Rejected By My Beloved Son

Heartbroken Hannes explains why he never told Eben – who wants his adoption nullified – that he wasn’t his real dad

- Carla Coetzee

THERE were many times when he asked himself if he was doing the right thing. When Hannes Maré looked at his son Eben he often wondered how he’d react if he found out the truth: that he and his wife weren’t his biological parents.

But Hannes was too scared to tell Eben because he remembered the oath he’d sworn in court more than half a century ago. A magistrate made him promise never to try to find the biological parents of the baby boy he was adopting. 

And now decades later everything he feared has come true. After discovering the truth Eben isn’t only furious with Hannes and his wife, Eugené, for keeping

Hannes (84) sighs heavily as he tells us about the hardships he faces in the twilight of his life. In 1966 he and Eugené adopted baby Eben, the same Professor Eben Maré who recently told YOU about his high court battle to benefit from the estate of his biological dad, Pieter André Bezuidenhout (YOU, 15 March 2018).

The multimillionaire was murdered in 2016, three years after he and Eben met for the first time. André left a fortune worth about R86 million. Because Eben was adopted as a baby and his biological dad didn’t leave a will he isn’t legally entitled to a cent of it. Unless he can persuade a court to declare his adoption null and void the entire estate will be divided among André’s three surviving children and one of his grandchildren.

But his court bid is causing his adoptive parents great pain. Today Hannes, his adoptive dad, or “real father” as he calls himself, is talking exclusively to YOU to explain his side of the story. He was just doing his parental duty protecting his child – and he has no regrets about his silence of so many decades, he says.