Things of family

Hi Mario

I thought you may have rushed your reading, and I was to have told you the anguish of having my sister and her husband on death row back in 1993. I was doing my Masters that year and I don't know how I managed to finish it with that hanging about my neck..no pun! Gay was acquitted and Mandela commuted Clive' death sentence to life. We as a family have been suffering the distant trauma since then. They are family and Gay and I are sister and brother; our mother died from cancer when I was small and Gay became my mum, so to speak. It was she who invited me to RSA in 66 and because of Gay Caron and I are together.
Yes, we are close and I met Clive in 87 during a brief visit to see my son Chris.

I think you may have been on the wrong track because of your reading; I am so staunchly anti-racist I devoted seven years of post grad research into racism. My novel RANE is about racism and its scourge. I studied the hate groups of the USA, Israel, South Africa and our own despicable past in Australia.

Caron and I risked twenty years gaol in South African prisons by illegally taking my son Chris from RSA to Oz in 1977. Long story there and the courts sent him back to RSA. I did it to remove him from a racist environment in RSA. I had him born in Oz in 1973 so as to give him an Oz birth certificate and not a South African one. I foresaw the collapse of apartheid and the stigma of being South African during those hideous times.

Our [yours and mine] knowledge of China and the Chinese is not racist but realist; realistic of their inherent racism, not of ours.

You may also have mis-read my resume. Indeed, you have drawn a conclusion far wide of the mark. I am so non-specialist that having no special training or experience has been the bane of my working life; so much so that in 1989 I was unemployable because of it. I then began school again, having left school at age 15 to join the navy. So from 89 to 01 I did full time university, all of it behind a computer, not going to one single on campus lecture. Caron has done the same with twelve years devoted to off campus property study. We moved fourteen times, buying and selling our place of residence to pay for our lives cos there was no tax on profit from selling one's own home. We travelled from southern Oz to the far north and back again, doing this, studying and it was during this time that one rainy morning at 5.23 I heard on the radio that Clive had been arrested for Chris Hani's murder. Walus already had been arrested days earlier. Then the big shock came later with Gay's arrest. The trials and the acquittal of Gay and the death sentence for Clive. I read the complete trial transcripts... miles and miles of pages.

Loyalty is an honourable trait and we as a family have remained loyal to Gay and Clive, despite the wide differences we have on things of race. No one wants a sister or her husband hanged. It is an extreme emotional thing. And we all have shared in the grief, no matter what.

My son Chris is and has been back in RSA since the courts returned him there in 77 and he came to Oz in 93 the year of Hani's murder and since then I haven't seen him but have remained close through the magic of telecommunications.

I despise the notion of RSA and its hypocrisy and the only notion of returning is to have Caron reunite with Rita and Pete Snyman. But I don't think that is to be now as this present drama has robbed us of this chance. I wanted it to be, to also see Chris my son, to see Gay and Clive, and to know that after over a quarter of a century Caron finally did meet again with her SA family.

Conspiracy? Mario, that word is a con. There was no conspiracy. That I do know. I am family, so is my brother and he is a lawyer in Sydney. Clive was shocked when Walus killed Hani but has stood by Walus ever since, even to the point of execution. This you should know!!!!!!

Walus took it upon himself to start the revolution. It was the talk at braais, at dinners, all over conservative South Africa at the time. It was the atmosphere of Eugene Terreblanche and all those idiots dressed in Boer costumes. Everyone was caught up in it. If it were a conspiracy then half of white South Africa was involved. Everyone feared Hani. Most of the ANC feared that murderous thug. If you knew of his activities in the ANC training camps in Zambia you would understand why I did not shed a tear at his murder. He was himself a brutal murdering thug and was responsible for the deaths of perhaps hundreds of fellow ANC members and deserters. Hani was the Mao Zedong of the ANC and even Mandela and Mbeki did not want Hani to be the El Supremo of the ANC. They hated one another.

I told you I had training in guerrilla warfare; that included intelligence and I was privy to much Int during those days. Conspiracy? That is a joke. It is still a part of the SACP ethos to prolong this adulation of Hani and the perpetuation of Hani's credo to keep the SACP together as a viable force in RSA politics, especially after the collapse of Communism in the European world.

I admire Clive for his loyalty to poor stupid Walus. Never once has Clive put that clown down. Everyone gave one another guns in those days. During the 70s I carried one. I knew the carnage that the communists would create to gain power...through the gun, as Mao once or millions of times said. It is strange that today Zuma is to be the next president. He still sings of murder at his rallies, dances to death, as it were. But he at least has visited Clive twice, met with Gay, actually practises reconciliation! And he is an enemy of Mugabe and that makes Zuma my friend. It is Mugabe who needs the proverbial bullet these days and I am surprised he is still alive.

I was in Rhodesia during the early 70s, working all over the place [never mind the CV] and I personally saw the ravages of Mugabe's actions against his fellow Rhodesians. He is the most evil man in modern African history. And Hani was just the same.

But in saying all this, nothing justifies murder. Nothing. And that includes the electric chair, state executions, assassinations et al. China and the USA head the world in this field and both nations should be condemned for it.