The commission of inquiry that was convened by the IUEF in order to investigate Williamson's espionage was comprised of an international group of representatives from different governments. In addition to John Wilson, who had been the information officer at the IUEF office in London, the commissioners were:

The commission met on three separate occasions, between April and June of 1980, in Geneva, London, Lusaka and Gaborone. In addition to reading through whatever files were still held by the IUEF (as Williamson had absconded with a large pile of key documents) the commission also heard testimony from more than 20 different people, including staff of the IUEF, recipients of IUEF funding and representatives from the ANC (Mac Maharaj, Thabo Mbeki and Thomas Nkobi), as well as representatives from Zanu. Arthur McGiven, the BOSS officer who initially exposed Williamson, also gave testimony.

The principal function of the commission of inquiry was to assess ‘the extent of damage done to the organization, to the recipients of IUEF assistance, and to IUEF relations with other organizations’ as a result of Williamson's infiltration. The commission was concerned not only with the specifics of what Williamson had done (or intended to do), it also sought to probe more deeply into the structural problems within the IUEF, which (a) allowed the organisation to be infiltrated in the first place and (b) allowed a significant portion of well-meaning funds to be diverted and misused by the South African security services. The commission was influenced strongly by the stated concerns of the donors who provided funding for the IUEF. Crucially, since a great deal of the funding for the IUEF came from European governments, there was a concern that widespread distrust of the IUEF as a result of Williamson's infiltration would have a negative impact on all attempts to fund the anti-apartheid movement. ‘This was a clear and present danger judging by the various reports appearing in the donor countries.’

Lusaka limbo

If it were possible to reconstruct the Schoons’ mindset at the moment of understanding that they needed to leave Botswana, it might be possible to understand the thought processes that went into the decision to go to Angola. However, there is about a six-month gap between their departure from Botswana in June of 1983 and their arrival in Luanda in December of that same year. These months are almost entirely unaccounted for, either by Marius or by anyone who might have known them and worked closely with them during that period.

There are a number of problems with reconstructing these events. First of all, it is important to understand that whether or not either Jenny or Marius were actively participating in armed activities, they were nonetheless, as disciplined members of the ANC in exile, ‘under instruction’, which meant being subject to a military hierarchy. This was especially true in terms of major life decisions, such as where to live or what work to do (even whether or whom to marry). That is, in the language of the ANC at that time, the Schoons would have been ‘deployed’ to Lubango, and this would have been thought of in much the same way as any other soldier, for any army, being deployed into a given war situation. Other members of the ANC underground during that same period explained to me that it was possible – to an extent – to refuse a command from someone higher in the hierarchy, or at least to negotiate for another option. But this kind of negotiating had to be done within reason, and while understanding that the organisation had limited resources, spread out across multiple countries in Africa, as well as further afield. Also, at the end of the day, there was always the basic feeling that having committed oneself to the ANC meant surrendering to the larger needs of ‘the movement’, even in matters of life and death.

When Hilda Bernstein interviewed Marius Schoon in 1990, after the organisation's unbanning, and as he was preparing to return home, there are a number of moments in the interview where he expresses criticisms or regrets about the ANC.

On 26 and 27 March 2019, almost 60 years since the Sharpeville Massacre, a group of 50 or more veterans from the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), came together for a conference at Liliesleaf, which is now a ‘space of liberation’, a museum and conference centre, but was once the site of a dramatic police raid, in 1963, which led to the imprisonment of most of the African National Congress's (ANC) executive leadership. At this conference, on multiple occasions I witnessed MK members saying, ‘we fought against apartheid … and apartheid ended.’ Likewise, younger people in the audience repeatedly congratulated the veterans for having taken up arms, and therefore for ending apartheid. In other words, there was no need to fill in the missing information that is contained within the ellipses. We fought … we won. Story told.

As the veterans told their personal stories about their time in the military underground, I saw that all stories were received as heroic accounts, regardless of the actual details. One veteran spoke of the disastrous failure to bring a large ship down the east coast of Africa, intended to land in the Transkei, to launch a guerrilla uprising, in imitation of the Cubans. The veteran recounted the way in which ‘the boat got sick’ and had to turn back again and again, never making it further south than Dar es Salaam. Another veteran recounted, in gripping detail – and with a remarkable sense of humour – being one of a group of soldiers instructed to march through Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from the Zambian border in the north and attempt to infiltrate South Africa. Desperate for food and water, the group found themselves wandering through a game reserve, hunting zebra (‘the striped quagga’) while being hunted down themselves by the Rhodesian special forces. Many of his comrades died, and he spent months in jail.

