Remembering John Maroo, a South African underground operative

The number of people walking and commuting, on the streets of Soweto these days, is on a steady rise. Number of malls, also on the rise, sprouting out anywhere, have long displaced small businesses, redirecting cash in circulation to Johannesburg’s leafy north. Billboards advertising alcohol display faces of youngsters smiling. No faces of drunk-looking people feature here. Try again if you thought the liquor industry could curb alcohol abuse, gender-based violence and road fatalities.

In another hour or so, traffic at arteries like Koma and Chris Hani roads, will come to a standstill when funeralgoers swell the streets. We too are funeralgoers, on a Saturday in October, to lay to rest Todd and Esmé Matshikiza, and John Pogiso Maroo.

This is an ode to Maroo, a Parys-born freedom fighter who died in exile, in Harare, in 1989. He was 63. His hearty laughter matched his compassion, discipline and intellect. Through episodes of solitary confinement, exile, banishment and imprisonment, he fought on, till the end.

Maroo belongs to the generation of Adolphus Mvemve, Henry Squire Makgothi, James la Guma, Moses Mabhida, Nomvo Booi, OR Tambo and Ruth First. Don’t forget Swapo co-founder Toivo ya Toivo and Robert Sobukwe, the first president of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania.

Maroo would have met or worked with most of them during the 40 years he gave to the cause – from picket lines and mobilisation in Johannesburg, to Robben Island, and in exile.

Scores of other names link the evil past and the future we wish for our progeny. Historians gasp, some amusedly, at the mention of weapons of mass destruction, thanks to George Bush & Co, and Ian Smith’s idiocy to undo African civilisation. Until 1980, Oxford had a history professor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who canonised stereotypes – falsely claiming there was no African history before colonists set foot here, a place teeming with “unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes”.

So, surely, Oxford and peers would have never taught about Emperor Mussa or other realities in Africa independent of Europe’s caricature. At the same time, the University of Cape Town’s curriculum made apartheid seem normal, noted alumnus Tim Jenkin. It was during his stay abroad in the 1960s that Jenkin, who later joined the ANC, realised that his homeland, South Africa, had institutionalised his white privilege while oppressing black citizens for being black. It’s at this point worth recalling Chinua Achebe’s counsel for us, as a people, to record our history.   

Johannesburg 2025. The abundance of overweight politicians and police officers, like the ones managing a roadblock on our way to the CBD, is vexing. Somewhere, past Soweto Highway, where Orlando meets Noordgesig, I catch a glimpse of a railway line to Naledi, via Phomolong (cue jazz cat Abdullah Ibrahim’s eponymous tune). My mind drifts to Molo Fish! Avoiding the Truth, a series that took viewers to the family-splitting Group Areas Act, “the very essence of apartheid” as racist regime’s premier Daniel Malan said in the early days of that minority rule. On the upside, Molo Fish’s music score and poetry built in were rich.

There was a time, though brief, when TV forced us to imagine and grow. That was the heady 1990s, cue local- and foreign-trained talent Dali Tambo, Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, Joe Tlholoe, Lesley Mashokwe and Melanie Chait, Sylvia Vollenhoven and all-rounder Dennis Beckett. Radio shed its propaganda profile. Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia tracks the previous decades and, briefly, revels at how propaganda backfired on Pretoria in the era of the Group Areas Act and its devastating cousins the Immorality Act that Trevor Noah’s book revisited albeit on a light note. It’s hard to ignore these things when the past stalks the land, when ideas of restitution and affirmative action get derided as if the Irish-coffee economy is OK, as if to delegitimise Nelson Mandela’s clarion call: “Let there be bread, water and salt for all.”

John Pogiso Maroo’s daughter, Dr. Lebo Maroo, faults deviations from the Freedom Charter, a document her dad swore by.

“I think he wouldn’t believe that we are free [in South Africa today]. Look at the means of production, look at the colour bar in cultural life,” she writes in Botswana Mmegi, stressing that the charter is about “the land [and] mineral resources and about wealth being shared. It would be sad if we have forgotten about the Freedom Charter because we still have so many undone things, so many gaps,” she notes, urging young people to “take the baton and fight for a just, equal and fair society”.

Born in an increasingly repressive society, Maroo and the Matshikizas sought refuge in Zambia and so on. Ntate Todd died in Lusaka in 1968 but his work lives on. His erudite ‘Chocolates for My Wife’ was to become activists’ staple from the 1970s. Staples have changed. Right-wingers swell Armageddon talk radio today. They curiously ignore socio-economics, cartels and foetal alcoholic disorder stemming from the dop era but routinely brush off institutionalised dispossession.

The aggressive anger-ignorance junction is palpable. Zakes Tolo, a stalwart of the African National Congress and its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), recalls Maroo’s tale about a white pig, in a bowtie, that so yearned a minute to swim in the mud. “The moral of the story is that people would never discard who they are,” says Tolo, remembering his comrade’s take on bigots. “As the liberation movement goes towards the left, [reactionaries] go towards the right and trample on the objectives of the movement.”

