Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  While she remained close with childhood friends and family, no relationship with Jane was straightforward. She would be mad about someone for a while, and then she’d go off them. She didn’t talk to her son for months, years even, at a time. Jane and Mary fought. She squabbled with her neighbours. She was difficult with her daughters-in-law. But she adored her granddaughters, Jann and Kim. Jann remembers her grandmother as an amazing, emotionally complex and intense person. Jane had a huge influence on her life, and ‘I feel her love still holds me’.

  Neither was Jane difficult with Sophie. Theirs appears to have been a quiet companionship. ‘I was always there,’ Sophie recalls. ‘Hanging around her house. I just left her alone. And, she never gave me lip or anything. I just sat in front of her fire smoking all her cigarettes. She liked having me around. I would sit with her at night. We’d listen to the BBC radio – and then sometimes she would just cry. She was an angry, sad and bitter woman.’

  After Richard was killed, Jane turned her life’s focus and all her energy on finding his killer. She was prepared to do anything, spend anything and go anywhere if it meant she might get information on what had happened to her son. She was not afraid of what could happen to her during the search. She was not afraid of dying if the killer came after her. ‘I am dead already.’11

  Jane believed that a telephone call that Richard made to Barbara about getting the children passports would have panicked the security police. The state may have thought that Richard was preparing to flee the country with his children, as his friend Donald Woods, a newspaper editor, had done a few weeks earlier. Jane also had strong suspicions that a Durban-based ‘spy’, Martin Dolinschek, had a huge dossier on Richard before his death. She believed that he had kept her son under surveillance and knew what happened the night that Richard was killed. Jane had to deal with rumours that implicated the ANC in Richard’s murder. There were suggestions that Richard had helped the police in a terrorism case and was killed by the ANC in revenge.

  Jane spent months – and much of her savings – in the Seychelles in order to follow a trial involving Dolinschek in 1982. She had heard that he could help her solve the mystery. Dolinschek had allegedly played a part with five others in an abortive coup against the Seychelles government in 1981. She vowed to haunt him until she discovered the truth behind her son’s murder. ‘I intend to follow the trial throughout. I’m haunting Dolinschek. I sit in the gallery where he can’t help but see me, just to remind him I know and there is no escaping the truth.’12 But when she finally obtained access to him in prison, he denied having any knowledge of her son’s killing and laughed in her face.

  When she was eighty-one, having devoted ten years to the case, Jane handed over the search to her eldest granddaughter, Jann. She had felt alone in her search for her son’s killer, and she was bitter about what she considered an inadequate investigation by the police. Cervical cancer had slowed down Jane’s work, and though she beat the disease, Jann took over the task as Jane got older, depressed and sick. It was around that time that Jane moved into an old-age facility in Somerset West, where she spent the rest of her life. She had a flatlet with a view of the mountain and sunsets, and according to her niece, Jean, she seemed happy there. She died peacefully in November 2000, and her ashes are buried on her farm.

  Eight years after she took over the hunt for her father’s murderer, Jann gave up the search too. The killer never came forward. Nor was he found. ‘I suppose the story was never going to have a happy ending, but I never expected the truth to be so depressing,’ she says. ‘The truth is that I will never know who came to our house in Durban in January 1978 … I’m tired of it, I’m tired of returning to the horror of the night my dad was killed, tired of pushing to get to the ever elusive truth about who killed him, and why … The truth is I have failed him.’13

  Driving up Helshoogte Pass today is a very different experience from what it would have been like when Jane and Paddy first visited Welcarmas in the 1940s. The windy, single-lane rural road, which twisted and turned along the mountain in some parts and through the valley in others, has been upgraded to a modern, wide two-lane road, avoiding the densely forested areas of the valley by providing an economical route up and over the mountain. The breathtaking views of the steep hills and the rugged sandstone and shale mountains behind them are unchanged.

  The use of the land has changed, from fruit orchards and a few vineyards to mostly vineyards and some olive groves. Where Welcarmas once was, there is now a grand wine estate called Tokara. The collection of quaint and messy old cottages has been replaced by a series of large modern buildings of concrete, red brick and glass. There is no ‘riot of colour’ nor ‘fruit trees in blossom’. The chestnut tree which stood its ground for decades in front of the main house is no longer there, and the house itself has been demolished. Smart buildings for organised industry and straight rows of carefully managed vines and expensively landscaped gardens of indigenous agapanthus, irises, grasses and succulents have replaced Jane’s bohemian homestead. Security guards control access to the farm for rich people who flock from all over the world to visit the restaurant and deli and to taste the wines.

  Unless you’d been told, you wouldn’t know to look for it: a few metres past the security guard’s office at the wine estate’s entrance, on a patch of grass left of the paved road, is a tree stump partially hidden from view by a growth of wild irises. Brushing away leaves and a few dead flowers, I read the plaque nailed to the stump:

  In memory of Jane Turner. 1908 to 2000.

  Who planted this tree.

  And of her son Richard. 1941 to 1978.

  Who loved to climb it.

