The neo-fascist leader Eugene Terreblanche was yesterday preparing to serve a one-year prison sentence for seriously assaulting a black man, following the delivery of a notice ordering him to report to the Potchefstroom Magistrate's Court in Johannesburg by 3 p.m. today.
Terreblanche, whose Hitlerian-style oratory once enthralled militant Afrikaner nationalists and aroused disgust and dread in many other South Africans, cut a sorry figure as he whinged about his impecunious state - he complained of having to sell part of his farm and all his cattle to pay his legal costs - and railed against the judicial system.
But, judging from the remarks of his lawyer, Mr Pieter Spoelstra, fear as well as self-pity dominated Terreblanche's thoughts as the last minutes of his freedom ticked away.
An avowed white supremacist, he dreaded the thought of being confined in a communal cell with black prisoners, particularly as the two men he savagely assaulted in March 1996 were both black.
A former policeman, Terreblanche (56) rose to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the leader of the neo-fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement or AWB, an abbreviation derived from its Afrikaans nomenclature.
A bearded man with a nostalgia for the old Boer republics, Terreblanche escaped imprisonment for his political fanaticism (though more than a score of his followers had to serve prison sentences for their actions), only to be convicted and sentenced to imprisonment in March 1997 for common law criminality - attempted murder of an employee, Mr Paul Mothable, and serious assault on a petrol attendant, Mr John Ndzima.
He was granted leave to appeal on Monday against his six-year sentence for attempted murder but refused permission to appeal against his conviction for assaulting Mr Ndzima. Hence his imminent imprisonment yesterday.
Instead of facing the press and reaffirming his loyalty to the swastika-like triple-seven emblem of the AWB, Terreblanche, who once boasted that he would lead a revolution against the African National Congress if it took power, spent yesterday in seclusion.
His once dedicated followers were conspicuous by their absence.
But his fall started long before his conviction for common law crimes and his desperate attempts to avoid imprisonment, including an application to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty in contradiction of his often-expressed scorn for the commission's quest to promote reconciliation in South Africa through confession.
One factor in Terreblanche's fall was undoubtedly the contradiction between his public persona as an Afrikaner Moses seeking to save his people from their enemies, and his reputation as a hard-drinking womaniser.
His perceived hypocrisy as an Afrikaner who preached one set of values but lived by another was given sharper focus by his much publicised association and alleged affair with a woman columnist.
He was exposed to ridicule by court testimony from a witness who said she saw his heaving naked buttocks through the keyhole of a door to the columnist's bedroom.
The AWB's ignominious retreat from Mafeking in March 1994 was equally damaging. It intervened there to save Lucas Mangope, president of the purported independent state of Bophuthatswana and a member of Conservative Alliance, from his rebellious followers.
But when soldiers of Mangope's fledgling army turned their guns on the AWB, the invaders fled, leaving three of their wounded comrades to be killed by an enraged black policeman.
Finally, after the right-wing bombing blitz on the eve of the April 1994 election which brought the ANC to power, more than a dozen AWB members were arrested and convicted of sabotage and murder. Terreblanche, however, managed to emerge unscathed. He conveniently forgot about his boasts of a counter-revolution and proclaimed that the war was over and that the time for peace had come.
By last year, as the number of his followers visibly shrank, Terreblanche was being accused of cowardice and even plundering money collected for AWB prisoners by the very men who had once admired him as a visionary and fearless leader.