The revolutionary who lived under a cloud of suspicion

Berend Schuitema was a key member of Okhela, the radical, mostly white, 1970s apartheid resistance movement, until he was falsely accused of being a spy. He died this week still wanting to properly clear his name, writes the last writer to interview him

‘He’s lying here peacefully, and … let me feel, ja, his hands are cold, but the top of his mind, that’s still warm.” This was said by Katja Schuitema, daughter of Berend Schuitema, who died on January 22, aged 82, in the village of Beets, the Netherlands.

Schuitema’s name has long been associated with the 1970s revolutionary organisation Okhela, a littleknown and short-lived group of white activists led by the poet Breyten Breytenbach and handled by Johnny Makatini, former ANC representative in Algeria and roaming ANC diplomat. It was during this time that Schuitema was “unmasked” as a spy. From then on he unjustly endured a lifetime of suspicion.

One of six children of Dutch immigrants, Schuitema grew up in the Odendaalsrus farmlands, studied engineering at Wits University in the mid1960s, then dropped out to work as a miner in the Klerksdorp area.

In the late 1960s he went to join his wife, Miek, in the Netherlands to study. He soon fell in with student radicals at the University of Amsterdam where he was studying economics, eventually taking a job at the Anne Frank House, a place of open discussion and exhibitions focusing on human rights.

He was prompted to form the Dutch AntiApartheid Movement (AABN) after a run-in with Eschel Rhoodie, the National Party mandarin and government strategist of covert affairs, who at the time was a diplomat in The Hague. Schuitema ran the movement from the Anne Frank House, and got on well with Anne’s father, Otto, who popped into the office a few times a week and had a good knowledge of and interest in apartheid South Africa. As trust grew, Frank used Schuitema as a courier, sending him to Basel or Brussels, or once even to New York, in a new suit paid for by Frank.

One of the AABN’s first priorities was to put sanctions against South Africa at the top of the agenda. Working at night, Schuitema and his colleagues broke into the premises of banks, industrial corporations, agri-businesses, importers and exporters and newspapers, stole their rubbish and retrieved shredded documents. By day, in the basement of the Anne Frank House, a group of dedicated Holocaust survivors solved the paper jigsaw puzzles and put the documents together.

From this came two consequential reports on sanctions-busting in Rhodesia and South Africa. The team had found which companies in the Netherlands were supplying oil to and dealing in tobacco with Rhodesia. Within a short time the Dutch government instituted an inquiry and the British government convened a parliamentary inquiry into the breaking of sanctions.

Schuitema’s success brought him to Breytenbach’s attention. He recruited him into Okhela in 1973.

Soon afterwards Schuitema went to Paris to meet other Okhela members and Makatini, and to train with an organisation called Solidarité that was skilled in the clandestine arts.

The group provided support — including with finances, counterfeiting and subterfuge — to left-wing movements in the global south. It had been convened by Henri Curiel, the exiled founder of the Egyptian Communist Party who, during his many years in France, co-ordinated support for National Liberation Front freedom fighters during the Algerian war. Curiel’s network supported the Black Panthers, the early Basque separatists, Sandinistas, the South Moluccan separatists and practically every anticolonial or communist party in South America.

He and Breytenbach, both exiles, had a close relationship with Curiel, according to his biographer, Gilles Perrault, regarding Breytenbach as his “spiritual son”. Curiel was murdered in 1978.

By 1974, with several missions to South Africa under their belts — contacts made, recruits engaged and a manifesto and strategy to roll out — Schuitema and Breytenbach met in Algiers to be debriefed by Makatini and plan their next trip.

Schuitema recalled meeting on a beach some kilometres north of Algiers, where, together with Breytenbach’s wife, Yolande, and Marie-Joseph Fanon (just returned from one of several clandestine visits to South Africa) they plotted as they sketched maps and diagrams in the sand. Their catastrophic mission home would result in Breytenbach’s capture, arrest and imprisonment and Schuitema’s escape. This escape led to a lifetime of suspicion.

In the aftermath, the leaders of Nusas, the student organisation, were picked up and in many cases tortured and detained. Many had been visited by Breytenbach and Schuitema while they were in the country, and the feeling among them was that the adventurist Okhela operatives had brought a world of trouble down on ordinary, decent activists who were pursuing ANC-sanctioned objectives.

Anger at Breytenbach mounted, as did suspicion of Schuitema, who, it appeared, had escaped scot-free.

Breytenbach wrote later in True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist that he too believed Schuitema was the spy who had betrayed him to the police: “Many of my friends are convinced that it was he, Schuitema, ‘Jan’ as we called him, who had shopped me. Even while I was still in prison I learned of an inquiry launched by people close to me, and an envoy sent to Europe to investigate returned with the verdict that Schuitema was the man.”

It took a couple of weeks for Schuitema to get out of South Africa. He headed first to Botswana, then to Lusaka to account to a furious Oliver Tambo, and then to Algiers, where Makatini told him to wait until the dust had settled. He then went to Geneva.

There he paid numerous visits to Craig Wiliamson, the security policeman, former Nusas vice-president and spy who was deputy director of the International University Exchange Fund and responsible for funding some Southern African liberation movements. He had given money to Okhela from time to time, reckoning that any organisation that was a vexation for the movement was good for apartheid South Africa. He had masterminded the smear campaign at home against Schuitema by planting stories and fanning rumours.

For Schuitema, being called a spy stuck. Breytenbach said so, the South African media said so, Breytenbach’s friends said so, the liberation movement said so, the security police said so. At one point even Schuitema was quoted as having said so. This, despite the evidence of his own life: living for years as a stateless person, frequently on the run, continuing Okhela (there were some subsequent name changes) activities in the Netherlands, Ireland and the US, campaigning for Breytenbach’s release and his own eventual return to South Africa, where he was stitched up for the 1982 bombing and murder at the President’s Council Building in Cape Town. He went on hunger strike and was released after 100 days, but the persecution by the security police continued. The police were ordered to make Schuitema lose his mind.

Named and shamed during apartheid, Schuitema found the liberation years little kinder. He moved around the Eastern Cape, eventually settling in East London. From there, he fought for justice wherever he found it absent. He worked for the Jubilee Debt Campaign, travelling the country assisting former mineworkers; he developed a collective vegetable farm; and he volunteered with Khulumani, the organisation of ex-detainees. He later married Jean, a nursing sister from East London, who died of Covid in 2020.

Schuitema died at his daughter Katja’s home, beside a long window with a clear view of a pasture, a warm stove at his feet, and with two messages arriving in his last days. One, from Breytenbach: “Those past times were confusing and I want to ask your forgiveness if I promised you an impossible utopia.” And one from Williamson: “After Breyten’s arrest the spy rumours around you were easy to fan. From the perspective of South African intelligence, we were concerned that you could perhaps initiate a type of Black September group uncontrolled by any main political group.”

A miner, autodidact, outsider and historian of outsiders, a difficult yet ardent man in love and struggle, a refusenik and, it has to be said, incapable of following any party line, Schuitema was the beautiful revolutionary, his name not on the treaty.

Schuitema, born in Benoni on July 24 1940, leaves his daughter Katja, her partner Sjoerd, grandsons Joep and Pepijn, granddaughter Nila, sister Thea, brothers Jerry and Etsko, and many friends.