OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Monday 7.00pm.
RUTH First had turned away from active involvement in the African National Congress to concentrate on her academic career at a university in Maputo in Mozambique some time before she was killed by a letter bomb sent by the apartheid security forces, Transport Minister Mac Maharaj said on Monday.
Maharaj was testifying at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty hearing in which former apartheid spy Craig Williamson is applying for amnesty for the murder of First in Mozambique in 1982 and Jeanette Schoon and her two-year-old daughter Katryn in Angola in 1984. He is the first of a number of government ministers set to testify before the TRC this week.
Maharaj said he had visited First in Maputo shortly before her death where she told him that she had moved away from the ANC’s liberation struggle and was concentrating on her work at the Eduardo Mondlane University. Maharaj further denied that First had ever been deployed by the ANC in Mozambique. He said he had known both First and Schoon very well during his years in the underground structures of the African National Congress.
Maharaj said he had visited Schoon and her husband Marius at their homes in both Botswana and Angola. He said that, while they were involved in the ANC, they had never been involved in the armed struggle. He said Marius Schoon had received military training, although this had been focussed on self defence and to learn to use pamphlet bombs.