The Afrikaner white-supremacist terrorist leader Eugene Terre'Blanche, who has been allegedly hacked to death at the age of 69 by two young black South Africans for withholding the wages of labourers on his farm, managed the remarkable feat of making former South African prime minister John Vorster look like a moderate.
When the imposing Terre'Blanche and six other diehard Afrikaner racists conceived the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB, Afrikaner resistance movement) in 1970, Vorster was at the height of his power, while Terre'Blanche was a police warrant officer and member of the elite bodyguard protecting Vorster and other leading politicians.
As a correspondent in South Africa at the time, I met Vorster at a parliamentary cocktail party. He had just announced in the all-white parliament that he had broken off talks with Kenneth Kaunda, then president of Zambia and a leader of continental African opposition to apartheid.
The fact that he had been meeting Kaunda had only been revealed as part of the announcement that contacts had ceased, which made the revelation a double shock. Asked what had gone wrong, Vorster complained of double-dealing by Kaunda, and then turned to me to ask: "Are you on duty?" I said nothing, but raised my glass as if to say, not while having a social drink. He then said: "I could have killed him." Any inclination to interpret this as a figure of speech died when, after a short pause, he added: "But I didn't." This seems an unusual form of liberalism. Nonetheless Terre'Blanche saw Vorster's secret contacts with such a leader of black African opinion as a liberal betrayal of the Afrikaner volk.
Terre'Blanche was born at Ventersdorp, a joyless farming town 100 miles west of Johannesburg in the Afrikaner heartland of the old Transvaal province. His family, like many other Afrikaners, was of French Huguenot origin.
Disillusioned by Vorster, he left the police, took up farming and founded the AWB, which got off the ground in 1973 and adopted a swastika-like black, white and red motif. The black symbol in the middle was made up of three sevens, which he said was chosen as a counter to the 666 of the satanic beast in the Book of Revelations. As his notoriety grew, the AWB chief emerged as part murderous thug, part buffoon.
The movement expanded, and the heavily bearded, blue-eyed and bulky Terre'Blanche (the name means "white land") took to wearing black or khaki uniforms and riding around on horseback. He let himself be styled "die Leier" (Afrikaans for leader, as in Duce or Führer) and looked like a cross between Moses and Mussolini.
He was a formidable, sometimes frightening, public speaker. The AWB may have achieved a peak membership of 70,000 as the former government bodyguard surrounded himself with a bodyguard of his own called the Iron Guard, all dressed in black and armed. In buffoon mode, he once fell off his horse in the middle of a parade.
He was allegedly seen in rather close contact with a South African woman journalist at, inter alia, the Voortrekker monument, of all places – an Afrikaner shrine outside Pretoria. When the journalist sued Britain's Channel 4 for libel over its report on the liaison, she lost, but the South African media made the most of the emerging details, which he steadfastly denied.
His political and criminal activities were less amusing. The AWB came to fame in 1979 when members tarred and feathered a relatively progressive Afrikaner theologian. The movement linked up with political parties well to the right of the ruling Afrikaner Nationalist party. When guns were found hidden on his brother's farm, Terre'Blanche and three others were convicted in 1983 under the Terrorism Act, designed as an instrument for suppressing black opposition. He was sentenced to two years, suspended for five.
The government of PW Botha, another Afrikaner, went so far as to ban the AWB from carrying arms in public, prompting Terre'Blanche's bon mot that "an unarmed white man is a dead white man". In protests against negotiations between white and black leaders, the AWB killed three people and injured dozens more.
And in a campaign against the first South African election by universal suffrage in 1994, which made Nelson Mandela president, the AWB killed 21 people. Terre'Blanche carried the can for this at Archbishop Desmond Tutu's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, and was forgiven.
However, as recently as 2004 the incorrigible Terre'Blanche emerged from three years in prison for badly beating a security guard in 1996, and in 2008 announced a revival of the AWB, with secession in mind. He is survived by his wife, Martie, and one daughter.
• Eugene Ney Terre'Blanche, white supremacist leader, born 31 January 1941; died 3 April 2010
Source: guardian.co.uk
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