South African Diaries
Shadows of the Night
The Murder of Dr Robert van Schalkwyk Smit
Van Schalkwyk Smit was no innocent himself. He headed the country’s largest insurance company, Santam, and as its boss and as South Africa’s representative to the International Monetary Fund, he was certainly involved in countless actions of the apartheid regime in Pretoria.The trick attributed to van Schalkwyk Smit is the one repeated thousands of times via South African shell companies in Mauritius, the Seychelles, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Goods subject to embargo are exported to those countries and then re-exported to South Africa.
This is also how sanctions from Germany’s Federal Export Office in Eschborn near Frankfurt are circumvented. Dozens of apartments around the world serve as fronts through which almost anything can be bought and sold.What exactly happened that evening in Springs in the Transvaal can only be speculated upon. When the police investigate at all, they always do so in favour of the Botha government and its regime lackeys.The perpetrators are said to have spent hours in the bungalow in Springs and to have tortured the victims thoroughly. Or perhaps they even returned once because they had forgotten something. It was probably about documents related to the atomic deals. The investigations are so diluted that no one any longer knows what Pretoria claimed the outcome should be or was. Dr van Schalkwyk Smit came home later that evening.
By then his wife must already have been executed after torture — killed by countless stab wounds and targeted shots to the head. Smit died shortly afterwards. Whether the killers were searching for something or had only a targeted assassination order remained completely unclear in the South African police investigation. The statements of the chief investigator, a burly Boer, oscillate between “Smit was dragged through half the lower floor” and “Smit was already dead when he tried to unlock the door in the hallway.”In a leaked report it was said that the apartment — mainly the kitchen — had been searched. That was also where the perpetrators left the inscription “RAU TEM”. It is unlikely that documents exposing government corruption were stored there. According to what Dr Eschel Rhoodie said in England last year, there were supposedly countless bank accounts in Switzerland. He himself had fled via Ecuador to Britain and then to France, where he was arrested.Did Smit manage to report before his death what would be exposed months later as the “Muldergate affair” in 1977 in Pretoria?
Millions of South African Rand — at the current exchange rate roughly between 2.50 DM and 3.00 DM per Rand, with a purchasing power about double that in Germany — had been embezzled to influence the press and to cook the news as a dictatorship needed in order to cling to power. The chosen vehicles were The Citizen or Die Burger. The idea came from the head of BOSS, Hendrik van den Bergh — one of the most repulsive figures and one of the main guarantors of the South African dictatorship.According to an investigation report, Balthazar Johannes “B. J.” Vorster, Botha’s dismissed predecessor, was also deeply involved in the affair. He now lives in Cape Town, isolated and shunned by the local Boer elite.The real mastermind and string-puller for the government in Pretoria was Connie Mulder (Petrus Cornelius Mulder), a shady character even among the brown-shirted comrades in Pretoria.They simply expelled him from the holy grail of the NP when things got too hot.
The Washington Post reported a few years ago on this bad crime novel written by the propaganda department. Yet journalists on the ground here believe that the only opposition paper in South Africa, the Rand Daily Mail, was completely infiltrated, and that the Boers are taking revenge for Helen Zille’s article about the death of (Bantu) Stephen Biko.The only credible leadMad Mike Hoare and his troopUntil now, no one has shown any real interest; perhaps that will change in the coming years. Through a statement to the Erasmus Commission, a former judge of the Transvaal Supreme Court became active. He knew a pilot from South African Airways who testified about two Germans who had flown in from Luton Airport (UK) for a £40,000 job to murder van Schalkwyk Smit and his wife.
These two Germans had belonged to Command 5 of Mad Mike Hoare in the Congo. There, daily killing and leaving graffiti was normal practice, as countless contemporary photos show.It is therefore not surprising that the man known as Mad Mike — the chief of the mercenaries in the Congo, whose most famous platoon leader was the “legendary” Congo-Müller — is said to have been involved in the murder of the van Schalkwyk Smit couple. This, however, points back to the South African government, which did not want to dirty its own hands with overseas mercenaries.What the South African Airways pilot really knows amounts only to his statement that two Germans accepted the contract to murder the couple. This murder must be connected with the accounts in Switzerland and Germany stemming from the “Muldergate scandal”. To top it all off, Dr Eschel Rhoodie is said to have stored evidence in a safe place — presumably in a Swiss bank safe deposit box.
The New York Times, one of apartheid’s fiercest opponents, already reported on this in 1979. Unfortunately, this — the most credible and probable lead — was never properly pursued. Mad Mike, the Irishman, had carried out similar actions in the Congo during the Katanga crisis. Many of his comrades were Germans who in the 1960s preferred to fight in the Congo rather than face German courts for Nazi-era crimes.A historical irony is that Mad Mike now lives in South Africa, not far from the scene in Springs, in the Johannesburg area. Whatever van Schalkwyk Smit and his wife knew, the perpetrators surely took with them. Congo-Müller, however, who in a pitiful interview once revealed his true soul, used to drive into battle with a death’s head on the bonnet whenever a murder was needed in Katanga.It would have been a simple matter to identify Mad Mike’s German mercenaries and compare them with entry records into the Boer Republic. But clarification of this abominable crime was never desired. The murder of van Schalkwyk Smit and his wife was intended to deter internal enemies.
Now, as the shadow of night falls over the Free State, I head to the take-away. I will eat a boerewors and drink a Castle Lager.
