"Gaddafi is dead. ET is no longer newsworthy," read the message from a colleague.

Maybe it's true, I thought, sitting in my hotel room in Ventersdorp, the home town of murdered AWB leader Eugene Terre Blanche.

In the end, the keenly awaited murder trial of the fiery orator's alleged killers got relegated to the tail end of TV news bulletins and the inside pages of newspapers.

I decided to stake out one of the town's mostly empty bars to find out if people here still thought the case was newsworthy.

"Are you interested in the trial?" I ask a 24-year-old woman who grew up in Ventersdorp. "We follow it on the news," she shrugs.

She did not want me to mention her name because "she works at the municipality and gets along really well with the black people".

She told me that Terre Blanche "was a feeling person (gevoelsmens)".

"My ex-boyfriend used to work for him and we would go to the farm sometimes. He would read his poetry to us and when he made a point he used to touch you."

I buried my desire for a front-page story and asked her what she meant.

"To emphasise his point he would touch you on the arm," she explained.

I asked the owner of the bar, Francois Brits, whether the murder of Terre Blanche had had any effect on the town.

"It's a small town so everyone knows each other and [the murder] was bad. But for us he wasn't the leader of the AWB - he was just one of the dorpsmense (townspeople).

"I've never seen anyone in Ventersdorp wearing an AWB badge. All those people who came here during the murder and waved their flags and went mad, we had no idea who they were," he said.

I asked Francois, one of the only openly gay men in town, whether the place lived up to its image of bigotry.

"I'm out [openly gay] and nobody's ever given me s**t. This town is like cocaine. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else," he said, adding that half of his clients were black.

But I did not trust the white people in Ventersdorp. They were too aware of what speaking freely to the media might mean and gave clinical, government spokesman-type responses to tough questions.

"You all think we're racist," said one patron of the bar, refusing an interview.

So I drove out of town on the Klerksdorp road - the route to Terre Blanche's farm - and turned right at the intersection into Tshing township. In Danny's Tavern not one of the 12 patrons was aware that the murder trial was on.

There was a perspective here that stood in stark contrast to the refrain of "the people of Ventersdorp get along very well".

It was a sentence that one often heard when conducting interviews in the white part of town.

"The whole of Ventersdorp is still like apartheid," said a 28-year-old who introduced himself to me as "Whisky Dodo".

He did not understand the media hype about the murder trial.

"Many people die in the township but nobody cares about them."

Dodo told me that the biggest problems in the township were gangsters and joblessness.

Another patron, wearing the only Springbok jersey I had seen in Ventersdorp, said he knew Chris Mahlangu, the man accused of murdering Terre Blanche.

Though he was glad that Terre Blanche was gone, he said Mahlangu had to face his "penalty". "There's nothing we can do."

I did not get the impression that people were having sleepless nights about the murder of Terre Blanche.

Life goes on in Ventersdorp. It is a really small town in North West with the same types of problem as any other dorp in the province. The only difference? Ventersdorp had Terre Blanche and the AWB.

In some ways, the stories of Gaddafi and Terre Blanche are similar. Both men were considered, at one time, to be leaders of some influence.

Both ended up with photos of their bloody corpses making the rounds on the internet.

Few people remember it now, but under Terre Blanche's leadership the AWB orchestrated a series of bombings meant to derail South Africa's first democratic elections.

His followers stormed the venue of the constitutional negotiations in a modified armoured car and "invaded" Bophuthatswana to prevent the homeland's participation in the elections.

Terre Blanche is no more and I think South Africa is the poorer for it. He was a relic. He was associated with our transition to democracy as much as Mandela, albeit at the other end of the political spectrum.

The fact that there were no right-wingers demanding justice outside the court in which the murder trial is being held speaks volumes about our democracy.

So much for the British press's "panga-wielding" mobs roaming the streets - our "Zimbabwe moment" is already somewhere else.