Marius Schoon plans to lay charges against Craig Williamson for the murder of his wife and child, writes Mark Gevisser
The conscience of white South Africa is a self-assured Standard Six pupil whose voice has just broken, who is soccer-mad, and who witnessed his mother and sister blown to smithereens when he was two years old by a parcel- bomb.
The conscience of white South Africa is etched in the lines on his father’s troubled face; in the beaten but tenacious stoop of Marius Schoon’s back; in his righteous articulacy as he squares up to challenge the man who he now knows had a hand in killing Jenny and Katryn, his wife and daughter.
Schoon is unequivocal: he will lay charges against Craig Williamson. He is no longer the broken man, shattered by the bombing. Whether or not he wins the case — or even, in the face of the indemnification process, gets it to court — there is victory in that fact.
And there is a story to this victory: shortly after the bombing, which happened in southern Angola, two-year-old Fritz was attacked by a monkey. Monkeys then became a symbol for all the terror the little boy experienced but could not articulate. Wherever the father and son went, Fritzy would hallucinate monkeys: on the road to Devon, at the Asmals in Dublin, in Tanzania.
Then Schoon went to Luanda, for the unveiling of tombstone on the graves of his wife and daughter. He met up with his son, then four, at Victoria Falls. One morning, they were eating breakfast, and a real monkey jumped out and grabbed the little boy’s toast.
“The monkey took my toast,” the boy said. “You know how I feel?”
“How do you feel, Fritzy?” the anxious father responded.
“I’m really glad you went to Luanda, because I feel as though you came back and you gave me an AK and I’ve beaten all those monkeys. And the monkeys have gone. They’ll never come back.”
Schoon, of course, was battling the monkeys along with his son: “I learnt more about courage from that four year old boy than I’ve ever learnt before or since.” Now there is the worry that they may have came back this week, anthropomorphised as an obese superspy and his troupe of spooks. Now Schoon not only knows who did it, but that the bomb that killed his wife and his daughter was intended for him.
And there, in front of us as we talk, is a photo of Williamson in the paper. Does he want to meet him, confront him? “There’s only one way to look at such people, and that’s over the V-sight of an AK 47.”
Over on the other side of the table, his Irish wife, Sherry, growls. Marius! “Was I not mean to have said that? I suppose what has surprised me is that I’m experiencing a whole lot of anger I thought I had dealt with. I worry that I’m not coping….”
And yet he appears to be coping just fine. When he, a Hillbrow hippie on the periphery of the struggle, was conned by an agent provocateur into trying to blow up the Hillbrow police station and sent to jail in 1964 for 12 years, he was tagged — even by common-law crooks — as “staunch”; the greatest compliment that is paid “inside”. He has, says his former fellow-inmate Hugh Lewin, “a doggedness quite unlike any I have ever encountered”.
He might have been a hippie, even a joke, before his imprisonment: prison changed that: “He really proved himself there,” says Lewin. “He was tough, unselfish, and most importantly, he played a great role in looking after Bram Fischer. They were both verraiers, committed to overthrowing an evil system tied up with their own backgrounds. They were the original anti-apartheid Afrikaners.”
There is much Schoon has survived: the death of two wives (the first by suicide) and a daughter; 12 years in prison; bannings; horrendous times in exile; expulsion from the fold of Afrikanerdom. Comparatively, something small has unhinged him: an event that predates the Williamson revelations by a fortnight:
“I was on a British TV programme with Dirk Coetzee, and I found the whole thing freaky, sitting there having a reasonably friendly conversation with someone who tells me, quite casually, that he had been given orders to kill me. ‘Why were you coming to shoot me, Dirk?’ I ask him, and he says, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t know anything about you. I only wanted to please my superiors.’ I suppose I just don’t understand that mentality, of doing things to please authority rather than because of conviction.”
At least, however, Coetzee shows remorse. “I know this sounds like a very Catholic thing to say, but there can be no indemnity, no forgiveness, without remorse. We see no such signs of Craig being sorry. I mean, are we going to have a situation where people can qualify for indemnity just by saying, as if they were reeling off a grocery list, ‘I killed this one and poisoned that one and beat the shit out of the third one’. It seems untenable to me, morally and philosophically.”
But even if Williamson were to repent, Schoon would not want him to be indemnified. “I’m not in the business of forgiving.” This does not, however, mean that he is opposed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “I think it’s the most important thing we can do, but I don’t think we should confuse truth and reconciliation with indemnity. They are two different issues. People say the whole thing is going to turn into a witchhunt. But let’s not forget — we’re dealing with witches.”
He is quite prepared to accept that “my leadership in the ANC, people with wiser political heads than mine, are likely to decide that indemnity is essential to the truth and reconciliation process. That’s their business: I’m certainly not going to follow them like sheep.”
Marius Schoon is not a man who exudes inner peace. And yet one senses that no monkeys, now, will disrupt the home he has created and the identity he has settled into. His Yeoville house exudes the kind of bonhomie that could only be borne of an Irish-Afrikaner union, and he loves his job at the Development Bank; particularly his daily interaction with Afrikaners he once spurned. Eventhough there are many Afrikaners “who have just put their grey shoes away for a while and would love to be wearing them again”, he sees, in his own people, “more inward-looking questioning, more real change than English-speaking whites, who actually think it’s going to be business as usual with the house in Plett…”
Now Schoon goes off to work — and speaks Afrikaans, a language he refused to speak for decades, with his colleagues. Has the Williamson revelations made this personal reconciliation more difficult? “You know, he says, “working for The Bank is different to being an underground activist. I’m committed to The Bank, but it’s a job. Sherry and I do not sit up all night planning strategies for development the way Jenny and I used to in Botswana planning the revolution. I’m able to keep things seperate.”
He still, however, uses the word ‘comrade’ the way exiles did –“a comrade is coming over”; “the comrade felt that…” — and intimates that camaraderie is something he has been missing since his return: comrades from both before his exile and his time away have been scarce. Yet he chooses to be heartened, rather than cynical, by this week’s constant trilling of the phone and the calls of solidarity from long-lost friends.
Comradeship is about support, “the kind of support you get when you’re an activist”, and Schoon clearly hankers after it. At the end of our two-hour meeting, he bursts: “This whole thing with Craig has made me an activist again. I haven’t been an activist for some time now. parly due to lethargy, partly just because I wanted to get on with my own life for a change. And now there’s this little window and I can do something. I can lay charges and assist in the final undermining of the whole apartheid structure, the shitty ideology, the lies, the deceit, the corruption. It actually feels quite nice.”
Fritz and a friend –also the child of returned exiles– sit on the couch. “Yes, Marius!” they laugh; in part boyish chiding, in part the respect that teenage boys reserve for an adult who knows how –and when– to fight. Pity the monkeys.