PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA—A well-known athlete, who is white, is charged with murder after shooting and killing his girlfriend, a model and reality show star who also happens to be white.

This is the case of double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius, whose high-profile trial is in its second week. Skin colour would seem beside the point. But here in South Africa, where official apartheid ended only 20 years ago, an undercurrent of racial politics has emerged.

It begins with Pistorius’s defence. Pistorious, 27, claims he mistook Reeva Steenkamp for an intruder when he shot her in the early hours of Valentine’s Day last year.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. An armed burglar in your home is a terrifying possibility. But in a land still suffering from the effects of enforced segregation, some find it hard not to hear “the old white fear of the swart gevaar,” as South African journalist and crime writer Margie Orford puts it, in Pistorius’s legal defence.

This threat of the swart gevaar — meaning “black peril” — was used under the racist, white-minority apartheid system to excuse all measures of violence and control on South Africa’s population, Orford writes in a recent essay. Orford calls the idea of an unknown, presumed dangerous black intruder hiding in Pistorius’s bathroom the “third body” in the case.

Read more on thestar.com:

South African apartheid death squad leader seeks freedom

Apartheid’s last stand in South Africa

How South Africa’s dream turned into a grim reality

“The figure of the threatening black stranger has driven many South Africans into fortress-like housing estates, surrounded by electric fences, armed guards and the relentless surveillance of security cameras,” Orford argues. “So, the accepted logic goes, of course, a man would simply shoot.”

In fact, it is black South Africans who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. Women of all races are especially vulnerable in their own homes, but this is due to their own boyfriends or husbands, not intruders. South African women are most likely to be killed by someone they know, according to the group Gun Free SA.

In Pistorius’s account, this mysterious intruder, who had crawled through a bathroom window and hidden in the toilet cubicle, would almost certainly have died after coming under fire from the athlete’s 9-mm pistol, loaded with hollow-point bullets designed to cause maximum damage.

Sandile Memela, writing for the Johannesburg-based Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader website, says that if there had been a black intruder, Pistorius would be a hero for having killed him.

“You see, when some whites buy and collect guns, it is to kill two things: animals and black people,” Memela writes, adding that “as far as some gun-toting white males are concerned, sometimes there is no distinction between the two.”

This opinion riled the FW de Klerk Foundation, run by the last apartheid-era president of South Africa who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela.

De Klerk’s foundation released a statement Wednesday saying that Memela’s comments “portray white South Africans as unreconstructed racists who wish to kill black South Africans at the least provocation and who regard black South Africans as animals.”

“Such wildly provocative and unfounded statements can have only one objective: the stirring up of racial animosity,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, in the Pistorius trial courtroom, middle-aged black members of the African National Congress Women’s League — part of the country’s ruling party — sit almost every day with white Steenkamp family members and friends.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

There are usually two or three ANC women seated among the Steenkamp supporters, and sometimes more outside the courthouse, dressed in their trademark green uniforms and wearing photos of Reeva on their lapels.

They argue that the most pressing issue here is that of violence against women — a tragedy that cuts across all races and backgrounds. The prosecution is expected to argue that Pistorius killed Steenkamp intentionally, in a fit of rage.

Reacting to the Pistorius trial, one black South African woman says that she is afraid of strange white men and has even crossed the street to avoid them.

“I do not — of course — think that white men are by their nature evil or violent,” the woman, Sisonke Msimang, writes in The Daily Maverick, a South African news website. “Yet listening to the stories about the gunplay of Oscar Pistorius and his mates this week has reminded me of how little we speak about white male violence in this country.”