stand
Jansie Kotze and Jonathan Ancer
The volk were armed with cellphones. And the leader was reduced to flogging off two bottles of mampoer dressed in a vierkleur, in his last-ditch bid to stay out of jail.
It was all a long way from the Battle of Majuba. Or, for that matter, the heady days of 1994 when the “Third Boer War” seemed in the offing.
While the rest of South Africa was watching Bafana Bafana take on Egypt in the African Cup of Nations last week, 40 hardline rightwingers were gathering at the Sandspruit farm of the Boerestaat Party leader, Robert van Tonder, to celebrate the rout of British forces at Majuba in 1879.
Today, however, the freedom struggle has been reduced to a battle by Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) leader Eugene Terre’Blanche to stay out of prison – a struggle, in the Appellate Division, which he was trying to help finance with the sale of two bottles of mampoer, each bearing his very own signature with a special decorative vierkleur.
“I won’t go to jail, because I didn’t do it. I’m not a criminal,” declared Terre’Blanche. But the grim reality for the would-be liberation leader is that, if the Appellate Division fails him, he will be seeing in the new millennium behind the walls of an (integrated) prison.
The AWB commander is out on bail pending his appeal later this month against his conviction of attempted murder and assault.
The attempted-murder charge arose when his employee Paul Motshabi suffered brain damage after Terre’Blanche beat him with an iron pipe. Terre’Blanche was also found guilty of assaulting petrol attendant John Ndzima. In July last year, Potchefstroom magistrate Chris Eksteen sentenced the leader to six years in jail.
“Terre’Blanche is being victimised to remove him from the political arena as he is the one person the African National Congress government is truly scared of,” said Van Tonder.
Terre’Blanche, whose memory about adulterous scandals is selective, accused former president FW de Klerk of selling out the Boers for the sake of his new love, Elita Georgiades.
“The romantic Greeks advised Aristotle [De Klerk] to get rid of the country so he could vry [romance],” he chirped.
The normally thunderous tones of the once- celebrated orator were uncharacteristically tame, as were his few supporters, only one of whom was toting a gun.
But Terre’Blanche won’t accept defeat. “The Boers haven’t finished trekking,” he insists. “They are just next to the road resting their oxen and planning the political trip ahead.”