VENTERSDORP, South Africa – Followers of one of South Africa’s most notorious white supremacists cast his death as a rallying point for their cause Sunday, with one top member claiming his brutal death was “a declaration of war” by blacks against whites.

Eugene Terreblanche’s supporters blamed his slaying on a ruling party official’s performances of an apartheid-era song that advocates killing white farmers. Police, however, say it appeared to be a wage dispute that led two of Terreblanche’s farm workers to bludgeon him in his bed Saturday.

South African officials are trying to ward off any rise in racial tensions 10 weeks before their country of about 50 million enters the global spotlight as host of soccer’s World Cup. President Jacob Zuma appealed for calm following “this terrible deed” and asked South Africans “not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fueling racial hatred.”

Police Minister Nathi Mthetwa said Terreblanche was attacked by a 28-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy, both black. Mthetwa said they were arrested and would appear in court Tuesday on murder charges.

Terreblanche, a bearded, charismatic 69-year-old, co-founded and led the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, which seeks an all-white republic within mostly black South Africa. Terreblanche emerged in the 1970s to the right of South Africa’s apartheid government, and had threatened to take the country by force if white rule ended. He was known to arrive at meetings on horseback flanked by masked bodyguards dressed in khaki or black.