The hole truth about Jani Allan

We journalists fancy ourselves as producing deathless prose… but here’s a piece of SA newspaper writing which will prove deathless, even after its author died this week after a battle with cancer.

“I was,” Jani Allan wrote, “impaled on his blue blowtorch eyes…” She wrote that in the Sunday Times, back in the early ’90s, of Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) leader Eugene Terre’Blanche.

The tone was more suited to a Barbara Cartland-type bodice-ripper than a Sunday rag’s profile piece – and led many people to believe she, the “soutie” model-like fashionista and writer, had been doing the dirty with the rightwing leader.

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Not long after she wrote that, a British TV channel produced a documentary on Terre’Blanche, which said exactly that – that Allan had slept with him. By now living in London, the outraged Jani sued and the case in a London court was like watching a slow-motion emotional trainwreck.

Prime witness for the defence was Jani’s former bestie and flatmate, Linda Shaw, who was the Sunday Times resident astrologer. (Bet Janie didn’t see that coming…)

Shaw told the staid courtroom that Terre’Blanche was a frequent visitor to their flat in Sandton and that she had once peeped through the keyhole into Jani’s bedroom and witnessed the holey green underpants of Terre’Blanche bouncing up and down on La Allan.

My news editor at the time ordered me (but I’m a real journalist, Deon, not a gossip hack) to find the flat and peep through said keyhole to see if Linda was telling the truth, the hole truth and nothing but the truth.

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So I did.

Late one afternoon, I knocked on the door of the duplex flat and introduced myself to a young woman, who held a baby in her arms. Fortunately, she was quickly in the spirit on things and agreed to allow me to peep into the main bedroom upstairs.

She even suggested she put the lights on and off so I could compare. And, I bent over and peeped – and had a very good view of the bed where “Die Leier” (which made sense if you pronounce the latter as the English “Layer”, given Terre’Blanche’s reputation with the womenvolk) would have been making the bedsprings creak.

Later, when I witnessed Terre’Blanche in person – addressing a rapt crowd of 2 000 people in the Pietersburg (now Polokwane) town hall during the rightwing campaign to encourage a “no” vote in the 1992 referendum on majority rule – I could understand why even a liberal white girl like Jani had been captivated.

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Terre’Blanche was an outstanding orator and had the audience in the palm of his hand as he told a tale of two National Scouts (the Boers who fought with the English in the Boer War) returning home to their farms.

Clink, clink, clink went their saddlebags, he intoned, filled with their 30 pieces of silver. And, as they crested the hill to the farm one of them owned, all they saw was smouldering ashes because the Engelse had burned it down.

Betrayal was the scent in the air that night. Terre’Blanche felt like a Boer Avenger who could lead his people to their own Volkstaat, far away from the National Party “traitors” and the black hordes.

And, afterwards, there was a queue of women – both young and not-so-young – who orbited around him, probably hoping to be impaled on those blue blowtorch eyes… Rest in peace, Jani. I wonder if you’ll meet up with him on the other side…

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