Eugène Terre'Blanche

Who was Eugène Terre'Blanche?

Eugène Ney Terre'Blanche was a South African political activist who founded the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. A controversial figure, he was given several labels during his lifetime, including "white supremacist", "nationalist," and "racist".

Born an Afrikaner in Ventersdorp, Transvaal, he developed an early interest in politics, becoming a police officer. Joining the Herstigte Nasionale Party which established apartheid in 1948, he founded the AWB as a secret society in 1973, after increasing disillusionment with the National party during the apartheid era. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he became known for threatening civil war to maintain white rule in South Africa. After the country's transition to post-apartheid democracy, he revised his stances and urged his followers to push for independence in an independent Afrikaner homeland, which he frequently referred to as a "Boerevolkstaat". Terre'Blanche led the organisation until his death in 2010.

Terre'Blanche spent three years in prison for assaulting a black petrol station worker and for the attempted murder of a black security guard in 1996. On 3 April 2010, he was hacked and beaten to death on his farm by a black farm labourer, allegedly over a wage dispute. Terre'Blanche's supporters have said that the murder is part of a larger pattern of anti-white farm murders in South Africa.