Dr Piet back with wife

2005-12-18 20:16

Marlene Malan and Lukas Meyer

Cape Town - Dr Piet Koornhof has been reunited with this wife, Lulu, after more than a decade of extramarital love. He's back in their house in Stellenbosch.

His wife refused to divorce him despite his living with his lover, Marcelle Adams and her children in Cape Town for 12 years.

Lulu admitted that it had not been easy to cope on her own.

After 12 years of "humiliation and ridicule" after her husband had left her for Adams, 36, and a new family, Lulu was still willing to "forgive and forget" now that Adams had forsaken him.

She took her sick and lonely husband back without blaming him for what had happened.

"I have sworn an oath before God. I feel sorry for Piet. He is a sick man. All of us were hurt by what had happened in the past.

A little more than a week before Christmas the couple's sons, Drs Gerhard and Johan Koornhof, also from Stellenbosch, fetched their father from the house in Table View in Cape Town where Koornhof was living with Adam's younger sister Carla van Wyk.

Van Wyk has been taking care of Koornhof sen since Adams's departrue.

Adams and her five children - Maria, 12, twins Samuel and Danie, 8, Anna, 3, and Christina, 1, have been living with her new lover, Fritz Cherdron, 56, in Germany for quite a while.

Koornhof still believed Adams would return. "She will be returning today or tomorrow, definitely before the end of December," he said on Friday.

When asked whether he had been reconciled with his wife, he said: "There is no talk about reconciliation - it's not necessary.

"We have never been separated. We have always been together in spirit. Our marriage has never been in jeopardy."

A friend of the Koornhof's, who wanted to remain anonymous, said mrs Koornhof, like the rest of the family, was overjoyed at being reunited with her husband.

She said Koornhof was not healthy, and at times he couldn't recall the past.

She said Mrs Koornhof was overjoyed about her husband's return. "God, child, he's home, he's home," she said almost in tears when telling her friend the good news.

The friend, the daughter of a former cabinet colleague of Koornhof, said: "Aunt Lulu never stopped loving uncle Piet."

Although they talked over the phone almost daily, she suffered during the years without him being at home.

She said besides him being unable to continue living in the rented house in Table View because of ill health, it was known that he had been yearning for the love and care of his wife these past couple of months.

- Rapport