  Sources and further reading

  In addition to personal letters from Jane Turner to her niece, Jean Fawbert, to her sister, Nell, and to her friend, Muriel Meek, interviews were conducted with Sophie Antony, John Clare, Jean Fawbert, Barbara Follett, Michael Hubbard, David Louw, Tony Morphet, Vernon Swart, Jann Turner and Kim Turner. Documents consulted were Jann Turner’s police statement, Bellair, January 1978; the October 1996 recording of the Turner family’s proceedings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Durban; and a funeral note for Richard Turner. Newspaper and online sources include copies of the Sunday Express, Independent (London), Cape Times, Sunday Tribune, Cape Herald, Cape Argus, Rand Daily Mail, SA History Online and Stellenbosch University Archives (online). Additionally, see Richard Turner, The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1980); Billy Keniston, Choosing to Be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013); and Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2003).

  Danie Craven: The contrariness and contradictions of South Africa’s ‘Mr Rugby’

  Albert Grundlingh

  * * *

  Every year on 11 October, Stellenbosch students from the men’s residence, Wilgenhof – for the white Stellenbosch community, a residence steeped in tradition – gather in formal attire around the statue of Danie Craven and his dog Bliksem at the university’s Coetzenburg sports grounds to share a couple of beers and to listen to tales about Craven. This is meant as a tribute to one of their famous sons: a Springbok rugby player, academic, legendary coach and chair of the South African Rugby Board (SARB) for more than three decades. Craven has clearly left enduring memories. This is evident from the fact that in 2018, the annual Woordfees literary festival at Stellenbosch even thought it appropriate to devote a session to discussions on Craven.

  Yet for all of this, one must enter a caveat. Walking past Craven’s statue at Coetzenburg, I have also overheard a student talking on his cellphone and explaining his exact location to his friend: ‘I am standing here next to the dude with the dog’! To some on campus, a new generation of students with different world views and backgrounds, the statue no longer seems to have much or any significance at all. This should not be too surprising; generally, the contextual world around statues is known to cha
nge, and as it does, shifts in understanding and meaning are inevitable. Craven himself was a man who at times embodied contradictions, but as he was also known to be imbued with a sense of historical preservation, he might have found the ignorance of the student slightly disconcerting.

  Craven’s grandfather, John, born in 1837 in a bleak Yorkshire town, Steeton, came to South Africa in 1860 and married a young Orange Free State woman of seventeen years in 1870. They settled in the district of Lindley in the eastern Free State. From this union, James Craven was born in 1882. He married Maria Hartman in 1906.

  The newlyweds also farmed in the Lindley district, where Danie Craven first saw the light of day in 1910 – at the time of the unification of South Africa, eight years after the conclusion of the devastating Anglo-Boer War. His father, James, despite his English background, had fought on the side of the Free State Commandos and was about to be dispatched as a prisoner of war when the war ended. Still, despite the long legacy of bitterness that the Anglo-Boer War left in its wake, the Cravens did not subscribe to the same deep resentment towards Britain that animated many of their other Afrikaans counterparts. The family’s loyalty was to a broader white South Africanism, and this conviction, not devoid of certain ambiguities in trying to reconcile the past with the present, was one that also fed into the young Danie’s political and social outlook.

  Craven, though, was not too concerned about the complexities of what exactly constituted South Africanism. From a young age, he had quite a straightforward philosophy in this regard: ‘I realised that South Africa was important, number one. Later in life I said that my politics was South Africa. Whatever was good for South Africa, that was my politics.’1 It was precisely in this uncomplicated view of matters that contradictions in Craven’s political position would later emerge because there was, of course, not one South Africa but many with clashing interests.

  The rough and tumble of life on the farm, peppered by a range of physical activities, came to stand the young Craven in good stead. He developed a stocky, powerful physique, and not being particularly tall, he had an almost simian-like appearance with long, exceptionally strong arms. All the physicality, however, belied a certain potential frailty, as the Craven clan was genetically known to have defective hearts. A number of his close male relatives died at a relatively young age, and Craven was relieved when he reached the age of fifty. He lived to be eighty-three, though he did have a serious heart scare when he was forty-six, which he chose to keep secret.

  Craven’s schooling career had an inauspicious start. He far preferred life on the farm and initially actively resisted going to school. He had to be ‘hauled out from his hiding place behind the door of the milking room, scrubbed and dressed and forced, screaming, into the cart that took him off to school’.2 Although the tantrums subsided, Craven never excelled at school and barely scraped together a university-entrance pass in his final year. Yet after his first taste of studying at university, he took to it with the zeal of the newly converted and eventually obtained three doctoral degrees. Moreover, what he lacked in initial academic acuity at school, he made up for on the sports field. He showed exceptional talent and ability and not only represented his school but also played for the town rugby team with distinction. Those in the know saw in Craven’s performances a harbinger of things to come.

  ‘The dude with the dog’: the statue of Danie Craven and his dog, Bliksem

  Craven’s talents came to fruition at Stellenbosch University, his university of choice and at the time considered to be the premier Afrikaans institution in the country. Stellenbosch grew out of the nineteenth-century Victoria College to become the first independent Afrikaans university in 1918. The University Council, representing the Afrikaans community, deliberately aimed to give the university a specific Afrikaner identity in order to counter that of the neighbouring and predominantly English-speaking University of Cape Town. It was within this context that the game of rugby was played by the sons of the Afrikaner elite.

