Eugene Terre'Blanche: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, a firm implementer of apartheid, 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 member of the elite bodyguard protecting him.
In that capacity, Terre’Blanche witnessed Vorster’s secret contacts with black African leaders. Such moves struck him as a liberal betrayal. 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.
Terre’Blanche was born in Ventersdorp, a joyless farming town 160km (100 miles) west of Johannesburg in the Afrikaner heartland of the old Transvaal province.
As head of the AWB, he let himself be styled die Leier (Afrikaans for leader, as in Duce or Führer).
The organisation came to fame in 1979 when members tarred and feathered a relatively progressive Afrikaner theologian. When guns were found 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.
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 took responsibility for this at the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, and was forgiven.
In 2004, however, he emerged from three years in prison for badly beating a security guard and in 2008 he announced a revival of the AWB, with secession in mind.
His wife, Martie, and a daughter survive him.
Eugene Terre’Blanche: born January 31st, 1941; died April 3rd, 2010