Another Story About A Fascist Old Wrestler You’ve Never Heard Of
Rather a long time ago, I wrote on this very blog about Johannes Van Der Walt, South Africa’s Masked Marvel - he was also the subject of the first episode of my podcast, Bunkum & Ballyhoo. His story was not a pleasant one; lurking behind that mask was a sneering racist monster, a murderous terrorist, a Nazi sympathiser, and, ultimately, a martyr for the racist national project of white South Africa that would ultimately birth almost 50 years of apartheid.
It was as a general in the pro-Nazi paramilitary group the Ossewabrandwag that Van Der Walt met his end, and his grave remains a stopping point on South African road trips advertised in the darkest corners of the internet by some of the worst people you’ve ever met. But Johannes Van Der Walt wasn’t the only professional wrestler to have his cut his teeth in the OB.
Manie Maritz was a junior member of the OB, and a talented amateur wrestler, turning pro in 1947. He styled himself as the South African Heavyweight Champion, and headed to England, wrestling there for the remainder of the decade, where he popped up on cards alongside the likes of the masked Count Bartelli, and at some point held the British Empire and Commonwealth Junior Heavyweight Championships. So far, so regional touring journeyman wrestler - adequate muscles, cropped blonde hair, a name on the card, troubling enough programmes to leave a paper trail for those of us who obsessively track the careers of forgotten and former stars, but never a household name outside of his native country, where the memories of the odd aged fan tells us he was a world-beater, but precious little tangible evidence remains. It’s a familiar story.
Back in South Africa, Manie Maritz became a champion breeder of Brahman cattle, another accolade to rest alongside his South African Heavyweight Championship, and what tends to be the headline memory of the man in his obituaries. But it was in 1950 that the true source of his notoriety first began to trouble the press.
If you happen to be of a military history bent, you might have wondered of that name - where do you recognise it from? General Manie Maritz, father of our wrestler “friend”, was an officer during the Second Boer War, and lent his name to the Maritz rebellion of 1914-15, leading a pro-German rebellion against the South African government during World War 1 - for that, he served just three months in prison for high treason. Still less of a punishment, however, than he received for his enthusiastic role in the massacre of more than thirty people people in the Leliefontein massacre, or the deaths of tens of thousands in the Herero and Namaqua genocide.
Come the 1930s, and Maritz found common ideological ground in the rising fortunes of Germany’s Nazi Party; he released a book modelled after Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which he called My Lewe en Strewe - sometimes translated as “My Life & Aspirations”, or “My Life & Pursuits”, but perhaps more accurately, given the inspiration and subject matter, as “My Life & Struggle”. In 1939, a South African court found the book’s later chapters - when Maritz veers away from autobiography and towards political polemicising - to be sufficiently antisemitic as to warrant prosecuting for inciting racial hatred.
But sins of the father, right? Can we really tar Manie Maritz the younger with the same brush as his virulently antisemitic, murderous, Nazi of a father, who died in 1940? Well, it’s in a press digest from 1950 that I next found Manie Maritz’s name - at the Voortrekker monument, a potent symbol of white nationalist and colonialist rule, the wrestler Manie Maritz was admonished for selling copies of his father’s book, which had been banned and out of print for much of the previous decade. Even the national press of South Africa deemed the elder Maritz’s racist screed unacceptable.
And if undue pride in the writings of a racist parent had been all that Manie Maritz was guilty of, he’d rightly be little more than a footnote in history. But like the grave of Johannes Van Der Walt, Maritz’s final resting place also appears as a stop on certain dubious road trips, and in my search for evidence of his wrestling career, I found copies of the younger Maritz’s book, alongside pin badges, and flyers advertising his matches, sold by sellers of incredibly unsavoury collections - a one-stop shop for anyone looking for Nazi medals, Rhodesian stamps, and, in the case of those Manie Maritz pin badges, what the seller describes as “a must for any AWB collector”.
In wrestling, we’re used to a vast alphabet soup of three letter acronyms, so I’ll forgive you if the letters “AWB” didn’t strike you with a bolt of recognition, or send a chill down your spine. But I daresay that they should.
The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging - or Afrikaner Resistance Movement - to give them their full name, were founded in 1973 by a former police officer, Eugène Terre'Blanche, and a group of seven like-minded allies. Given his closeness to Terre'Blanche from thereon out, it’s likely that the former South African Heavyweight Champion, Manie Maritz himself was on of those allies.
Terre'Blanche was incensed by what he saw as the overly liberal political views of then-Prime Minister B.J. Vorster - that would be the ex-Ossewabrandwag general who imprisoned Nelson Mandela, oversaw the arrest and murder of Steve Biko, and abolished all non-white political representation in South Africa, if you’re looking at where to calibrate your political compass to what passes for “liberal views”. To the AWB, South Africa under apartheid was too leftist and liberal, too open to influence from Communist corruption. They attracted thousands of members, held rallies and incited riots, advocating for a kind of ultra-apartheid - a separate state, independent of South Africa itself, that would be home only to Boer-Afrikaner people, with black people allowed in only for their labour, and Jews banned outright. Their slogan was “God, People, Fatherland”, and their flag depicted the number seven three times, interlocked inside a white circle on a red backdrop, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Nazi swastika.
