Remembering Ntate John Maroo, an underground operative
Shoks Mnisi Mzolo
The number of people walking and commuting, on the streets of Soweto this morning, is on a steady rise. Malls, which are also on the rise, sprouting out anywhere, have long displaced small businesses, redirect cash in circulation to Johannesburg’s leafy north. Billboards advertising alcohol bear faces of youngsters in rude health. No faces of drinking-looking people feature here. Profits trump sobriety. Try again if you thought the liquor industry cared to 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 activist who died in exile, in Harare, in May 1989. He was 63-years-and-some-months-old and his reburial, in Joburg, takes place 36-years-and-some-months later. His hearty laughter matched his compassion, discipline and intellect.
Through episodes of solitary confinement, exile, banishment and imprisonment, Maroo fought on ’til the end. He belongs to the generation of Adolphus Mvemve (John Dube), Henry Squire Makgothi, James la Guma, Moses Mabhida, Nomvo Booi and Ruth First. Don’t forget Swapo co-founder Toivo ya Toivo and Robert Sobukwe, first president of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania. Maroo would have met or worked with most of those freedom fighters, and with OR Tambo (with whom he reunited in Lusaka, after 20 years, in 1979), during the four decades – from picket lines and mobilisation in Joburg to exile via solitary confinement and Robben Island – he dedicated in pursuit of liberty, his birthright.
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 supposedly teeming with “unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes”.
So, surely, Oxford and peers would have never taught about Emperor Mussa or other realities of an Africa independent of Europe’s caricature. Meanwhile, the University of Cape Town’s curriculum treated apartheid as normal, noted alumnus Tim Jenkin. It was during his stay abroad in the 1960s that Jenkin, who later joined the African National Congress, realised that his homeland, had institutionalised his white privilege while oppressing black citizens for being black. It’s thus 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 an odd 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 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 era. 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, with local- and foreign-trained talent: Dali Tambo, Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, Joe Tlholoe, Lesley Mashokwe, Melanie Chait, Sylvia Vollenhoven and all-rounder Dennis Beckett. Right-wing and supposedly liberal print media bosses had endorsed Pretoria’s violations. In Native Nostalgia, Jacob Dlamini, through the lens of a radio listener, revels at how propaganda backfired on Pretoria in the era of the Group Areas Act and its devastating cousins the Bantu Education and the Immorality Act that Trevor Noah’s book revisited. It’s hard to ignore these things when the past stalks the land, when ideas of restitution and affirmative action via BEE 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]. Look at the means of production, look at the colour bar in cultural life,” she writes in Botswana’s 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. Many exiled children went to school in Tanzania in those years and the military based in that country as well as Angola and Uganda. 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 ANC 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 gambol 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. SA 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 Nazi-inspired regime enabled by London and Washington DC. Nationalists’ cronies spanned Bonn (Kiesinger-Kohl years), dictatorial Brasilia and, writes Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Tel Aviv. Still, legions of folks around the globe rejected segregation. The sight of mourners in kaftans, a code for Palestine, at the funeral suggests the spirit of solidarity lives on. The SA 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. None of his scions will ever be born a crime, or suffer weaponised police dogs, a tragedy mocked by a 64-year-old foreign correspondent who has never heard of the Sharpeville Massacre. Nor will Maroo’s progeny, safe from the Molo Fish reality or from being “fallen” from police custody, ever experience the evil that forced their ancestor into exile (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 left for exile with her father in 1978, never to meet again. She told Motsweding FM that, to mitigate, ANC’s top brass re-deployed its operative from Maseru to Lusaka.
Pretoria was on a killing spree: Gaborone, Matola and elsewhere in Southern Africa. In Boipatong, the regime ended 45 lives 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 (eSwatini), Dulcie September (France), Jeanette Schoon (Angola) and others. Maroo received the news on Onkgopotse Tiro’s assassination in Botswana while on Robben Island where he took in his stride hard labour and inhumane conditions. 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 a suppressive, 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. Look at Gold Fields, Netcare and RCL Foods, Dogmor makers. Even post-1994 firms, like Capitec, reserve some jobs for men. For decades, Shoprite had an all-male board.