  Stellenbosch was the first and, for a while, the only institution where young, predominantly Afrikaner men were concentrated in one place for a reasonable period of time and where they had sufficient leisure to indulge in what has been called a game played ‘by young males in a state of hormonal pugnacity’.3 However, rugby at Stellenbosch was more than just an outlet for robust males in the prime of manhood. The game also became central to Afrikaner student culture. With the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, rugby became as much part of Afrikaner culture as volkspele (Afrikaner folk dancing) and celebrations like the 1938 centenary of the Great Trek. The sport became part of a cluster of cultural symbols closely associated with resurgent Afrikanerdom.

  Rugby players were feted among their peers, and those in the first team were almost regarded as demigods. Female students participated keenly in this adulation, and this form of hero-worshipping continued year after year. Craven experienced this when his playing career took off in the 1930s. The word ‘rugby’ was one to conjure with, he recalled; it was a magical word, and a rugby player was admired by all and sundry. Certain players stood out. In the 1960s, Jannie Engelbrecht, a speedy blond winger and a protégé of Danie Craven, was singled out for idolisation. Whenever he touched the ball, the freshettes on the stand would scream: ‘Jannie, Jannie, Jannie!’ While some players would take advantage of this enthusiasm, Craven did not. He took his rugby too seriously and didn’t want to be distracted.

  At Stellenbosch, he came into contact with A.F. Markötter, known locally as ‘Oubaas Mark’, but to Craven he was ‘Mr Mark’. Markötter, as the university coach, was informed about Craven’s abilities even before his arrival at the university town, and he took him under his wing. This was quite an unusual step, as Markötter had a reputation as an abrupt curmudgeon given to scant praise. Over time, Markötter became a very prominent influence in Craven’s life, helping to shape his playing tactics and later his coaching style, as well as even his interactions with people and sense of judgement. It would probably not be too much to say that Craven’s irascibility and contrariness, which occasionally soured his relations with people, had in some measure to do with the demeanour of his role model.

  These two outstanding personalities, who virtually became rugby legends in their own lifetimes, did much to turn Stellenbosch into the Mecca of twentieth-century South African rugby. For Craven, it was the ‘task of Stellenbosch to train and provide players for the club, Western Province, and South Africa. But it also had to do more. It had to train players for other clubs and provinces.’4 Stellenbosch Rugby Club regularly took the game further afield through annual tours to the Cape countryside, allowing people in ‘areas deprived of the opportunities enjoyed by students’ to savour what was considered ‘sparkling student rugby’.5

  Craven’s stature as Springbok rugby captain in the 1930s made him a readily recognisable figure. It was also in this capacity that South Africa’s Defence Force sought to use him for recruiting purposes during the Second World War. His decision to join the Union Defence Force ran somewhat against the grain at Stellenbosch, as a considerable number of Afrikaner students had no affinity for the armed forces and for the United Party government’s decision to participate in the Allied war effort. However, it was precisely Craven’s standing as a nominal Afrikaner and his visibility as Springbok captain that the Defence Force sought to exploit. An almost full-page advertisement was placed in certain Afrikaans newspapers, with a large photograph of a resolute Danie Craven in uniform peering into the distance, proclaiming, ‘I am playing in the biggest Springbok team ever, join me and score the most important try of your life.’ Exhorting fellow Afrikaans-speakers ‘not to be spectators only’, he encouraged them to ‘join their teammates to push in the scrum; it is the only place for a “true” Springbok’, and it was only in this team that the ‘sweet sensation of ultimate victory’ could be savoured.6

  Craven returned to Stellenbosch in 1947 as professor of physical education. He was back in the town
that held a special appeal for him. And at the centre of this was his favourite sport: rugby. The process of strengthening the rugby fraternity and enhancing the reputation of Stellenbosch spawned its own subculture, in which enthusiasm for rugby as an Afrikaner-male activity was equated with robust patriotism, to the exclusion of other, perhaps more threatening, world views. Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, parliamentary leader of the white opposition in the mid-1980s, has graphically recalled how disillusioned he became with this subculture during his rugby-playing days at Stellenbosch in the 1960s:

  the post-mortems after the game with pot-bellied, beer-drinking ‘experts’ from way back; the sight of players continually ingratiating themselves with sporting correspondents for some coverage; the pseudo-patriotic ethos that pervaded discussions on the importance of rugby in our national life; seeing successful farmers grovelling at the feet of arrogant second-year students simply because we were ‘Maties’ [nickname for Stellenbosch students] on tour in their vicinity. Mentally it was not only escapist, it was a social narcotic to anything else going on in our society.7

  Although Craven harboured his own kind of contradictions, Slabbert’s outlook was not one that he would have shared. To Craven, the appeal of rugby was pure and unsullied, holding out the promise of a contented community. He was too much part of the game itself to reflect critically about its wider import. Writing in 1977, he recapitulated his view: