steel
Ben Turok
In 1958 when Marius Schoon applied for membership of the Congress of Democrats (COD), the Congress Alliance (as the African National Congress-led movement was then known) was actively fighting to defend its policy of non-racialism against those who wanted to establish the Pan Africanist Congress as a basically anti-white organisation.
The ANC insisted that it stood by the words of the Freedom Charter, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” Marius wanted very much to be part of that nonracial movement, and his presence in it, as a young Afrikaner straight out of Stellenbosch University, was clearly of considerable symbolic importance.
Yet his entry into the movement was not a simple matter. The COD was being targeted by the Special Branch, we were in the midst of the treason trial, they were sending in agents to spy on our activities, and a young Afrikaner, with no history of involvement in the struggle and no family connections to indicate some sympathy for democratic ideas, and Marius himself breathing unconventional attitudes on many issues, was a cause for some concern.
Like Oosie Oosthuisen, an Afrikaner journalist who also sought membership of the COD, suspicions were aroused as to their motives. And so, although both were admitted to membership, some doubt about their credentials remained. Oosthuisen subsequently committed suicide, perhaps because of his loneliness and misery at having been cast out by his family, and not quite wholly accepted by the movement.
These stories come to mind since they troubled Marius a great deal, and were also a source of great discomfort to the core members of the COD. Indeed, the issue of qualified acceptance was only resolved between us in a yard of Pretoria Central Prison, where, when Marius was at last admitted into the company of the white political prisoners and allowed to exercise with them, he said to me, “I had to get 12 years for sabotage to prove my political integrity.”
Of course it wasn’t simply that Marius was an Afrikaner. He was also a rebel against convention in all its forms, lacking that stolid middle-class background that was typical of white members of the movement. Marius liked to jol, he had absolutely no colour-consciousness, no class awareness, and was a true radical.
For me, as the national secretary of the COD, carrying much of the responsibility for vetting recruitment, Marius just did not gel as a candidate for membership and so we kept an eye on him for quite a while, of which he was quite aware, accepting it with remarkable political maturity.
Yet, despite some discomfort, Marius’s commitment grew and grew. He read a great deal, became a good theorist, brought his young wife Diane into the COD and lived the life of the struggle.
And yet, a degree of exclusion clung to him. When Umkhonto weSizwe was formed in 1961, Marius was not included, and this hurt him terribly. After some of us were jailed, he joined up with Raymond Thoms, another COD person, and together with a man who turned out to be a police agent, tried to blow up the Johannesburg Post Office Tower.
They were trapped, and Thoms and Schoon were sentenced to 12 years. The first three months were hell. They were kept in total isolation, and Marius was subjected to constant harassment, mainly on the grounds that he was an Afrikaner renegade. When he joined the rest of us, it came as a great relief, even though we too were in virtual solitary confinement.
I spent more than a year in the company of prisoner Schoon. He was already a man of considerable learning and he used the small opportunities we had to vastly increase his erudition. Even more, the joller proved to be a man of steel.
He was absolutely uncowed by the warders’ constant harassment, he spurned totally any suggestion that he should try to negotiate early release, as some were being encouraged to do, and remained stubbornly defiant. He was one of the bravest in our group and also one of the most sensible about our situation. In short, we had totally misjudged him, by the superficial nonconformism of this radical comrade.
Marius knew that Diane was not coping outside. She had financial problems, and was terribly lonely. She committed suicide and this was a horrible blow to Marius. But his morale never faltered, and he served out his time with that tough moral fibre we came to know wholly intact.
On his release, he left South Africa to join the underground in the neighbouring countries, where he was in constant danger, and where, ultimately in 1984, a bomb sent for him killed his wife Jeannette and daughter Katryn.
I met up with Marius on various occasions in exile. He wanted most of all to be recognised for his true worth as a committed revolutionary. Despite some hesitation on the part of the movement at various times, history will grant him that recognition.
The epic of Marius Schoon needs to be told. It is the story of our struggle, with its cruelties to individuals, its ironies, its rich cultural diversity, and, above all, its revolutionary meaning. Just because the ANC is now a party in government, striving to govern responsibly and well, its historical mission cannot be denied.
Ben Turok is an ANC MP