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.