen or one reads the utter codswallop trotted out with such fluency - and at such length - by people called Percy Gumbi or Musa Xulu (and there are many more of them - including on Moneyweb and Politicsweb - this is merely a random selection) - and one grows angry.

Won't someone tell me who they are? According to one reference I found on the internet, Xulu is "the ANC head of Media & Communications in the greater Johannesburg region". What the hell is that? And if it is what it seems to be, and if he is indeed the head, what is Jackson Mthembu? The tail?

And this Gumbi oke? Apparently he comes from the Justice for All Forum (JFAF). What is that? The J-FAFs? I recall a dragon called Fafnir from my days studying Norse mythology. But I'll be damned if I know who the J-FAFs are. But maybe don't tell us. Some things are better left as mysteries.

Gumbi wrote: "Where was Julius Malema when Steve Biko was butchered by the racist police force in the 70's?" I don't know where Malema was, Percival. Either in Baghdad or dad's bag or neither - I don't much care.

But I do know that Steve Bantu Biko was not "butchered". To butcher someone or something is to behave in relation to the said person or object as a butcher behaves towards a piece of meat, usually with a knife or cleaver. Biko was beaten on and about his head, chained to a cell grille, thrown into a police van. But he wasn't butchered. Have just a little respect for history and language, would you?

But enough anger, I decided a few days ago - and wondered what I could possibly do to help promote reconciliation, love and a toenadering between the races in this beautiful country.

It occurred that one of the best things I could do, besides assassinating Malema, was to arrange a gay pride march through Ventersdorp - like the ones I used to watch when I lived in San Francisco.

Provided there were enough feygeles (safety in numbers and all that), the locals and the AWB wouldn't be able to bother them and I figured it would open an important cultural window. People would be able to see what the late Eugene TerreBlanche found so alluring.

Which reminds me: did you see that moronic headline in The Sunday Independent? "Was ET gay?"

My brothers, sodomising someone or forcing someone to perform fellatio on yourself (two pursuits inter alia in which our prison population specialises) has as much connection with "being gay" as the average newspaper article has with a Shakespearean sonnet. Sodomy, forced fellatio, etc are mainly about power - and also about inflicting pain and one's own pleasure. Catch a wake up, would you?

But even this idea of mine - a pink parade - was quickly doomed to failure - because no one, maybe not even the perps, seems to know what the hell happened to TerreBlanche, other than, of course, that he was bludgeoned to death.

When I read last week about TerreBlanche having (allegedly) been found with his pants down (this emerged from the crimen injuria charge) and read that a 15-year-old had been involved, I thought - aha - something related to abuse, homoeroticism, etc has been happening here (see the first three pars of my column last week).

Then of course we had, courtesy of The Saturday Star, the famous disappearing condom - and, following that, we had all the Sunday papers discovering a homosexual orgy that went wrong and ended in TerreBlanche's death. Even Max du Preez came out of the closet, so to speak, with a story about Vrye Weekblad having carried a story about TerreBlanche trying to mount some young AWB lad.

(By the way, I really don't care either way, but someone I know had a pretty thorough look for the Vrye Weekblad story about which Du Preez spoke - and it, like the condom, doesn't appear to be there. But maybe Max can set us right.)

But then, as of yesterday, all the juicy sex stuff has been denied by Chris Mahlangu's attorney, Puna Moroko. But what do we make of Puna Moroko? He said with a straight face that TerreBlanche had his pants down because that's what he did when it was hot.

Was the weekend media sold so big a pup that each separate member each got a little doggy-woggy of its own? So are we back to this: Chris Mahlangu thought to himself: "Eugene TerreBlanche is an arsehole who doesn't pay me properly. Why don't I make myself a hero by killing the boer"?

This whole thing has become as vexed as that famous November weekend in 2005 when that woman who was allegedly raped by JGZ told me over the course of 90 minutes that she had not been raped and she had never laid a charge against him - and I believed her - and the Sunday Times ran a story that same morning saying that she had laid a rape charge (and she had).

The problem we have here, as Cool Hand Luke might have said, is whether there is someone or someones consciously and maliciously disseminating (if you'll pardon the word) disinformation.

I don't think there is - but, on the other hand, there is a lot riding (if you'll pardon the word) on this matter.

If the late TerreBlanche - he of the booming voice, silly uniform and crypto-Nazi insignia - was slipping his fellow (male) countrymen the big chiluga and was murdered for it, it's the funeral of the AWB (and no resurrection).

If not, if it was a "farm killing," the bogeyman of the "kill the boer" song and Malema gets resurrected and the AWB says; ‘You see, we told you so."

Could there be someone connected with this whole sorry mess who would be so arrogant and stupid (simultaneously) as to try and spin it? I don't know - though I am amazed that the new NPA boss, Menzi Simelane, allowed himself to be connected with this matter. He has negative credibility and should have stayed well away from Ventersdorp.

Finally, what can we do but return to the classics? Cui bono? For whom is it of advantage? is the famous question. Or as young Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward put it: follow the money.

So perhaps the fourth estate would let us know who is picking up the tab of the two attorneys - Mahlangu's and the youth's.

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