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Afrikaner radical released from jail

"His ideology hasn't changed but he has become more tolerant. He's not a racist, more a xenophobe who respects his own kind more."

Gerrie Basson, lawyer for Eugene Terre'Blanche, former white supremacist leader

The black marble monument still stands in the town center, but Ventersdorp no longer fears the one-time Afrikaner messiah who promised blood and thunder. Eugene Terre'Blanche walks out of jail today, having served his time for beating up black people, but he will find the home he returns to, like the rest of South Africa, changed.

"That guy, yeah, he made the town famous. He's got that apartheid thing in his head but I'm not afraid of him," says Judy, 28, one of the well-dressed black women passing the monument during her lunch break.

A decade ago the name inspired dread: Terre'Blanche headed the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), and if anyone was going to turn the end of apartheid into a race war it was he. The Afrikaner volk (nation) would prevail over multiracial democracy, he vowed, and his khaki-clad Iron Guard paramilitaries planted bombs and took potshots at passing black people.

But the movement failed, and instead of sending Nelson Mandela back to Robben Island it saw its own leader in jail, convicted of assaulting a petrol attendant and trying to murder one of his farm workers.

After five years of hibernation while he was inside, the AWB will muster a show for the cameras when Terre'Blanche emerges from a probation office in Potchefstroom. Welcomed by a brass band and flanked by two riders, he will mount a black horse and parade through town to a hotel, where he will give a press conference.

"It'll be great to be back in uniform. This is a new chapter for us," says Johan Potgieter, 50, an AWB brigadier who will be one of the riders.

But reality will hit when the ex-inmate arrives home in Ventersdorp. The farm was sold to pay legal and other costs and his wife Martie and daughter Bea have rented a bungalow with chipped windowpanes and peeling paintwork. Only the alsatian snoozing in the yard seems well maintained.

Sympathizers have promised to give the 60-year-old some maize fields to till and a job selling farm machinery. But he is broke and his movement close to oblivion. White supremacy is a memory and the dream of an independent white homeland an ever-receding fantasy.

Ventersdorp has an African National Congress mayor who left the AWB monument, erected in 1991 to honor fallen members, as a reminder of the past to a new generation of confident, upwardly mobile black South Africans.

"Eugene is no longer a threat to us," says Thomas Motsumi, 24, a stallholder in Tshing, a nearby township.

For one man it is too late. Paul Motshabe, 34, can barely walk, talk or remember his age: The legacy of the beating from Terre'Blanche, who was angry about a neglected task on his farm. He is brain damaged and was divorced by his wife, who took their two children, leaving him in the care of his brother Andries and sister Maria. "What that man did to him was unforgettable, unforgivable," she says.

But John Ndzima, 44, who was throttled and mauled by Terre'Blanche and his dog, and shows the scars on his arms and legs and a gap in lieu of four front teeth, is back at work at the Shell petrol station and uneasy, but not terrified, about the Afrikaner's imminent return.

"Jesus says we must not hate," Ndzima said.

There was widespread glee five years ago when Terre'Blanche became one of just three white inmates among 800 black prisoners in Rooigrond prison, outside Mafikeng. Most of the warders were also black. One of those whites, freed now but preferring not to be named, says Terre'Blanche integrated surprisingly well. "He made friends, even with black guys. I don't think his life was ever threatened."

He tended the horses used for rounding up cattle on the prison farm, wrote poems and studied the Bible, becoming a born-again Christian who led prayer groups, according to his lawyer, Gerrie Basson.

"His ideology hasn't changed but he has become more tolerant. He's not a racist, more a xenophobe who respects his own kind more."

Supporters will be surprised by how much weight he had shed, he adds. But there may not be many of them left.

A sex scandal along with Terre'Blanche's failure to follow up his sabre-rattling rhetoric disillusioned many AWB members even before he went to jail, prompting suggestions that today's rally will draw dozens, not hundreds.
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