From Boerestaat to Blikkiesdorp

A HANDFUL of former AWB stalwarts are living peacefully beside black neighbours in a notorious relocation camp for the homeless in Cape Town.

Blikkiesdorp, with its trademark corrugated iron structures on a dusty plain 30km outside the city, has been lambasted as a human dumping ground and likened to a concentration camp.

Its 20000 residents - ravaged by poverty, illness and drug-induced crime - are waiting for proper houses.

The settlement has become an unlikely platform for ideological transformation and racial harmony, as people of different backgrounds unite in the face of abject misery.

Jan Ruthven, 50, and his wife Dot, 47, shared potjiekos with AWB leader Eugene Terre'Blanche in the late 1980s, while training white soldiers to fight for an independent Boerestaat.

Today the couple live in Blikkiesdorp, where they exchange cups of sugar and rice with their neighbours.

"We talk to everyone, there are no problems," said Dot, a former pre-primary teacher.

Jan, a former miner , recalled his days in an AWB paramilitary division that trained men on a farm near Welkom.

"At the time of our wedding in 1986 Eugene Terre'Blanche was starting to get it together and we liked what he was saying. I got involved in training Boere in self-defence," he said.

"The women stayed at home on the farms preparing huge pots of potjiekos. The men were out in the field with guns. It was tense times and all we thought about was the struggle."

He added: "But our insights have changed." The family fell on hard times after Ruthven was swindled by a relative.

Just down a rutted lane, former ardent AWB supporters Victor Stefanus, 55, and his wife Christina, 55, have also turned their backs on the right-wing organisation. They have informally adopted a two-year-old Xhosa girl, Amy Mabulu.

"It's an Afrikaans darkie, this one," joked Christina, hugging the child. "Her mommy is young and mostly absent, so she stays here most of the time. I love Amy like my own."

Said Stefanus: "The AWB days are long gone. They were full of promises which they never delivered. Terre'Blanche took things too far." In their shack, school pictures of smiling teenagers and a framed wedding portrait bear testimony to more prosperous times.

The couple once lived in the Cape Town suburb of Kraaifontein, where they joined political rallies and their children Adeen, 30, and Gerald, 23, attended Westcliff High. Stefanus, a builder, was tricked out of money by a housing agent, the couple said. Christina used to be a nurse. They've been sharing a Blikkiesdorp shack with five dogs for two years.

Said Stefanus: "Here our neighbours are all sorts: you get whiteys, darkies, Nigerians, Indians, Muslim people, and even some people from Japan. We might as well just all get along."

Community leader Bernadette de Kock said: "To my knowledge the community here don't mind the white people, if you want to describe them like that. We all get along, we all have similar circumstances and problems. So many people are dying of TB, HIV and bad sanitation." Linzi Thomas, chief executive officer of the My Life Foundation, which deals with homeless people, agreed: "There's no racism in Blikkiesdorp. It's quite unique. Tension there is gang-related, not race-related. The people are in survival mode, there simply is no time for fights over race."