Remembering the fallen liberation stalwart

Dr Lebogang Maroo | Tuesday April 8, 2025 11:07

In three months’ time, the Freedom Charter will turn 70. The nation is also marking the 65th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre that dimmed hope. Cosatu’s birth in 1985, amid a brutal State of Emergency, rekindled hope. For John Maroo, 1975 marked the return to the underground struggle. In 2025, his centennial, Maroo’s quest for human rights is underscored by a reburial – this time in the land that he lived, fought and died for.

Born in 1925 in Parys, hemming Lekoa John Pogiso Maroo was the second of five children of Mme Selina and Ntate Simon Maroo. The white minority-led Union of South Africa, which codified the colour bar, had been established 15 years earlier. The African National Congress (ANC), Maroo’s political home, had been founded in 1912. A year later, the devastating Natives’ Land Act legislated grimmer prospects for Africans. It overnight reduced them to “squatters”, as Sol Plaatje wrote. “The section of the law debarring Natives from hiring land is particularly harsh,” he asserted, adding that its heart it was “intended to reduce Natives to serfs.”

This was the society that the Maroos lived in. The threat of serfdom was real. It was thus a given that the farmworker-headed family packed and crossed the Lekoa for Johannesburg, first settling in the cosmopolitan Alexandra. That melting pot, and charged era, left an indelible mark in young John’s life.

Maroo eventually spent 40 years of his life in the struggle for human rights and freedom in a country that, for years, practised apartheid. His average built, slender and of medium height, belied the hardship that stalked him. He was athletic and very fit.

In 1989, Papa, aged 63 and in exile, succumbed to cancer. He had just been transferred to Harare after years in Lusaka. He was survived by his wife, mme Rebecca and children Cynthia, Abram – all since deceased – and Lebo, and a granddaughter. Three other grand children were born thereafter.

John Maroo’s mortal remains – amongst the 49 freedom fighters – were repatriated as part of the SA government’s programme. Reverends ZR Mahabane and James Calata were amongst top-ranking liberation theologians who led the ANC in the first half of the 20th century. Though Maroo was, in his teens, inspired by clergymen who preached freedom, he soon found out that that hymn sheet wasn’t embraced by all.

This was when the Methodist Church blocked his path to become a minister because of his activism. As a form of protest, the youngster left for the Presbyterians. Next, he discovered that nowhere was safe under apartheid, a crime against humanity. Gun-wielding police invaded the Presbyterian Church in Alex to capture Maroo. It was not uncommon for apartheid agents to desecrate holy grounds.

At the time of Maroo’s death, victory – in a struggle aided by a long list of nations including Angola, China, Cuba, Lesotho, The Netherlands, Soviet Union, Sweden, Zambia and others – was imminent. Pretoria was on its knees but its dying kicks manifested in a round of state-sponsored killing sprees.

The journey to Maroo’s burial, in the year of his centenary, is important but bittersweet. We are glad to finally lay him to rest in his motherland. This is a moment of closure. However, we note with sadness that in the intervening 35 years since his demise, mom has since passed on. So have two of his children – my brother and sister – and all of his siblings. Nevertheless, we are grateful that he is finally home.

His progeny will be able to pay homage to their freedom-fighter ancestor who was hounded as a “terrorist” for fighting for justice and treated as a third-class citizen in his lifetime. Lest we forget. Robala ka Kgotso Morolong. Robala ka Kgotso Namane ya Tholo! Like you taught us those many years ago, we shall keep the fight. A Luta Continua, Ntate John Maroo.

This month I wondered how papa would have felt if he could see South Africa. For context, he believed in the Freedom Charter. So, I think he wouldn’t believe that we are free. Look at the means of production, look at the colour bar in cultural life. Our society has not fully shed apartheid practices.

The Freedom Charter talks about the land. It talks about 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. Those gaps wouldn’t convince Maroo that we’re truly free. It is now up to the next generation to take the baton and fight for a just, equal and fair society.

Coincidentally, papa was amongst the thousands who in June 1955 met as the Congress of the People, which birthed the Freedom Charter at Kliptown, since declared a World Heritage Site. My father’s activism had begun years earlier in Alexandra. Here, he witnessed era-defining bus boycotts. He heard the clarion call, Azikhwelwa, and recognised the boycotts’ impact on white-collar economy restricted to the white minority. The people of Alex managed to force the establishment to reduce fares. Such was the milieu. Such was the cause.

This is the Alex that was home to exemplars Moses Kotane, Thoko Mngoma, Gaur Radebe and Adolphus Boy “JD” Mvemve (nom de guerre John Dube). Notably, Samora Machel sojourned in Alex en route to exile in Tanzania via history-rich Lobatse (a freedom route in those years). Order of Luthuli recipient ANC Women’s League leader Florence Mophosho also lived in Alex.

As early as the start of the 1950s, following the rise of the nationalists in a whites-only elections, the ANC had assigned John Maroo with critical tasks. The sensitivities that went with that implied that only a small circle knew his activities. Beyond that, some people knew that he distributed the movement’s pamphlets at train stations, from Park to Naledi and back, and spray-painted the regime’s offensive signs that pockmarked public spaces: “Europeans Only”, “Non-Europeans Only”, “Blankes” and “Nie-Blankes”.

As the ANC began to send its members abroad to continue the struggle amid Nationalists’ suffocation of political activity, Papa was recruiting and assisting activists skip the border via Zeerust into Botswana. Some of the recruits remained in Botswana while others proceeded to Zambia and Tanzania, or further afield: Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, China, France, Guinea and Soviet Union. So many nations enabled Southern Africa’s decolonisation and liberation. We should keep the spirit of solidarity alive.

