A superb film by iconic documentary maker Nick Broomfield made as a follow up to his 1991 film The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife. The documentary follows Broomfield as he returns to South Africa 12 years after the collapse of the apartheid regime. His previous film focused largely on JP Meyer, a driver for Eugene Terre’Blanche (the leader of the far-right Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging or AWB), and JP’s wife, Anita.His Big White Self sees Broomfield returning to Ventersdorp in the former Transvaal (now North West Province), meeting JP and Anita to see how their lives have changed since the fall of apartheid in 1994. JP and Anita have since divorced and JP now finds work as an ambulance driver splitting his time between this and his new wife. Anita has since moved to the town of Ottosdal and devotes much of her time to her grandchildren teaching them Afrikaaner ways and traditions. JP largely displays feelings of betrayal as he believed that the AWB would instigate a ‘Boer revolution’ in their quest for a white homeland after Mandela and the ANC came to power, something that the AWB failed to deliver.
Although the focus of the documentary is a serious subject, the underlying ridiculousness of Terre’Blanche and his lackeys – coupled with Broomfield’s seemingly overwhelming need to share the on-camera limelight with his subjects – lends a profoundly comical element to the entire film.