HIS BIG WHITE SELF

This time, he had to go back in disguise, apparently as a character from a Jilly Cooper novel. Bearding the biblical old racist again was funny, but the real point and poignancy of the revisit was to see what had happened to the other characters, Terre Blanche's supporting cast. They were as touching as they were unsympathetic.

The rural Afrikaners are a stripe in the corner of the new, rainbow South Africa that can now be safely ignored, beaten and unloved; they can be discounted as ultimately irrelevant.