Jeanette Schoon
South African anti-apartheid activist
Jeanette Eva Schoon (née Curtis; 1949 – 28 June 1984) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. She and her daughter, Katryn Schoon, were killed by letter bomb in June 1984 in an operation carried out by the Security Branch of the South African Police.
Formerly a student and labour activist and later a member of the African National Congress, Schoon was banned between 1976 and 1981. She went into exile in Botswana and Angola in 1977 with her husband, former political prisoner Marius Schoon. She was assassinated at her home in Lubango, Angola and police agent Craig Williamson was granted amnesty for orchestrating the attack.
Early life and activism
Schoon was born in 1949 in Cape Town in the former Cape Province. She was elected as vice-president of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1972, and she helped co-found the Western Province Workers' Advice Bureau, a forerunner of the General Workers' Union, in 1973. Her brother, Neville Curtis, was also a prominent student activist.
In 1974, Schoon moved to Johannesburg, where she was a founder of the Industrial Aid Society and a member of its executive committee. She also worked as an archivist for the South African Institute of Race Relations, collecting information about trade unions and trade unionists.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jeanette Schoon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.