The charged liberation song, Siyaya/Kubi, explains that cadres embraced their exposure to torture, detention, exile and death. They embraced a life underground. They embraced house arrests. That said, John Maroo was upon release from prison banished to Ga-Rankuwa – 100 km from our Soweto home.

This was frustrating and added a familial and financial stress. However, upon arriving at what was supposed to be his new address, a men’s hostel, Maroo was incensed. He forced the authorities to respect his rights and dignity. He flung their humiliation games back at them. In apartheid South Africa, hostels, built as black labour reserves, epitomised the dreaded migrant labour system and slave salaries.

“I have a family. How are my wife and children supposed to visit me here? Should they travel to this hostel for them to stand outside the fence and I inside? I’m not staying here,” Maroo charged. “Feel free to take me back to Robben Island!” He wasn’t going to obey such an insult. The stalemate lasted for hours. Finally, with Plan B activated, the officers moved him to Mr Nthite’s mayoral residence in the area where he remained until he was transferred to a house in nearby Mabopane. This was an expensive punishment that also kept us apart as the family.

John Pogiso Maroo had in the 1950s become a subject of apartheid security personnel’s surveillance. This culminated in raids. Then there were wall-to-wall soul-breaking 90-day detention without trial. That evil system was designed by the regime to keep activists behind bars for long spells. In detention, Papa told me, freedom fighters had nothing to do. They had nothing to read. They had no one to talk to. All some of them did was to stare at the walls. They stared at the ceiling.

In those years, South Africa’s racist regime was run by Hendrik Verwoerd while the measured Chief Albert Luthuli, a clergyman democrat, led the ANC. In contrast, the 1950s held promise for the Global South: Kwame Nkrumah had led Ghana to independence. Gamal Abdel Nasser-led revolutionaries liberated Egypt. In the Caribbean, 32-year-old Fidel Castro led a revolution to end imperialism in Cuba. The Europe-dominated United Nations installed Dag Hammarskjöld, a decolonisation agent.

A different reality prevailed in East and Southern Africa. Britain’s Conservatives, then running a brutal machinery, were imprisoning freedom fighters in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe. For instance, Kenneth Kaunda and Jomo Kenyatta were locked up by Harold Macmillan’s administration in the 1950s. In the Union of South Africa, injustices worsened. By the 1960s, Verwoerd’s 90-day detention without trial reigned. While in detention, Maroo and fellow sons and daughters of the land suffered abuse, torture, sleep deprivation, starvation and dehydration. The practice was common but always ruthless.

After his release from prison Papa continued his internal underground activities for two years before leading a group of six youngsters to exile in 1978. That is how I left South Africa barely a teen. From Gaborone, where dad and I hurriedly split (after the ANC discovered that the Boers were tracking us), I was rushed to Lusaka after which I proceeded to Tanzania then Cuba. I was in Santiago de Cuba at the time of Papa’s passing.

My brother was in Lusaka and my mother, my sister and our extended family were in Johannesburg. Papa was once deployed to Maseru, where he survived the Pretoria-ordered massacre in December 1982. His blood-stained suit, recovered in Maseru, was vivid in telling his near-death story that he neither had a chance or a heart to tell. Thereafter, Botswana declared him a persona non-grata in order to elude the wrath of the Botha regime which wanted him deported to SA. Botswana government’s move came about after some talks with then-ANC President OR Tambo.

At the time of Papa’s demise the tide was turning in the fight against apartheid. Pretoria, which had, for years, destabilised the region and exported mercenaries and parcels of death from Angola’s Lubango to Maputo and beyond, had been humbled at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Notwithstanding a brutal State of Emergency, anti-conscription campaigns and internal resistance had become unstoppable.

To counter that reality, the regime unleashed a terror campaign that took an untold number of lives in “drive-by” shootings and other tragedies. The TRC found that Gauteng suffered 112 massacres (1990-1992). Rural and urban communities kept bleeding up until Shobashobane (1995), more than 40 months after Boipatong. People braved the bullets. They forged on. That spirit is epitomised by slogans like Freedom or death, victory is certain.

This is an opportune time to reflect on the liberation journey thus far. Lest we forget the 69 people massacred by apartheid in Sharpeville in March 1960. This event and the barrage of arrests thereafter dampened the fighting spirit. Students pressed ahead regardless. Fourteen years later, Pretoria’s cross-border machinery assassinated exiled Onkgopotse Tiro, 36, in Gaborone.

Twelve months earlier, it had banned leaders of the South African Students’ Organisation for fighting apartheid. In February 1970, Winnie Mandela and 20-plus comrades detained under the Suppression of Communism Act were acquitted only for most of them to be re-charged. Then, in February 1982, Neil Aggett died in detention from torture. The passage of time is not an excuse to let names and events fade. Lest we forget.

As my first political educator, Papa introduced me to Tiro’s story in the late 1970s. Tiro’s martyrdom lives on. Azapo’s former president Prof Itumeleng Mosala noted after the launch of Parcel of Death, by journalist Gaongalelwe Tiro, that Tiro’s spirit “was to galvanise another generation decades later in the (#FeesMustFall) and decolonisation movements at the turn of the century.” Hardly a fortnight after Tiro’s killing, Pretoria assassinated Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Mvemve or “JD” in Lusaka. Mvemve had been comrades with Maroo since their Alex days. Decades after Alex, and a whole generation after the dawn of democracy, dad is part of the heroes exiled from motherland to advance the fight for liberty that are now finally treated with dignity in their land of birth. This is the motherland that they gave up their lives for. Justice has been served, albeit posthumously.

Dr Lebogang Maroo is the daughter of the late John Pogiso Maroo. She graduated as a medical doctor in Cuba in 1989 and returned to South Africa in 1992, working mainly in the healthcare sector.