Mme Esmé, a daughter of Noordgesig, died a nonagenarian in June 2020, having voted since 1994. She’s been reunited with her husband Todd in death. To stress, 1994 was just the beginning (apartheid ended four years earlier in Namibia). Communities still track the shadow of brutal poverty, contrasts in survival rates, price-distorting cartels, and rand manipulation. Economists mumble Gini co-efficient. South Africa and Namibia remain the globe’s most unequal nations. Students cite, wait for it, post-apartheid-apartheid but unfairly vilify capitalism while lauding the likes of Sweden and China. A lot gets lost in translation.

Like his 48 comrades repatriated from Zambia and Zimbabwe, Maroo returned home last year. He’d died a “terrorist”, to borrow from propagandist Nationalists, a regime enabled by London and Washington. The Nationalists’ fan base included Bonn, Brasilia and Tel Aviv. In contrast, legions of folks opposed oppression. The sight of mourners in kaftans, a code for Palestine, at the funeral suggests the spirit of solidarity lives on. The South Africa that Maroo was repatriated to is nothing like the one that separated him from his wife, mother, and three children (scattered in as many countries). His folks had suffered from the Natives Land Act and other draconian laws. His scions will never suffer weaponised police dogs. Nor will they ever know the evil system that forced their ancestor into exile in 1978, pursued him in Gaborone (1979), nearly took his life in Maseru (1982).

In the aftermath of Maseru, a massacre that claimed 42 lives (including two kids), Maroo’s “blood-stained suit was vivid in telling his near-death story that he neither had a chance or a heart to tell”, noted Lebo, who went to exile with her father in 1978, never to meet again.

To mitigate, ANC’s top brass re-deployed its operative to Lusaka. Pretoria was on a killing spree: Gaborone, Matola and elsewhere in Southern Africa. In Boipatong, south of Johannesburg, the system killed 45 people in 1992. Massacres spanned the breadth of Mzansi: Kabokweni, Langa (Uitenhage), Mthatha, Naledi, Ongoye, Thokoza, etc. Cross-border assassinations took the lives of Busi Majola, Dulcie September, Jeanette Schoon and others. Maroo received the news of the murder of Onkgopotse Tiro while on Robben Island where he took hard labour and inhumane conditions in his stride. Chronic back pain and awful scars told an untold story.

For ANC leader Fikile Mbalula, those scars bore “testament of his resilience and dedication to the cause”, he told mourners at the City Hall, a venue flanked by Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, Harrison and Rissik streets. Those names are akin to a path from an oppressive, and sexist, past to the present. Sadly, the private sector isn’t shedding its apartheid-era boys’ club profile, as men still tend to hire men as CEO, CFOs, etc.

“Comrade John Maroo was the embodiment of a patriot, a cadre of our revolutionary movement grounded in the commitment to the liberation of our country,” Mbalula noted. The scandals rippling the movement’s founding ideals tend to draw an involuntary sigh, a cry and a chuckle at the sight of ANC top dogs. This time I chuckle when the man beside me whispers to himself “here comes a celebrity” as Mbalula strides into a packed hall.

The service recalls the 1980s. It’s emotional. Mourners in black and in other colours, in party regalia and so on colour the service with slogans. Freedom songs reverberate in a hall with some 1,500 people. There’s more chanting outside. Aluta continua! Others chant age-old Amandla! Fists in the air. Goosebumps. Police officers sit stoically. Some, standing at attention, will later salute the heroes’ coffins. Church hymns meet toyi-toyi. That sums Maroo’s life: from church, in Parys and Alexandra, to exile. Mourners wave Palestinian flags. War veterans lift their legs this high. Time stops. Amen.

As a boy, all young John dreamed of was a life as a reverend. But, when his time came in the 1940s his application to be a candidate minister of the Methodist Church was rejected. Meanwhile, the national stage was seized with a groundswell of activity against Jan Smuts who laid the foundations of what became apartheid. In 1950, Maroo joined the ANC but his activities soon drew police surveillance. He had at that time also met a nurse named Rebecca Tlolane. The couple married in 1953 and settled at Moletsane, western Soweto. In no time, their house became a subject of endless police raids.

In those years, the ANC wanted to build a non-racial and non-sexist society where the doors of learning and culture would be open, and in the sharing in the country’s wealth.

Now, in the 2020s, those pushing for real change are overcrowded by gravy-train types. Cue Luthuli House’s preoccupation with the party’s fall from the pound seats to a polygamous dormitory. Social ills from drugs to hunger get a half-hearted mention.

The ANC has unwantedly birthed four parties since it took power 1994, the first splinter came about after the movement fired Gen. Bantu Holomisa for exposing Sol Kerzner as its cash daddy. More recently, but for different reasons, ex-president Jacob Zuma started his own party. ANC stalwart Sophie Williams-De Bruyn, in a 2011 interview with the author, singled access to resources as the real enemy. Government chiefs of all shades are minting it. Look at ministers’ credit cards and waistlines. Pity. Part-time opposition is strife-torn. Williams-De Bruyn worried about degenerating morals and a new orientation with post-1994 leaders differing from “the servants of the people” of the old.

