A person I wish could be alive today
- Denis Hirson
Letter to Wits Review
One person I wish could still be alive today would be turning seventy on May 5th 2019, yet she died at the age of thirty-five under unspeakably terrible circumstances. You can follow her path up to that moment on the internet: from Vice-President of NUSAS in 1972 to a moving force behind the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau, founder of the Industrial Aid Society and archivist at the Institute for Race Relations, from arrest in 1976 under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act to the inevitable flight out of South Africa to Botswana after marrying another banned person whom she had no legal right to even meet, ex-political prisoner Marius Schoon.
Not feeling safe there, they moved on to Lubango in northern Angola. That was where Jenny Curtis, as we knew her, was killed along with her six-year old daughter Katryn on 28th June 1984, when, in her own kitchen, she opened the parcel-bomb sent to her by Craig Williamson. Her then three-year old son Fritz, who was also in the kitchen, still lives with the traumatic shock of that moment.
Would anyone on the Wits campus in the repressed yet turbulent, wild-edged atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s have been able to predict that Jenny might lead such a richly engaged life, with such a violently abrupt end? And though she was already an activist on campus, how many of us could have guessed at the political resolve and utter determination behind her shy smile and quiet words, always caring, rarely speaking of herself before inquiring about others?
I did not know Jenny well enough. But the Curtis home in Johannesburg, where she grew up alongside her brother Neville – a much appreciated NUSAS president who died at no more than 60 years old in 2007 – was a place so many including myself enjoyed for its warm and easy hospitality and convivial parties. I will take a glass from a table there and raise it now to Jenny, making the sharply bitter-sweet wish that those who knew her then, and throughout her life, might celebrate the day she turns three score years and ten.
Denis Hirson, Paris