Dissident has stood firm against inequality
Sampie Terreblanche has insisted on role played by slavery, land theft, neoliberalism and transnational corporations, writes Dennis Webster
Edenville lies in the middle of the nondescript expanse between Kroonstad and Heilbron in the Free State. In the town fancifully named for the Garden of Eden, Sampie Terreblanche picked up the hoarse Afrikaans accent with which he would later articulate some of the most scathing accounts of dispossession and poverty in SA. Terreblanche was born into an Afrikaner nationalist family during the economic depression, drought and Calvinism of the 1930s, which sparked his interest in the economy, and how it should be organised. Terreblanche is now 84 years old. He describes, in his thick Edenville accent, a life of extraordinary transformation as "very interesting and very challenging". He has always communicated as much with his hands as he has with his words. They have taken on a gruff accent; thrown out wide in ridicule of US triumphalism, or lifting three chubby fingers to illustrate that the ANC’s calamitous concessions during the transition were either the result of coercion, being c...
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