Just like today’s ANC, part-time opposition and cash daddies obsess about amassing power. Liberals’ PR machinery is sleek but derides transformation. Liberalism has become a convenient label for those who favour South Africa’s status quo. Theatrics and judiciarisation of politics provide fodder for newsrooms but deflect from the legacy of oppression. Look at the Western Cape’s multiple trouble: drugs, foetal alcoholic spectrum disorder, gangs and joblessness. Pesticides stunt children’s growth, dimming the future. Teen pregnancies stalk the future. Homes are war zones. We need catharsis. Theatrics distract.

FASD, TV, alcohol abuse and other factors unknowingly conspire to numb the nation’s trajectory. It starts with falling levels of consciousness. Thankfully, some things aren’t falling. Students are usually engaged. Some still perform poems and chant slogans in memory of martyrs like Steve Biko and Onkgopotse Tiro. Thankfully, notwithstanding a culture of erasure, some things just survived the intervening five decades.

“As my first political educator, Papa introduced me to Tiro’s story in the late 1970s. Tiro’s martyrdom lives on,” wrote Lebo Maroo. An activist and history teacher who’d been hounded from Morris Isaacson High, Tiro was slain months after finding refuge in Botswana. His spirit galvanised a “generation decades later in the (#FeesMustFall) and decolonisation movements at the turn of the century,” reflected Prof Itumeleng Mosala, Tiro’s fellow black consciousness adherent.

Taking a look at Maroo’s untimely demise, MK grandee Zakes Tolo draws solace from the fact that the operative died aware that victory was imminent though some individuals remained behind bars, in exile, or were tortured, “accidentalised” and “disappeared”. Anyway, talks-about-talks gatherings were afoot in places like Senegal’s Gorée and Zambia, recalls Tolo. Sadly, the Nationalists still chose destruction and hatred.

So came the end to Maroo’s tortuous path, 10 years after Botswana declared him a persona non grata in 1979 to elude the wrath of Pretoria which wanted him deported. The fear of execution was real. Coincidentally, Solomon Mahlangu had been executed months earlier. Maroo had, a year prior, daringly escaped with six recruits to Botswana from Bophuthatswana – a Bantustan he’d been banished to – traveling first by car then by foot. Apartheid police minister Jimmy Kruger and his bosses were livid. Maroo had 13 years before his demise providently told his then 13-year-old Lebo that “the Boers weren’t going to make him ‘shrink and do nothing out of fear of torture, I’ll keep fighting. We must keep fighting’.” In paying homage to Maroo’s cohort, may we inspire youths to keep fighting for economic justice, equality, friendship, solidarity and unity grounded in innovation, moral regeneration and Ubuntu.

Fondly known as Ntate Maru in Lesotho, the fighter was survived by wife Rebecca and children Cynthia, Lebo and Oupa (who in 1976 joined MK in exile). The five hardly lived together as a family as the police security branch would routinely hound the fighter even before his 12-year imprisonment on Robben Island where he arrived in his late 30s and released in the year of his 50th. He’d have turned 100 this year. 

Back at the City Hall, the Natives Land Act, chronicled a century ago by intellectual and freedom fighter Sol Plaatje (Fikile Mbalula’s distant predecessor) makes it to the mourners’ informal exchange after the funeral. That Act was the beginning of “crippling, anti-African legislation [which] ultimately deprived blacks of 87% of the territory in the land of their birth,” Madiba wrote.

My ear also scrapes scraps of G20, tariff weaponisation, geopolitics to Che Guevara, Nikolai Ostrovsky and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. There’s also Deolinda Rodrigues de Almeida, Kenneth Kaunda and other names I don’t recall. It’s like a case study in diligence.

Hearing pan-Africanist Es’kia Mphahlele’s name recalls West Africa’s solidarity. Tsietsi Mashinini and Miriam Makeba fled to Guinea as exiles. The African Youth Command, whose members included John Mahama (Ghana’s newly-re-elected president), fought apartheid. Mphahlele, an author and academic extraordinaire forced into exile in 1957, excitedly reflected that “Nigeria and Ghana gave Africa back to me” and a “scintillating sense of freedom and daytime, after the South African nightmare” – a time of draconian laws, flanked by Jan Smuts and Hendrik Verwoerd’s racist dictatorship.

Mme Rebecca Maroo passed on in 2020 after years of trying to get her husband’s remains repatriated. For decades, she and her family endured police harassment and humiliation. The matriarch, a general without a medal, kept her family as a unit even when it was physically apart. Hers typified the underrated role many women play, quietly but with dollops of fortitude and resolve, in repressive societies. This is a tribute to her too and to all the mothers of the struggle everywhere.

By Shoks Mnisi Mzolo

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