As Apartheid finally came to a halting and long overdue end, the AWB ramped up their political and criminal activities - storming the Kempton Park World Trade Centre where negotiations to end apartheid and hold the country’s first non-racial elections took place, smashing through the glass fronted building in an armoured car. They terrorised and murdered innocent black Africans, bombed the offices of newspapers and government buildings, and continued their campaign of terror long after the end of apartheid.
Manie Maritz was no naïve fellow traveller, washed along by the tides of populist opinion. He was at Eugène Terre'Blanche’s right hand at a rally in Pretoria in 1988, by his side on horseback, burning the flag of the African National Congress while Terre'Blanche bragged of his “superior white genes”, surrounded by AWB supporters giving Nazi salutes.
But by 1989, Maritz was at odds with Terre'Blanche - he had no crisis of humanity, no sudden awakening to the injustice he fought to enforce; he objected to rumours that his leader was embroiled in an affair with a gossip columnist, and was letting his celebrity undermine his political goals. In a statement given presumably without irony, the Neo-Nazi separatist Manie Maritz told reporters, “The members can no longer tolerate the dictatorial way in which he is running this organisation”.
Manie Maritz in his wrestling days
In 1990, speaking in English, Manie Maritz told the Washington Post that, “according to the Bible, we have the right to stay a white nation”, with his wife Beatrice chiming in that, “we have our own culture and religion, and no witch doctors”.
Apartheid finally ended in 1994, but not without a a fight from the legions of racists, separatists and white supremacists who saw a coming apocalypse in freedom and the political franchise being extended to South Africa’s black majority. Far right militia movements began stockpiling weapons and preparing either for the end-times, or for a hostile takeover, and for the establishment of an Afrikaaner whites-only volkstaat.
Police raided farms, compounds, and firing ranges, seizing unlicensed weapons, explosives, ammunition, and all the accoutrements of the paranoid survivalist - bug-out bags, camouflage uniforms, even parachutes, while scared right-wing whites panic buying left supermarket shelves bare of candles, gas lamps, and tinned foods, convinced that they were fleeing either persecution from a new black government, or else all-out civil war.
Many AWB members resigned from their jobs, sold their homes, and fled north to camps, compounds and farms in the North West province. One such farm was Manie Maritz’s, where he kept around twenty families under round-the-clock protection provided by armed AWB commandos.
Manie Maritz was no bit player; his name appears in the minutes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, named by victims of human rights abuses. And, in the great contradiction of nationalism and separatism, he kept up a vast international network of contacts, in the mid-90s offering up his farm for mock-military training for members of the AWB with arms illegally obtained through an illegal conspiracy of groups that included Croatia’s HOS Militia, Belgium’s Voorpost, America’s National States Right Party and the Ku Klux Klan, and Britain’s Column 88.
And Maritz kept busy into the 21st century. In 2002, members of a terrorist AWB offshoot group, the Boeremag, detonated at least ten bombs across the township of Soweto, targeting railway lines, petrol stations, and bridges, while others targeted mosques, airports, residential areas, and a Buddhist temple. Twenty members of the Boeremag were arrested and ultimately charged with treason, murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to overthrow the government, while police investigating managed to locate a further 26 pipe bombs.
The beliefs of the Boeremag were a hodgepodge of racist, separatist and Christian extremist fanaticism, plotting to assassinate Nelson Mandela, to start a race war, and either to reinstitute apartheid, or create a separate white Christian ethnostate. This was a world-view that strikes me as not a million miles away from that of Manie Maritz, and the South African police clearly thought similarly, as his home was among the 94 named farms and 43 named homes listed as belonging to Boeremag sympathisers and known right-wing agitators; a raid that resulted in eleven arrests, and the seizure of 64 illegal firearms, as well as the discovery of a list of names of detectives investigating the Boeremag - though whether any of those items were found specifically at the home of Manie Maritz is unclear. That he still travelled in Neo-Nazi, white separatist and terrorist circles is not.
Manie Maritz photographed by Madelene Cronje, 2010.
They say that only the good die young. Manie Maritz died aged 93, in 2018.
His obituaries are cloying and sentimental, celebrating him as a great cattle rancher, and a wrestler who was proud and unbeatable, who, as you’ll hear of every wrestler whose glory days were just out of reach of memory, was the real deal, not like the circus that wrestling became after he left. If they make reference to his politics, it’s to call him a “principled nationalist”, without looking too closely at what they might actually mean by that. One headline referred to him as “Uncle Manie”.
Manie Maritz’s time as a professional wrestler was brief and, outside of South Africa, largely unremarkable. Yet it’s still enough to warrant a mention in the obituaries, decades after he hung up his wrestling boots for jackboots.
If you want more wrestling history, you can buy my book Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling on Amazon now.
For more strange stories from the past, about showmen, con artists, hustlers, hoaxers and liars of all kinds, check out my podcast, Bunkum & Ballyhoo, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you subscribe to my Patreon, you’ll get every episode of Bunkum & Ballyhoo one week early, along with additional Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes, and - who knows? - maybe some more exclusive goodies in the future. Patreon support helps to cover costs of hosting for this website, of subscriptions to archives, and of all the research material that goes into my work, so it really is appreciated.
