Whatever happened to Eugene Terre Blanche?

The Moment In May 1989, Eugene Terre Blanche (48), charismatic leader of the AWB, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, is acquitted of criminally damaging the gates to the Boer monument, the Paardekraal. The trial has focused attention on the scandalous news that Jani Allen (37), glamorous newspaper columnist, was with the upstanding father, farmer and extreme right-wing separatist on the night in question...

The background In 1973, Terre Blanche lived up to his name and founded the AWB to establish the a whites-only homeland for South Africa's 3.5 million Afrikaners, the "Volkstaat". Denouncing the lily-livered National Party government and the ANC, and peddling myths of racial purity, the neo-Nazi AWB emerged in the civil unrest of 1986 to play on white fears of a black revolution. Among his new admirers was the unlikely figure of Jani Allen, who had gushed about Terre Blanche's "blow-torch eyes" and who had been seen increasingly on the arm of the Afrikaner family man...

The Effect Scandalized by their glorious leader's (allegedly) lustful dalliance, "ET"'s staunch "volk" deserted him. Legalisation of the ANC in 1990 sparked further AWB bluster, culminating in the dramatic storming of the Johannesburg World Trade Centre in 1994. By 1992, however, Allen's libel action against Channel 4 about the pair's relationship had produced gruesome testimony of the Boer's "heaving white buttocks" and holey Y- fronts. With his political credibility (and his underpants) in tatters, Terre Blanche watched in dismay as the Rainbow Nation embarked peacefully without him.

The Future As Mandela wooed Afrikaners, Terre Blanche's support dwindled to hundreds. However, prison rather than farming beckons Terre Blanche following his conviction for the attempted murder of a black labourer last month. Should he escape a penal sentence, however, Johannesburgers recently voted that an alternative role of stature awaits him: Father Christmas.

Mike Higgins