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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2025
A bove and beyond the general difficulties and complications of doing underground work for the ANC, in the Schoons’ specific case, as Glenn Moss scathingly – and correctly – says,
The damn problem with their network was that it was heavily infiltrated. It was not just Williamson and Edwards; everybody who went to Botswana to meet with them [the Schoons], something happened to them afterwards. People went there just to visit them as friends and were asked to bring back a document or something like that and they always got stopped at the border and searched … people who touched that network would get into serious trouble.
Barbara Hogan echoes Moss's sentiments regarding the Schoons’ network, of which she herself was a member. Hogan's description of how she ended up working with the Schoons in this way is gripping, in that it reveals her deep misgivings and regrets:
Mac recommended that I be shifted to the Botswana operation because Jenny and Marius were there. It was understood that I would work with the white left on shifting them to a Congress position. The white left punched above its weight at that stage because of its privileged position … I was unhappy about going to Botswana, although I loved Jenny and Marius. I thought it was a very leaky operation. Jenny and Marius weren't very good at managing security. The people who were messengers for them were security police. In actual fact, the work I did with Jenny and Marius I regard as the least important. My main interest was to look at how you organise the unemployed, and I was working with the unions down in East London.
It is interesting that Hogan, a lifelong supporter of the ANC, describes her work with the Schoons as the ‘least important’ that she did during that period. If Hogan's priorities were to organise the unemployed and help build trade unions, was it worth the risk involved to send coded messages via dead letter boxes and couriers across the border, letting the Schoons (and the ANC, by extension) know about these activities?
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