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In the
past, whenever leaders of the National Party had advocated liberal reforms
they had quickly lost ground within the Afrikaner community to militant
defenders of white supremacy, a process exemplified by Daniel Malan’s
formation of the “Purified” National Party in 1933. In the late 1970s Terreblanche sought to
repeat this process with a new political party that emerged from a
paramilitary group founded in the 1930s, the Oxwagon Sentinels. Terreblanche is the descendant of French
Huguenot settlers and founded this movement in response to news reports that
the government of P.W. Botha was considering a plan to restore voting rights
to Asians and Coloreds. The movement
was based in the impoverished farming community of Ventersdorp, 100 miles
west of Johannesburg.
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