3 Afrikaners Killed by Rebel Mine Buried Amid Grief, Talk of Revenge

Conservative Afrikaners came together in a mingling of grief and revenge Thursday to bury a farmer’s wife and her two children, who were killed by a guerrilla land mine that blew their truck apart on a lonely road.

Eleven members of two white farm families were in the truck when it struck the mine last Sunday. Six were killed and five were wounded.

In contrast to the outpourings of nationalist fervor at funerals for blacks killed by police in anti-apartheid rioting, the mood was somber and subdued at the service in Tzaneen, a farming center whose whites oppose even modest concessions to South Africa’s black majority.

“I have this to say to Oliver Tambo: You must not awaken a tiger in the Afrikaner,” Dirk van Eck, who survived the explosion, said after the funeral. He had buried his 34-year-old wife, Jacoba, and their children, Nelmari, 8, and Ignatius, 2 1/2.

Tambo leads the African National Congress, the main black guerrilla group fighting the white-minority government.

“As I looked into the grave, I was stunned there are still people who talk of negotiating with the ANC,” Van Eck said. He spoke in Afrikaans, in which the funeral was conducted.

Holds Survivor

Van Eck, 36, cradled his only surviving child, 18-month-old Erik, through most of the hourlong service. It was held in the yellow-brick Dutch Reformed Church in this heartland of Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers who came here in the 17th Century.

Van Eck’s wife and children, and a grandmother and two children from the other family, were killed when the truck hit the mine on a game farm about 90 miles north of Tzaneen, on a dirt road two miles from the Zimbabwe border.

The farmer, his baby and the three surviving members of the other family were not seriously wounded.

The African National Congress says the mine was one of a series planted three weeks ago by its guerrillas based in South Africa. The government says insurgents slipped in from Zimbabwe and has threatened reprisal raids into the black-ruled country.