By 1991, documentary maker Nick Broomfield had edged in front of his own camera lens joining the ranks of the so-called Les Nouvelles Egotistes. If Soldier Girls and Chicken Ranch had been straightforward Cinéma vérité, this showcased the Broomfield Mk. 2 method: bumbling, faux naïve, an unfailingly polite, very English approach designed to lull his subject into a false sense of security, followed up by a persistent intrusiveness, guaranteed to get on the subject's wick and force them into revealing their true colours. Nevertheless, there are those who think he really only has one subject: Nick Broomfield.
For Broomfield, securing an interview with South Africa's premier white supremacist Eugene Ney Terre'Blanche was "a game", never to be taken seriously - here was a man who appeared to have never gotten over an adolescent crush on Hitler. Broomfield deliberately sets out to expose the AWB's supporters as laughably pathetic - and antagonises their leader from the outset, prompting him into baring his fangs.
However, before we get to him, Broomfield passes the time with the leader's driver, JP, and JP's wife, Anita, through them exposing an atmosphere of fear and loathing among white, Right-wing South Africans. Like many neo-Nazi types, JP is convinced that some all-powerful cabal is responsible for the world's woes. This downtrodden bear of a man only left prison a week earlier for alleged terrorist activities, and sleeps with a Luger beside him. Meanwhile JP's wife Anita is possibly even more racist than her husband. Why does she call her cat Kaffir? "Because it's black!" of course.
A mother of two, Anita's chief priority is handing out condoms and other methods of sterilisation to blacks. Anita managed to sterilise 60 women in a week in her area. When she's not halting the racial flow, she's equipping her children with placards reading things like: "Mixed Education Is Poor Education", and goading her daughter to say she'll fight black children if they show up at her school.
Broomfield attends an AWB annual dinner, where the guests dance to Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing in the Dark'; the Boss's liberalism apparently not a pressing concern. "They're always happy, the blacks", the director's told. "Always singing - because they don't work." Such idiocy would be laughable were it not brandishing a gun, and Broomfield refers to incoming news reports of AWB assaults, including the case of some black schoolchildren and their teacher being attacked by members with whips and sticks for having the gall to use a local swimming pool.
At a local golf club, Nick is called a communist and an ANC sympathiser, and refused service at the bar, while a polite but firm Terre'Blanche repeatedly tells Broomfield that "I want to use this time to talk to my people." Terre'Blanche, he's warned, has a habit of chasing interviewers out of the room if he considers their questions "intrusive or stupid". He is particularly sensitive to allusions to an alleged affair with Janie Allen, a former model-turned-gossip columnist. Allen, who calls him "Ramboer", had noted in an article "He doesn't walk in to a room, he takes occupation of it
Right now I've got to remind myself to breathe. I'm impaled on the blue flame of his blowtorch eyes."
When Broomfield eventually secures his interview, around an hour into the film, he arrives five minutes late, claiming he's stopped for tea en route. This was quite intentional: "I wanted to do something that would reveal his temper and his bullying and the fact that he was just a thug," Broomfield comments in DVD collection Documenting Icons. "And so I set an elephant trap. Elephant traps are such fun because they are all to do with your knowledge of people, which becomes so intimate that you know exactly how they are going to react when you do something; so you find the simplest thing to trigger that reaction."
Terre'Blanche is apoplectic with rage, though somehow, Broomfield manages to squeeze his question in. At what point, he asks Terre'Blanche, did he decide he was waging a war. The Leader either affects to, or genuinely misunderstands, the question. "When I choose the time", he mutters. "That is my choice, my good friend." Broomfield isn't quite finished with him yet, and later pops up to prick the pomposity of the Kruger Day rally. "If you people show up again" Terre'Blanche tells him, "I'll put you out. I tell you people when you can take shots of me, but your cameraman is hanging on like a bladdy monkey in a bladdy tree."
Three years after Broomfield made his documentary, Terre'Blanche would admit "moral responsibility" for a series of car bombs that killed 17 people, claiming he had "nothing to apologise for" and that God was on his side. In June 1997 he was sentenced to six years in Rooigrond Prison for the attempted murder of security guard Paul Mothabe, leaving him brain-damaged. On his release in 2004, having served three years, he claimed he'd become a born-again Christian and dropped many of his extremist views. In 2005, Broomfield returned to South Africa and Terre'Blanche for a documentary entitled His Big White Self, infiltrating Eugene's poetry society.
Fourteen years earlier, however, the overriding impression is of a paranoid, frightened, deeply isolated people, who know they've lost the ideological war. By the end of the documentary, a disillusioned JP resigns from the Party. "I think my spirit was broken when I was inside" he says. "I don't feel anything anymore. I'm just sick and tired." Are we, wonders Broomfield, about to witness his "transformation from a white supremacist into a new South African?" Sadly not. "I feel the climate is right for human life to be taken" he stresses. The last shot of the movie is a harried-looking JP telling the director he'd better go and find his wife. "Or she'll thrash me with a rolling pin" he might as well have added.
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