Botswana: Wedding day departure

Despite Jenny Curtis and Marius Schoon's defiant enthusiasm, the banning orders did eventually take their toll. When ‘Marius received a tip that he was going to be arrested’, due to his communication with Breytenbach while at Pretoria Central, he decided that his only viable option was to flee the country. Consequently, Jenny Curtis decided that they would need to get married straight away ‘so that, should Marius be caught and imprisoned, she would be able to visit him’. However, figuring out how to marry two people who were under banning orders was by no means straightforward. As Jack Curtis explains, ‘This presented a knotty problem. A magistrates’ court was out of the question for the wedding, and any minister of one of the established churches was likely to hedge at being party to an illegal gathering.’ In fact, as early as March of 1977, both Curtis and Schoon applied to the minister of justice for an exemption to marry. In a provocative attempt to give these applications additional weight, the couple had their letters hand-delivered by Helen Suzman, the Progressive Party MP, who could add a personal touch to the appeal. Suzman attached a note: ‘You once said in the House that you are “a kindly man” – maybe you will react accordingly to the requests I was told were contained in the letters.’ In addition to requesting an exemption to marry, the couple also requested permission to visit Marius's sister in Natal, and ‘Schoon also requested a variation of his restrictions to enable him to live with Curtis at her address’. Unsurprisingly, none of these requests for exemptions was granted. Even though the applications were submitted during April, the minister of justice made no reply whatsoever, through all of April and May. Therefore, the couple decided that the wedding needed to proceed illegally. On 3 June 1977, Jenny Curtis and Marius Schoon were married.

IT IS HEREBY CERTIFIED:

The attempts to bring Craig Williamson to justice for the murders of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon took many forms, spanning more than a decade. Even though Williamson confessed to his role in the murder and despite the tenacious persistence of the Schoon family to do everything in their power to stop Williamson from evading justice, their efforts ended with the limp, pathetic lie that Williamson gave to Deputy Sheriff Van den Heever.

To make sense of this remarkable travesty of justice, an entirely separate book could be written. There is neither time nor space to analyse all the twists and turns in Craig Williamson's path to amnesty and beyond. However, it is necessary briefly to sketch the broad contours of this process, towards an assessment of the specific significance of this book to contemporary contestations around justice for the crimes of apartheid. In addition, tracing Williamson's successful evasion of justice offers important signposts for further research, which could build on this book and take it in new directions.

Evading justice

Crucially, it was Marius Schoon who first sought justice for the murder of his wife and daughter by filing a civil suit against Craig Williamson, on 18 August 1995. Marius Schoon's case against Williamson came about in response to a televised confession by Williamson, who showed no shame for his role in the 1984 bombing of the Schoons’ home in Angola. Citing over a decade of trauma endured by himself and young Fritz, Marius Schoon sued for R1 million, with roughly a quarter designated in Williamson's ‘personal capacity’ and the rest in his ‘representative capacity’ as a servant of the police.

This book focuses on a small group of white radicals, centred on the experiences of Jeanette (Jenny) Curtis and Marius Schoon, between 1972 and 1984. In large part, the individuals who are at the core of this book are largely absent from the existing historiography of the anti-apartheid struggle. Jenny's story has been told, in part, via a memoir by her father, Jack Curtis, and Jonathan Ancer's 2017 biography of Craig Williamson. Interviews with Marius Schoon were included in The Rift, Hilda Bernstein's collection on the exile experience, as well as Julie Frederikse's book on nonracialism, The Unbreakable Thread, published in 1990. Beyond this, there is little to speak of. Unlike their better-known contemporaries, Joe Slovo and Ruth First, no full biographies have been published for either of the Schoons and neither are they generally spoken of in books that cover the armed struggle or the ANC. Part of the reason for this absence, I argue, is because the Schoons’ story is – in important respects – ‘unusable’ in the sense that neither their participation in the anti-apartheid struggle nor the multiple moments of tragedy in their lives fits neatly within a triumphant narrative. However, it is precisely the fact that this history is not easily contained within the standard narratives of the liberation struggle that it deserves to be researched and analysed.

This book is not a biography of either Jeanette or Marius Schoon. To the extent that what is contained here is of a biographical nature, I’ve taken inspiration from a growing trend among historians to write ‘biographies of a generation’. Luisa Passerini's Autobiography of a Generation, for example, analyses the radical upheaval in Italy in 1968, while Robert Foster's Vivid Faces depicts the Irish generation that fought for independence around the turn of the twentieth century.

Jeanette and Katryn Schoon were killed on 28 June 1984. The young mother and her six-year-old daughter died after a parcel bomb exploded inside their apartment in Lubango, Angola. Craig Williamson and Jerry Raven, South African security police officers, together confessed to manufacturing the bomb and sending it to Angola. These are the facts that can be stated without dispute or hesitation. Beyond these details, however, the story of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon's last moments alive drifts into speculation, contradictory and contested narratives, and supposed conclusions based on unverifiable evidence.

