Thousands of followers of Eugene Terre’Blanche, the murdered white supremacist, attended his funeral amid tight security today.
Mourners, many dressed in combat gear, sang the apartheid-era national anthem as the coffin entered the church. Some among the congregation performed Nazi salutes during the service.
Other who could not fit inside the church filled the streets of the small farming town of Ventersdorp, 62 miles (100km) west of Johannesburg.
South Africa’s pre-apartheid flag and Terre'Blanche's party's flag, which resembles the Nazi swastika, fluttered from pickup trucks in the surrounding streets.
Reverend Ferdie Devenir told the congregation that Mr Terre’Blanche had been “a good leader”.
“The world was against him, they looked for the bad things about him.”
Two of Mr Terre’Blanche’s black workers have been charged with beating and hacking him to death on his farm last Saturday.
Police suspect the murder was financially rather than politically motivated but the killing has exposed the country's persistent racial divide 16 years after the end of white minority rule.
Helicopters circled above the streets and police were out in force. Few black South Africans were among the crowds.
Mr Terre’Blanche, 69, had been marginalised after his failed efforts to preserve apartheid in the early 1990s.
His party, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), and its paramilitary wing wanted to establish a white, Boer nation in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natal.
“We think it was an assassination, not a murder,” Andre Visagie, secretary-general of the AWB, said today.
Mr Terre’Blanche will be buried at his farm later this afternoon.
Jacob Zuma, the South African President, has called for calm after the murder, barely two months before South Africa is due to host the football World Cup finals and the AWB has ruled out violent reprisals, but the mood among some at the funeral was militant.
“We are here today to declare war and avenge the death of our leader,” said one 46-year-old businessman from the north-eastern Mpumalanga province who did not want to be named.
“Most white men between 35 and 55 have military training and we are prepared to use our skills.”
The murder has heightened a sense among the AWB's 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 killing of MR Terre’Blanche.
The ANC condemned comments made by Mr Malema at a news conference yesterday, as well as his ejection from the conference of a British journalist. It said he would be summoned to a meeting to discuss the issue.
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