“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 service recalls the 1980s but – unlike then – there’s no teargas, police dogs or Casspir vehicles. It’s emotional. Mourners in black and in other colours, in party regalia and so on colour the service with slogans. Coffins are draped in ANC flags. Freedom songs reverberate in a hall with some 1,500 people. More chanting outside. A luta continua! Others chant age-old Amandla! Fists in the air. Goosebumps. Police officers sit stoically. Some will later salute the heroes’ coffins. Church hymns meet toyi-toyi. That sums Maroo’s life: from church, at home, 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. In response, Maroo switched to the Presbyterians. Meanwhile, the national stage was seized with a groundswell of activity against Jan Smuts who laid the foundations of what became apartheid. Maroo’s family, confronted by real prospects of serfdom south of Lekoa, migrated to Alex. A few years later, in 1950, Maroo joined the AP Mda-led ANC Youth League. He had at that time also met a nurse named Rebecca Tlolane. The couple married in 1953 and settled at Moletsane, western Soweto, with their house soon becoming a target 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. The ANC has thus birthed four parties since 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, Jacob Zuma followed Julius Malema and Terror Lekota to splinter. ANC stalwart Sophie Williams-De Bruyn, in an interview on the 55th anniversary of the Women’s March, 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.
Like today’s ANC, part-time opposition and their cash daddies obsess about the polls. Horse-trading tops the agenda. Liberals’ PR machinery is sleek but derides transformation. Locally, liberalism has come to represent a bloc that prefers inequality. Theatrics and judiciarisation of politics provide fodder for newsrooms but deflect from the messy legacy. 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 and other factors conspire to dumb the nation’s trajectory. It starts with falling levels of consciousness. Thankfully, some things aren’t falling. Students are often engaged. Some still sing poems and chant slogans in memory of martyrs like Steve Biko and Onkgopotse Tiro. Notwithstanding a culture of erasure, some truths would be too difficult to bury.
“As my first political educator, Papa introduced me to Tiro’s story in the late 1970s. Tiro’s martyrdom lives on,” read Lebo Maroo’s tribute to her dad. An activist and history teacher, Tiro was slain in February 1974, months after fleeing apartheid police. His spirit galvanised a “generation decades later in the (#FeesMustFall) and decolonisation movements,” 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 or “accidentalised”. Talks-about-talks gatherings were afoot in places like Senegal’s Gorée and Zambia. Sadly, the Nationalists stuck to destruction and hatred.
So came the end to Maroo’s tortuous path, 10 years after Botswana declared him persona non grata to elude the wrath of Pretoria which wanted him deported for being in possession of an arms cache. The fear of execution was germane. Coincidentally, Solomon Mahlangu had been executed in 1979, the same year. Maroo had, a year prior, daringly escaped with six recruits to Lobatse, Botswana, via Zeerust, from Mabopane, where he’d been banished. His party had travelled 300-km first by car then by foot before driving to Gaborone. Notorious apartheid-era police boss Jimmy Kruger was fuming. 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 Mme Rebecca and children Cynthia, Lebo and Oupa (who in 1976 skipped the border to join MK). The five hardly lived together as a family as the security branch would routinely hound their home even during the fighter’s time on Robben Island from when he was 38. He remained there until he was 50. 2025 marks 100 years since his birth.
To this day, the Natives Land Act – chronicled by freedom fighter Sol Plaatje (Fikile Mbalula’s distant predecessor) – elicits laments. It creeps to the mourners’ informal exchange. Like their forebears, Maroo’s grandkids and their peers still sing Thina Sizwe, to decry persistent landlessness. 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. With the mourners back at the City Hall after the funeral, my ear scrapes scraps of G20, geopolitics, tariff machinations, 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 free education in diligence. Hearing pan-Africanist Es’kia Mphahlele’s name recalls the globe and West Africa’s solidarity. Miriam Makeba and Tsietsi Mashinini, from Oupa Maroo’s cohort, spent some years as exiles in Guinea. 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 December 2020 after years of trying to get her husband’s remains repatriated. For decades, she and her family endured weaponised police dogs, 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.