There are just too many things in life that do not add up, even if they do eventually establish a pattern of sorts.

Like, for instance, the recent killing of Eugene Terre’blanche, the South African supremacist who was killed recently, apparently over a pay dispute with his farm labourers.
One would have expected the obnoxious bigot to have been gunned down by the fighters of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) a long time ago, at the height of the troubles that he himself fomented in the early 1990s as efforts were being made to dismantle apartheid.

Terre’blanche’s violent outbursts and acts of political thuggery were such that an MK execution then would not have come as a surprise.

That he should die in a pay dispute is an anticlimax. One other irony is that he should get himself killed at a time when his antics had become so irrelevant to the politics of South Africa that the only interest he was drawing was from those in the business of studying curious insects.

Sadly, the ironies surrounding Terre’blanche and people of his ilk do not end there. His name -- meaning ‘white land’ -- suggests French ancestry.

My guess is his people were among the French Huguenots who fled France to escape persecution at the hands of rabid Catholic inquisitors who were hunting down and burning at the stake all followers of the doctrine taught by a “heretic” named Martin Luther.

Some of those who ran away went to Holland, and some among these later moved again to Southern Africa with the “Boer” influx in the 17th and 18th centuries, which eventually led to the founding of a state based on extreme forms of exclusionism, racism and xenophobia.

Thus those who had run away from repression became master repressors themselves.

The irony of erstwhile victims becoming perpetrators of the injustices they themselves once suffered is one of those realities of life that beggars belief, even though here a crooked argument may be discerned: We were oppressed because we are special; we shall not allow ourselves to go through what we went through again, and to effect this resolve we are prepared for anything, including oppressing others.

It is the pattern that also emerges from the Middle East, where a Jewish state, basing its claims on land titles embedded in arcane scrolls that only the initiated can understand, is lording it over the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs whose only transgression is to want to live in a country that they have always called home.

Apparently, the sufferings of the Jews during the Holocaust — which were truly horrific — justify any exactions that the state of Israel feels like imposing on its non-Jewish citizens and neighbours.

Just like the Huguenots who became “Boer” colonisers in South Africa, the Jewish state couches its philosophy in a doctrine of divine selection that bestows powers on Israel that no temporal arrangements can vary, literally dragging God into a land dispute.

The next irony is the one about the Palestinians themselves — they are so bitterly divided that one might as well wonder whom they consider to be the real enemy. For Fatah, is the enemy Israel or Hamas? For Hamas, which is worse, Fatah or Israel?

Back to South Africa, briefly. One would have thought that the black South Africans who for centuries suffered iniquitous rule by racists who called them kaffirs, would be too wise to discriminate against others.

No, these selfsame victims of apartheid see it fit to discriminate against, chase, kill and torch their brethren from north of the Limpopo, whom they call “makwerekwere,” apparently a reference to the incomprehensible lingo these “foreigners” are supposed to speak.

These ironies will continue to haunt us as long as we refuse to uphold a few, very simple tenets of humanisation, such as the one about freedom being indivisible: It is either everywhere or nowhere. The clear message is that I cannot be free if one member of the human race languishes in slavery and dehumanisation.

Perhaps we should revert to the words of that Palestinian of 2,000 years ago: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Jenerali Ulimwengu, chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper, is a political commentator and civil society activist based in Dar es Salaam. [email protected]