Did he remain His Big White Self?

The first bulletin on the BBC World Service News last night when I switched on my radio was that the white-supremacist leader Eugène Terre’blanche had been murdered in his home, ostensibly because of a dispute over unpaid wages. The Associated Press have reported that the tipping point was a hate speech given shortly before the fatal attack, in the midst of racial tensions in the run-up to the World Cup.

I was not really aware of Terre’blanche before seeing Nick Broomfield’s 1991 documentary The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife and the 2006 follow-up, His Big White Self. In the second, Broomfield attempted to interview Terre’blanche about how the fall of Apartheid had affected the personal politics of the far-right orator, and to seek the answer to a question – ‘with the emergence of a new South Africa, has Eugène become a new South African or has he remained His Big White Self?’

Meetings are repeatedly set up and cancelled in both documentaries. As a consequence, and in a style that has characterised his film-making, Broomfield ends up exploring the devastating influence that his subject had exercised by interviewing friends and bystanders. In what might be called in climax of the earlier film, Broomfield eventually manages to locate Terre’blanche leading a rally. Terre’blanche is on horse-back and literally refuses to come down to Broomfield’s level, making for an uneasy dialogue after which Terre’blanche rides away and then ends up falling off his horse. In His Big White Self, Broomfield interviews Terre’blanche’s former chauffeur JP who appears extraordinarily childlike as he bumbles his way through his rationale for the supremacy of the white man and recalls the promises of revolution that were left unfulfilled. Veering more towards the tragic than the comic, the films are significant not only as a record of modern-day bigotry, but also as a model for lateral thinking in investigative journalism.