Journalist Chris Louw, who was found shot in the head with an AK-47 on Tuesday, committed suicide, North West police said.
”He told his wife to stay indoors, then went outside. There’s a place he planted some flowers, its a special place to him we understand. And in that place is where he shot himself with an AK-47 rifle,” said Superintendent Lesego Metsi.
Louw took his own life while his wife was home with their two children. He was 56. Police had found suicide notes saved on Louw’s computer. The first was dated for November 29.
”He wrote a suicide note on the 29th. He changed the date to the 30th and he couldn’t take his life then,” said Metsi.
Police have also found a hard copy of a suicide note.
Metsi said police were investigating where Louw found the rifle.
”We’re investigating where he found this gun because the wife confirmed he did not own it. It had some rust so it looks like it was hidden somewhere before he committed suicide.”
Family and friends earlier gathered at his farm near
Hartbeespoort Dam in the North West to offer their condolences.
”It’s always a shock and of course he was an old colleague and friend,” said Foeta Krige, who found Louw’s body.
Krige said Louw went missing on Monday afternoon shortly after 2pm. The neighbourhood watch had searched for him but couldn’t find him.
Krige, a former colleague of Louw, drove over to provide support to the family. He found Louw’s body near the house on Tuesday morning. He had a shot to the head.
Krige said his former boss at Radio Sonder Grense had just secured a contract to write a book. He had however, been concentrating on a crime wave in the area in his most recent articles for Beeld newspaper and was very worried about the subject.
Louw transformed the face of Afrikaans current affairs debates when he became executive producer at RSG and was a ”very liberal Afrikaner”, said Krige, who is now the producer of Monitor.
Earlier, the Freedom Front Plus’s Pieter Mulder said: ”The outspoken way in which Chris Louw had struggled with the problems of South Africa, resulted in nobody being indifferent to him.”
”In his last news articles he had, as a former member of the Dakar group, expressed the disillusionment of many South Africans whose high expectations of the new South Africa did not realise.”
Louw was known for his controversial open letter to the late Willem de Klerk entitled, ”Boetman is die bliksem in [Boetman is angry]”.
This was followed by a book, Boetman en die Swanesang van die Verligtes [Boetman and the Swansong of the Liberals]. It became
known as the ”Boetman debate”.
The letter to De Klerk, a National Party opinion-maker and brother of former president FW De Klerk, accused the older generation of Afrikaner leaders of political cowardice and deceit by sending the younger generation to war to defend apartheid.
Louw was also part of a group of South Africans who held meetings with the then-banned African National Congress in Senegal in 1987.
He was a journalist for several publications, including the Mail & Guardian, Farmers’ Weekly, Vaderland and Oggendblad and wrote for Beeld. Louw is survived by his wife, son and daughter.
Mulder continued: ”I had great appreciation for the honest way in which he criticised others, but also himself. The fearless way in which he stormed at everything and everyone which he regarded as
being dishonest, remains his big contribution to the South African debate.” – Sapa