The return of Jani Allan

She was one of the country’s most celebrated and divisive media figures of the 1980s and 1990s, and the object of one of its greatest sex scandals.

The waitress known as ­"Juliette" is a mystery woman in the small United States town of Lambertville, New Jersey.

Despite working at the same restaurant for the past nine years, the most people here know about her is that she only wears black, and that she knows Latin but doesn't know how to cook an egg. She's so broke that she can't afford cigarettes, but has met people such as Charlton Heston and the Dalai Lama.

The resident who knows her best, Riste Vaher (35), says: "She's known around town as the crazy British lady with the tiny dogs. The one whose story was never quite straight. Was she from Britain or Africa? She's highly intelligent, but I've seen her actually buying pre-boiled eggs. And how come she's so friendly, but says such harsh things?"

Yet the very first entry in Juliette's new waitressing blog will give a clue to her true identity for South Africans old enough to remember her glory days.

"Rejoice all my enemies (come to think of it, I used to have enemies of a higher calibre; the president of South Africa once described me as an 'attention seeker'). I am, these days, waiting tables in sensible shoes and a bistro apron."

Twenty-five years ago Jani Allan – in a poll directed at elite white suburbanites – was voted "the most admired person in South Africa". She lived in a villa above Clifton beach and drove a Ferrari. She was a glamorous, towering former model, a major opinion-maker in her role as one of the country's premier newspaper columnists, and one of its very first media celebrities.

Trained as a concert pianist, Allan was once the target of an assassin's bomb and, in 2000, she claimed to have been "used" as a spy by the ANC. She was also, of course, the focus of South Africa's all-time box-office sex scandal: the beautiful, liberal media icon who allegedly had an affair with the racist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) leader Eugene Terre'Blanche.

Allan's epic court battle over the Terre'Blanche claims – in a British documentary by Nick Broomfield – is remembered in the United Kingdom for the most salacious cat fight of the 1990s, with Allan trading humiliating sexual insults with a former friend, astrologer Linda Shaw. Welded into South Africa's memory was the court description of Terre'Blanche sitting in holey green underpants on Allan's sofa.

When Allan emigrated to the US in 2001, she left her country, her career and her identity behind. She vanished for 12 years, disappearing into anonymity even within her adopted rural town of Lambertville.

Now, with a blog with viral potential, a revival of old media connections and a book project on South Africa, Jani Allan is back. Again.

Adoption
Her waitress avatar, "Juliette", lives in a small ground-floor apartment, against a steel traffic barrier and a parking lot.