South Africa redux: bring me my bakkie!

I just finished reading Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Changed a Nation, a great book about Nelson Mandela using the sport of rugby as a political tool and window into the heart of millions of white South Africans in the early 90s. As I was reading along I had a sense of deja vu half way through the book when the name of Eddie Von Maltitz came up. This happened to me a few weeks ago while I was reading Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa and his name was briefly mentioned. Von Maltitz is a farmer in the eastern Free State; a province in South Africa that borders the northern half of Lesotho, and to say that he is a right-wing reactionary would be putting it lightly.

I first encountered Von Maltitz on a shopping expedition to Ficksburg at a locally-owned grocery store. His bakkie (pickup truck) was strewn with white painted signs about Mugabe, Zimbabwe, and the state of South African politics. He had a handgun strapped to his thigh and his imposing, khaki clad figure (not to mention his loud voice switching back and forth from Afrikaans to Sesotho to English) was hard to miss. I just thought he was a local character and thought nothing more of it. During later shopping expeditions I would see him but it was a rather memorable trek to the local Seventh Day Adventist Church that would be the strangest encounter yet. I was invited by the Werners (an opthamologist and his wife) and a visiting Australian medical student to go with them to a church service and then a privately owned park in the Free State one Saturday. I figured I should at least attend one Adventist service while I was working at Maluti, and the park trip added a sweet incentive.

When our little band from Maluti Hospital arrived at the church I noticed his political bakkie parked outside. After I entered the church I saw him and his wife in one of the pews and Eddie had his handgun placed in the back of his pants (I guess dress pants and a webbed gun holster on one's thigh don't mix). He was intimately involved in the church service and from what I was told later he was instrumental in saving the Ficksburg church (the membership, like the white population, of the little dorp had plummeted over the last decade). After the service, I was introduced to him and his wife and we chatted about the church, my work in Lesotho, and he invited me, Rob (the Aussie medical student), and the Werners (the doctor and his wife) out to his farm for lunch in the near future. He then launched into some political talk as we walked out to our vehicles. Rob and I took a double take when he opened the back of his bakkie and saw a mini-armory of weapons. He told us that his farm had been robbed multiple times. The Werners on our ride to the park gave me some personal background on him. His son was in the US military and his daughter had died of a debilitating disease after a desperate search for treatment. I never went to his farm, something I regret now, but the mini-armory and political views made me leery. I still have his business card, an interesting (to put it lightly) mix of biblical quotes and anti-communist rhetoric in Afrikaans and English.

Once again, I had dismissed him as a local wacko. Little did I know about his involvement in the new "Bitter-Ender" movement which actively sought to bring down negotiations between the Nationalist government and the African National Congress in the transition period between the old apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela being elected president in May 1994. Eddie had trained "kommando" groups of men on his farm and was the first man in the building when a force of highly armed right-wing groups led by the former head of the SADF (General Constand Viljoen) stormed the World Trade Centre in Johannesburg during talks between the Nationalist government and the ANC.

Fast-forward three years after reading about his background (ex-SADF special ops, black belt in karate, weapon expert) and role in that fragile transition period and I'm stumped. I absolutely deplore his political views and his past actions (not to mention the stockpile of weaponry) but I can't help but feel some sympathy for the man barricaded away on his farm outside of a little dorp in the middle of the Free State, where his only means of relief is to frequently call up South African radio stations and rant. I'm also stumped by how hard it must have been for Mandela and his group of fellow prisoners from Robben Island to forgive people like Eddie, who actively defended the system of apartheid, and try to win them over (the provincial head of the ANC invited Eddie to his house for a Christmas celebration!). This small encounter of mine only illustrates the complexities (good, bad, and ugly) of the individual narratives that make up modern-day South Africa and how they shaped my work in Lesotho.