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One Racist and his Exposed Genitals on a Quest for Justice

Eugène Terre'Blanche's genitals have been back on the news agenda this week.

Eugène Terre'Blanche's genitals have been back on the news agenda this week. Today [Friday, 9 April], as the South African neo-Nazi is laid to rest in an XXL coffin, and along with him his genitals, many will have pause to recall what those genitals were most famous for: being inserted into the journalist Jani Allan. That time round, Allan sued Channel 4 for libel after Nick Broomfield's documentary had flagged up the unlikely affair between the two. She lost. Badly. The court transcripts at times read like a bawdy novel: Terre'Blanche asleep on the couch in his green underpants. A witness spying a pair of massive, fleshy buttocks thrusting back-and-forth. Allan, who had once pronounced herself “transfixed on the flame of his blowtorch eyes,” in the end became more famous for being impaled on the end of his racist dick.

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But it was on Wednesday this week that the genitals once again held court over South Africa's chattering-classes, when it was reported that prosecutors investigating the Terre'Blanche's murder had laid a charge of crimen injuria against his two alleged killers. Crimen injuria refers to attempts to humiliate the victim of a crime during the execution of the crime itself. In this instance, Terre'Blanche's genitals were allegedly humiliated by being exposed to his bedroom. After they had smashed his sleeping head in with a knopkerrie [traditional African club], the assailants had, it seems, pulled down his pants.

It was this insult-to-injury that presumably won the pair wild cheers from the black crowd who'd gathered outside the Ventersdorp Magistrates Court. To the Afrikaaner extremists who have been descending on the town from as far as 1300km away, this was the final outrage. “The people who committed this crime are animals and barbarians,” announced Pieter Steyn, AWB spokesman. “There was nothing left of Mr Terre'Blanche's head. It was all over the walls, the ceiling and the curtains.”

But the law is a funny thing. Lawyers are honour-bound to get their clients off, so when the case comes to trial, it will no doubt be argued by the defence that Mr Terre'Blanche's genitals arrived in their al fresco state of their own accord. I imagine their line will run something like this:

The Leader arrives home with one thing on his mind: the pursuit of his own genitals. Later that afternoon, person or persons unknown break in, assuming that the house is empty. After all – according to his wife, Terreblanche had originally been scheduled leave his farm and drive back to his house in the town that afternoon. As they patrol the corridors, the burglars are startled to find The Leader, pants around his hefty knees, eyes tight shut, evidently fantasising about making love to one or more of his domestic servants, lost in a mephitic reverie of sweet self-relief. And so, presented with this challenge to their attempt to steal his VCR, they react as startled burglars are wont to: club his brains onto the kitsch wallpaper, and flee the scene.

No doubt Jani Allan will be called back to testify about Eugene's bedroom habits. Ventersdorp's chief vendors of pornographic literature will be asked to flesh out the circumstantial case: his taste in Barely Legal Babes and Spunk Slurping Cougars. The maid will be asked to decide whether she could be classed as “fanciable”. Perhaps his wife will even get a look-in. Justice will be seen to be done. A truly canny lawyer might attempt the David Carradine Defence: that Terre'Blanche had ingeniously burst his own head like a watermelon in pursuit of some obscure sex-game. Best of luck to such brave legal-eagles.

As he shines down on us all from heaven, perhaps Terre'Blanche will find it charmingly ironic that his career in public life began with a piece of crimen injuria itself. The AWB's rise to prominence in the 1980s, you see, was launched by press coverage of their attempt to literally tar-and-feather an ageing, mild-mannered Afrikaans academic called Floors van Jaarsveld. Floors had dared to suggest that the anniversary commemorating the Afrikaaner-Zulu battle at Blood River should become a more-secular public holiday. Wasn’t Terre'Blanche a nice man?