Eugene Terre'Blanche was a fearsome character with the oratory ability to whip up his racist devotees. But to the more level-headed majority of Afrikaner society and most of the rest of the white electorate, he had decided comical value.
That was if one looked past the menacing extremism and sporadic acts of violence to which he and his followers resorted.
The contradiction was captured in his imitation of Adolf Hitler. He could, like the Fuhrer, steadily build the tone of his speech until, wagging a finger in the air, he had himself and his audience in a frenzy. The bombings, drive-by shootings and assaults on black people were, at times, the inevitable consequence, and Terre' Blanche spent time in jail for severely attacking two black men.
As with the Nazi leader, he liked making theatrical appearances at public occasions. He usually appeared in khakis and boots, and sometimes in army fatigues.
To make things really dramatic, he would sometimes arrive on horseback, to portray the image of an old Boer general riding in from the veld to come to the rescue of his people.
In its heyday, the organisation which he and six associates founded in a garage in the then Transvaal (now Gauteng) town of Heidelberg in 1970 got much publicity, in South Africa and abroad as an extremist white racist group. But it was never going to muster a major following. Called the Afrikaner-Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), it was too militant and extremist to appeal to most in mainstream Afrikaner society.
But he was operating in a climate fraught with uncertainties and tensions, and increasingly prone to violence, as white-minority control came under growing siege from the liberation forces and a hostile world. It made people susceptible to crazy notions, and that was where his danger lay.
Many whites might to an extent have sympathised with AWB sentiments. Successive generations of Afrikaner-Nationalist society had been fed on the righteousness of their apartheid cause and on the idea that there was an international conspiracy against them. Neither did the example of black rule in parts of post-colonial Africa, like Idi Amin's Uganda, do anything to allay fears.
It was part of the contradictory character of the man that he denied that his organisation was modelled on the German Nazi party when everything it did was designed to encourage that perception. The party's insignia, three sevens in a white circle set on a red background, looked much like a swastika.
He and his followers saluted each other in the straight-arm Nazi way. Most wore khaki uniforms, but there was also a black-shirt Gestapo-type brigade called the Ystergarde (Iron Guard), and he had bodyguards who paraded in public with the bottom part of their faces masked by red cloths.
Terre'Blanche was born on January 31, 1944, in Ventersdorp, the then western Transvaal and now North West town where he settled and which was to become a kind of spiritual capital to his right-wing followers.
The son of a lieutenant colonel in the South African Defence Force, he became a warrant officer in the Special Guard Unit of the South African Police that was assigned to protect the prime minister and his cabinet.
Ironically, it was in opposition to the man he was supposed to protect, Prime Minister John Vorster, that Terre'Blanche and his cronies formed their movement.
What irked Terre'Blanche and his kind was the way Vorster was trying to soften apartheid's application in sport and in facilities like upmarket hotels and restaurants.
It offended their racist prejudice and, like their less reactionary conservative brethren, they saw it as the first steps towards abdication of white control.
Not geared for or inclined to parliamentary politics, the AWB tried to activate support for a Boer state (Boerestaat) consisting of the old Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Free State. It even used the vierkleur, or the original flag of the once independent Transvaal Republic, as a banner.
Flanked by his masked guards, and with his black-clad Gestapo types in attendance, Terre'Blanche went around the country making rousing speeches, jabbing the air with an admonishing finger, often using his other hand to wipe spittle and sweat from his robust greying beard with a handkerchief.
His comical side took the form of public theatre, though, when a torrid affair he had with an English journalist named Jani Allen was exposed. It started with her report of an interview with him in which she wrote about his "blow-torch eyes".
The disclosures in news articles went into gory detail like the holes she found he had in his underpants, and how he was discovered asleep on her doormat after vainly pleading with her to let him into her flat when she was trying to end the relationship.
Another incident that made him the butt of jokes happened when he fell off his horse during an AWB demonstration at Pretoria's Church Square.
Terre'Blanche was lampooned in a 1991 documentary The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife, directed by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, and in a 2006 sequel, His Big White Self.
But the danger of the man and his movement was perhaps most pertinently illustrated when they tried forcibly to prevent President F W de Klerk from holding a public meeting in Ventersdorp town hall in 1991, after he had opened negotiations with the ANC and the other liberation movements.
In the ensuing confrontation with the police, three AWB members and a bystander died in what became known as the Battle of Ventersdorp.
As the promise of a negotiated resolution of South Africa's racial standoff increased, so Terre'Blanche and his movement became more violent. In 1993, they broke ranks with fellow-conservative movements and turned what was intended to be a joint peaceful march on the World Trade Centre, where constitutional negotiations were taking place, into a vicious confrontation. Brandishing arms, they stormed past police, smashed through the centre's glass wall with an armoured vehicle and threatened and assaulted negotiators.
The following year AWB bands stormed the then independent homeland of Bophuthatswana to prop up the government of President Lucas Mangope against liberation forces wanting it to rejoin South Africa and its citizens to participate in the first all-race elections.
Firing at black people from cars and bakkies as they arrived, they went into confused retreat as the homeland's military turned against them. Television screens showed the horrifying scene of a black soldier stepping up to two wounded AWB members lying next to their dead comrade on the ground and executing them with shots from his automatic rifle as they pleaded for an ambulance.
On June 17, 1997, Terre'Blanche was sentenced to six years in prison for assaulting a petrol station worker and the attempted murder of a farm worker. Ever the actor, he arrived at the prison gate on his black horse, Atilla.
During his time in prison he became a born-again Christian and wrote poetry. He claimed to have moderated his racist views.
By the time he was released in 2004, times had moved on. The diehard followers who arrived to welcome him back were outnumbered by journalists and locals.