ATTIE POTGIETER, a white farm manager, was stabbed and slashed more than 150 times with a variety of farm tools, including a machete and a garden fork. The pathologist said he had been “tortured to death”. His wife Wilna and their three-year-old daughter were shot by single bullets in the back of their heads. There was no suggestion that their six killers, one aged just 17, bore a personal grudge. They had come to steal, they said. But the brutality of the murders suggested something more at play.

Since the end of the apartheid regime in 1994 more than 1,000 farmers and family members have been killed, an average of nearly 70 a year, according to official records. Most were Afrikaners, mainly descendants of Dutch settlers. Farming associations claim the true number is closer to 3,000. Unsurprisingly, their members dislike the black liberation song “Dubhul' ibhunu”, meaning “Shoot the Boer”, Afrikaans for farmer.

Julius Malema, the rabble-rouser who heads the Youth League of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), appears to take a particular delight in singing the song at rallies. He claims to mean no harm. But he calls white farmers “criminals” for having “stolen” their land from indigenous blacks, and is demanding the expropriation of their farms, Zimbabwe-style, without compensation.

Arguing that the song is unconstitutional “hate speech”, AfriForum, a predominantly Afrikaner lobby, referred the matter to South Africa's Equality Court. On September 12th it ruled that the song was indeed discriminatory and harmful and should be banned. The right to freedom of speech and expression could not trump the constitutional right to dignity, said the judge, who happened to be white. To those who claimed the words were never meant to be taken literally but were rather a call for the destruction of apartheid, he replied that what was understood mattered more.

The outrage that has greeted his ruling among blacks bears witness to the depth of racial sensitivities. The ANC said it was “appalled” by the court's attempt to “rewrite” the history of the liberation struggle and has vowed to appeal. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, an influential power broker, deemed the ruling a “gross insult”, saying that efforts to unite the country could not be “founded on an imposed amnesia about our apartheid past”. As for members of the Youth League, within minutes of the judgment being handed down they were on the court's steps, giving a lusty new rendition of the forbidden song and vowing never to stop singing it.