She’s keen to meet mom’s killer

Young and naive, an Mpumalanga schoolgirl wrote an essay while in matric in which she argued in mitigation of the 121-year jail sentence imposed on apartheid police hit squad leader Eugene de Kock.

What Marcia Khoza didn’t realise was that De Kock was responsible for the death of her mother, Portia Khulumile Shabangu, in an ambush in Mbabane, Swaziland, in 1989.

Khoza was only five years old when her mother and her two comrades were killed after being lured by an informer to Swaziland to go and join Umkhonto weSizwe, the ANC’s military wing.

Khoza, 28, said she grew up not knowing the truth about her mother’s death and had randomly chosen De Kock as her subject when she had to do a matric assignment at her school in Hazyview in 1999.

She had read about De Kock’s sentence in a newspapers and was “touched” by his lengthy incarceration.

“In my essay I argued that the 121-year sentence was just too much and that whatever De Kock had done, he did not deserve such a ‘movie-like’ sentence. I was concerned that De Kock has a family and how his relatives were going to survive without him,” she said.

It was only in 2000, after she wrote matric, that Khoza probed her mother’s death.

And it was Parks Mankahlana, the late Nelson Mandela’s spokesman, who helped her find the truth: Mpumalanga Youth Commissioner Godrich Gardee revealed that De Kock was to blame for Khoza’s mother’s death.

“This was the most ironic thing to happen in my life. The same man I had unknowingly sympathised with is the one who killed my mom. I could not believe it,” she said, weeping at her mother’s grave at Nyongane Trust in the Ehlanzeni district near Hazyview.

Khoza said she was not bitter. She had forgiven De Kock and would like to meet and have a serious chat with him.

Dr Piet Croucamp, a go-between for De Kock, confirmed on Thursday that De Kock was prepared to meet Khoza.

Khoza said: “I can’t wait for that day. I would also like to pose for a photograph with him.”

And she wants to know the exact spot where her mother and her comrades, Thabo Louis Mohale and Derek Mashobane, from the Free State, were killed so she can perform certain rituals at the spot to bring her mother’s soul back to SA.

“I would also like to tell De Kock that I will not judge him and that only God has the power to pronounce on his deeds.

“I had forgiven him long ago, even before he applied for amnesty,” she said.

Evidence led by De Kock and his lieutenants in their amnesty application stated that after the three were killed, a note was left in the vehicle they were using to create the impression that they had been killed by the ANC.

De Kock had testified that, after the shooting, they counted the bodies and found that one of them, believed to be Shabangu, was still gasping.

He shot her twice in the head.

After he was sure they were all dead, the vehicle was pushed down a slope. - The Star