The questions related to how and why the assassination of the Schoons took place is a central concern for this book. To the extent possible, based on interviews Marius Schoon gave while he was alive, the memoirs of Jeanette's father, Jack Curtis, and my own research in Angola, I have attempted to reconstruct the likely chain of events on the day of the bombing, and the immediate events that followed. In narrating these details, I have drawn inspiration from Luise White's book The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo. For White, the purpose of studying an assassination is not to confirm, once and for all, the facts of the matter. Rather, the study is done ‘in pursuit of history, of how narratives about the past are produced and reproduced and how power is produced and reproduced by these narratives’. In the case of the Schoons, the different narratives of the assassination demarcate critical fault lines, which have been used to argue both for and against amnesty for the killers. In addition, the contestation around whether apartheid operatives deserve amnesty for this double murder hinges around determining where the line exists between being a ‘combatant’ within the ANC's military infrastructure and merely being a member of the political underground. At best, the line here is subtle, and difficult to draw clearly and cleanly. At worst, the line simply doesn't exist.

For Williamson and Raven to receive amnesty from the TRC, they were obliged to argue that the bomb was an act of war, targeting a soldier. The pair claimed that Marius Schoon was involved in supporting MK while in Angola and was therefore the intended target of the bomb.

Another cover story

In September 1981, Jeanette and Marius Schoon were hired as co-directors of the Botswana branch of the (UK-based) International Voluntary Service. The IVS developed as a pacifist response to world war, enabling people from different nations and backgrounds to work together as an antidote to militarism and patriotism. For example, in the aftermath of World War 2, British volunteers went to Germany and worked alongside volunteers from all over the continent helping to rebuild war-torn cities. The organisation also responded to natural disasters and initiatives that would now fall under the broad umbrella of ‘development’ work. IVS in Britain had joined with other UK agencies as part of the British Volunteer Programme, funded mainly by the government, and it had ‘overseas programmes’ in several other, mainly African, countries. In fact, according to Nigel Watt, who was the general secretary of IVS at the time, ‘budget wise, the overseas programme was the biggest because we got 75 per cent, sometimes more, from the government for this programme. It was kind of like the British Peace Corps in a way.’ Much of the overseas work had a strong emphasis on development, such as digging wells, building schools, and teaching and working at orphanages. There was, since the organisation's founding, a strong focus on the value of hard work on improving society. However, IVS staff would have resented being lumped together with NGOs and charities that are paternalistic, who simply provide ‘service’ without a sense of mutual humanity:

In fact, the situation in Botswana for IVS was substantially different from how one might imagine the Peace Corps operating in Africa. First, the organisation did not pretend to be politically neutral, but rather, ‘we thought we were supporting anti-apartheid in a way by demonstrating that racial harmony can exist in the neighbouring countries [to South Africa]. I suppose that was the kind of motivation, you could say, for IVS as an organisation to be there.

A bove and beyond the general difficulties and complications of doing underground work for the ANC, in the Schoons’ specific case, as Glenn Moss scathingly – and correctly – says,

Barbara Hogan echoes Moss's sentiments regarding the Schoons’ network, of which she herself was a member. Hogan's description of how she ended up working with the Schoons in this way is gripping, in that it reveals her deep misgivings and regrets:

It is interesting that Hogan, a lifelong supporter of the ANC, describes her work with the Schoons as the ‘least important’ that she did during that period. If Hogan's priorities were to organise the unemployed and help build trade unions, was it worth the risk involved to send coded messages via dead letter boxes and couriers across the border, letting the Schoons (and the ANC, by extension) know about these activities?

Botswana

While everyone needed a cover story, not all covers were as clean cut as being a teacher or an artist; in some cases, cover stories could have an undercover side to them as well. Heinz Klug and Patrick Fitzgerald's exile years in Botswana are perhaps the most complex – and also the most compelling – cases in point.

Klug had been a journalism student, and part of the radical leadership of Nusas, after the entire executive disbanded in 1976, and after Williamson's flight from the country. Klug had been living in Durban when Rick Turner was killed and had experienced a nasty increase in harassment from the police in the aftermath of the assassination. At the end of 1978, Klug moved down to Cape Town and began an MA in January of 1979. Meanwhile, Klug continued his radical organising, often focused on opposing the conscription of white men into the apartheid military. ‘The pressures were building, and all of a sudden I got a letter that said that they had cancelled my deferment.’ In response to being called up by the military, Klug attempted to organise a group of students to all refuse to serve, together. However, the state strategically offered deferments, to whittle down this group of conscientious objectors. Furthermore, Nusas had decided that they were unwilling to encourage young white men to resist conscription.