Invictus - Carlin [60]
Von Maltitz’s bus was composed mainly of members of the AWB, which he had joined back in that eventful year, 1985. Why did he join? “God spoke to me,” he replied. “He urged me to fight to stop the Communists from taking over my country.” A dedicated Christian, Von Maltitz was of German origin but considered himself an honorary Boer. The AWB manifesto struck a chord with him. It defined the resistance movement’s mission as “assuring the survival of the Boer nation” that “came into being through Divine Providence.” To this end they proposed secession and the creation within South Africa’s boundaries of “a free Christian republic.”
The biggest draw for most of the AWB brownshirts was not the manifesto, however, so much as their leader, Eugene Terreblanche, whose speeches contained such pearls as “We will level the gravel with Nelson Mandela!” and “We will govern ourselves with our own superior white genes.” Even better was how he said it. The beefy, white-bearded Terreblanche was a rousing public speaker. His rallies could always be depended upon to stir the passions of Boers, anxious to mask their fears in blustery defiance. He was good in part because he was a natural actor, whose most treasured prop was the white horse he rode, in part because he had a poetically rich sense of the cadences of language, in part because a propensity for drink loosened his tongue, and in part because he had made a point during his youth of studying the oratorical techniques of Adolf Hitler.
Von Maltitz was less of a demagogue than Terreblanche, but he was just as driven. His zeal saw him rise quickly in the AWB to become Terreblanche’s chief lieutenant in the Free State, South Africa’s geographical heart. If he was not Boer by blood, he was one in spirit. His grandfather had fought alongside the Afrikaners in the war against the British, but, more important, he felt as pure and passionate an attachment to the land as any of the volk. Raised on the family farm, which he inherited from his father, he saw himself as a true son of Africa, proud of having milked his first cow at the age of three. Militarily, he felt he brought a measure of Prussian professionalism to Boer ranks that some of Terreblanche’s blowhards lacked. He had done his military service in the elite paratroop regiment, knew how to handle all sorts of weaponry, and had a black belt in karate.
But he became disaffected with Terreblanche, in particular by his heavy drinking. (More than once the leader, drunk, fell off his white horse, to the delight of journalists and black passersby.) Terreblanche, alert to the possibility that he might lose his best man in the Free State, phoned him one night and said, “Herr von Maltitz, are you with me or against me?” Von Maltitz replied ambiguously, “I am with you in the cause.”
Soon after (this was in 1989), Von Maltitz left and formed an outfit he named the Boer Resistance Movement, or BWB, which he left shortly thereafter to form another group calling itself Resistance Against Communism. Sinewy and straight-backed, with strong farmer’s hands, he never left his home in anything other than full military camouflage gear and he always had a gun strapped to his hip. Von Maltitz believed that God spoke to him—often—and this might have been funny had he not converted his farm, in response to Mandela’s release, into a part-time military training camp. At least once a week, he would gather like-minded Christian soldiers and prepare them for what he called “full military resistance” against the ANC. “The enemy is now at my back door. I must fight him,” was Von Maltitz’s reasoning. As many as seventy aspiring “kommandos” at a time were schooled in the use of shotguns, Magnum pistols, and guerrilla warfare.
Von Maltitz’s name was on the list of right-wing radicals being watched by Niël Barnard’s National Intelligence Service. For the intelligence people, as well as to a handful of journalists who kept tabs on the far right, the name Eddie von Maltitz had by now acquired