South African President Jacob Zuma has called for calm after the murder of white far-right leader Eugene Terre'blanche.
Police have detained two black farm workers and suspect Terre'blanche was killed in a dispute over unpaid wages, but his Afrikaner Resistance Movement says he was battered and hacked to death in an attack with political overtones.
Mr Zuma urged South Africans "not to allow agents provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fueling racial hatred."
Terre'blanche, 69, was the voice of hardline opposition to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, although his party has played a marginal role since then and does not have a big following among the 10 per cent of white South Africans.
Terre'blanche had lived in relative obscurity since his release from prison in 2004 after serving a sentence for beating a black man nearly to death.
Concerns over increasing racial polarisation have been thrown into the open recently by a row over the singing of an apartheid-era song with the lyrics "Kill the Boer" by the youth leader of the ruling African National Congress.
