MAIL ONLINE: For the self-styled Boer warrior, this was the ultimate humiliation.
Death came to Eugene Terreblanche not with his boots on, rifle in hand, defending the volk from the heathen hordes, but tucked up in bed in his pyjamas, probably passed out with the drink, and bludgeoned to death by two of his own black staff.
His supporters must today be asking themselves how such an advanced student of South Africa's racial peril could have left himself so vulnerable to ambush.
More than 3,000 farmers have been murdered in South Africa in the past 16 years, and no real man of the soil would go to bed without a pistol under his pillow.
If you're a white farmer in South Africa these days you learn to spot black faces at your window with the easy facility of a bushman sensing a juicy kudu in the veld.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, for Eugene Terreblanche was always the mountebank neo-Nazi, posing as a descendant of the great Afrikaner heroes such as Piet Retief and Paul Kruger.
For those of us who reported from his rallies in South Africa's platteland during the dying days of apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most striking thing about him was not his shabby anti-black or anti-Semitic bombast, but the fact he could barely ride a horse.
I have seen sacks of coal more elegantly mounted astride a black stallion, and one of the funniest images I hold in my mind from those old battles was of Terreblanche riding to a political meeting in Pretoria, and promptly falling off his horse on to his well-padded back-side.
'Ach man, he's not a farmer, he's just a drama student,' one neighbour explained, noting that Terreblanche's small-holding extended to no more than 80 acres, which in South African terms is equivalent to tending a few marrows and runner beans on a suburban allotment.
Terreblanche was a risible-figure to all but his inner coterie even before he struck up an extraordinary liaison in the late 1980s with a bottle blonde temptress from a liberal South African newspaper named Jani Allan.
Miss Allan was famous in South African journalism as the plain-speaking voice of reason. Sending her to interview him was like asking some lefty from the Guardian to stitch up Nick Griffin of the BNP.
But it did not turn out as her editors expected. Rather than denounce this racial separatist, Miss Allan fell for him like a neo-Nazi falling off his horse.
'Right now I've got to remind myself to breathe,' she wrote of their encounter. 'I'm impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes.' >>> Stephen Robinson | Easter Monday, April 05, 2010
CNN: Video: Eugene Terreblanche Killed >>> | Easter Sunday, April 04, 2010
