It appears that Eugene Terre’Blanche has learnt little from his sentencing but he still enjoys antagonising the press. Angella Johnson reports
I HAD been told that Eugene Terre’Blanche would not speak to a black journalist. Maybe the prospect of spending six years in a multi-racial prison had softened the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging leader, for not only did he agree to an interview, but he shook my hand and, I swear, he almost smiled at me.
That was as good as it got. Within minutes of my being ushered into “the leader’s” office by a stone-faced henchman, Ventersdorp’s most notorious convicted felon began to rail at me for having arrived on his doorstep without having first secured a meeting.
“You think you can just turn up and see me without an appointment?” blustered Terre’Blanche, who is out on bail pending his appeal against a six-year sentence for attempted murder and one year (to run concurrently) for assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
“I’m a busy man with lots of things to do. If you can’t be bothered to look us up in the phone book for the number, then maybe I won’t bother to speak with you after all.”
I began a passable imitation of Charles Dickens’s Uriah Heep, grovelling and apologising like crazy. He seemed appeased, especially after I laboured the fact that as a foreigner I was still trying to get to grips with cultural differences.
“Well, I’m seeing the SABC first -they bothered to arrange an interview very early this morning. You can sit in, but it will be in Afrikaans,” he reminded me.
At which point he turned to the photographer with me and suggested that he could act as an interpreter. “Where are you from?” he asked him.
“The Western Cape,” came the reply. This definitely brought a smile to the pudgy, grey-bearded man sitting behind a huge wooden desk surrounded by Afrikaner memorabilia, including a large Swastika- like flag. “So Afrikaans is your mother tongue.” It was not question.
Unfortunately, my colleague choose to treat it as such and replied in the negative. Terre’Blanche began to splutter with uncontrollable rage. He had already torn a strip off the photographer for turning up in patched jeans.
“Jy is hardegat,” he shouted and threw us out of the office. Hard ass, eh! Well, it takes one to know one.
Now that Terre’Blanche (53) no longer commands an army of pot-bellied, khaki-clad racists to threaten South Africa’s democracy, it takes a criminal conviction to get the media swarming around him again. It must have seemed like old times and he was enjoying throwing his weight around.
Which is exactly how he landed in court in the first place. For in Ventersdorp Terre’Blanche and his goons act like a law unto themselves – a kind of unofficial militia, revered by the white community and feared by blacks from the nearby Tshing township.
So when John Ndzima, who was assaulted by Terre’Blanche and his giant dog Saldanha, heard on Tuesday that his attacker had been sent to jail he was delighted. “I thought that at last I could move around without being scared,” he said.
But as Ndzima (37) made his way home that evening he spotted his nemesis in the centre of town. “I was shocked,” exclaimed the frightened garage attendant.
He still has nightmares about the night last year when he was locked in a ladies toilet at the local Shell garage and had his head repeatedly banged against the wall by the burly Terre’Blanche, who also tried to strangle him.
The AWB leader had arrived on horseback with a crony to punish Ndzima for reporting to the police that a young white boy was seen breaking into a nearby chemist. “He wanted to know why I did not tell him first and did not like the fact that I had said the boy was white,” said the father of three.
“Now he is free, I’m very afraid because I know what he will do if he finds me because he has a big temper. Also I’ve been told that he is promising to kill me before going to jail. He is very dangerous so I’ve got to watch myself. After all, the other guy he tried to kill has brain damage.”
Ventersdorp, 53km north-west of Potchefstroom on the Schoonspruit, is the AWB’s stronghold and still a segregated town, despite that fact that it elected itself a black mayor in the recent local elections.
I had expected rabid AWB members to run me out of town as soon as I started sniffing around with my notebook and pen. But the worst I received were polite refusals to comment from some white residents.
Most were glad to defend Terre’Blanche. “He’s a good man,” insisted farmer Albie Claasens. “He was my neighbour for many years and I don’t believe he did any of the things they convicted him of. Yes, he’s got a bit of a temper, but if you approach him in a good manner he can be very charming.”
In other words, agree with everything Terre’Blanche says and allow yourself to be bullied. For that is what Terre’Blanche is – an overgrown bully who will snap at the slightest provocation. And his victims are usually timid blacks who are too frightened to fight back.
“That’s why we want him in jail,” said domestic worker Mavis Letlelo, who had to be coaxed to speak because of her fear. “He rides around town on his big horse as if he was the devil himself. He treats black people like rubbish and will attack us for no reason, although the blacks who work for him at his farm says he treats them very well.”
Morne Eric, he would not give his surname, but said his father is the chief magistrate at Potchefstroom, was the only white person who dared to voice an opinion against Terre’Blanche – perhaps because he was passing through.
I cornered him putting petrol in his car. “He’s very lucky. All the evidence should have landed him 15 to 20 years. In fact, I think that under the old criminal justice system he would have been given the death penalty.”
But then the case would probably not have gone to trial.