On my sixth day as a foreign correspondent somebody tried to kill me. My rude initiation into this line of work came last week as I was driving with some South African journalists through me townships south of Johannesburg to cover the biggest general strike in this nation’s history.
I was on a side mission as well: to cadge as many tips as I could about how a white reporter who had just landed in this beautiful, damned and violent country should do business in risky terrain.
It turns out I got the lesson — and the gift — of my life. As our car came to a stop at an intersection near Evaton, south of Johannesburg it was cut off by another car full of tsotsis — hooligans who prey on township residents.
Four young black men leaped out of the car, hauled us out of ours, and demanded our keys and money. I could see that at least one had a gun. We explained we were journalists and made it abundantly clear that under the circumstances we were eager to oblige.
The tsotsi who yanked me from the passenger side seemed reasonable enough so before I handed him my money, I began the formality of showing him my press card. I wanted him to know I wasn’t a cop or some other agent of the state.
But I never finished the transaction. On the other side of the car, a much rougher set of tsotsis had hauled out the driver, Phillip van Niekerk, who is political editor of The Weekly Mail, South Africa’s leading investigative paper. One clubbed him over the head; another ripped off his jacket. One shouted: “Get out of the townships, you white (expletive).”
Then he shot Phillip in the head. The gunfire distracted my tsotsi which gave me a chance to walk around the car and try to help Phillip, whose face was covered with blood. I got to within five metres of Phillip and the gunman. He looked up at me; I at him. Nothing was said.
The only thing I remember of his face was the anger. I also remember thinking: “Stay cool. Don’t provoke. Either he’s going to shoot or he isn’t. You’ll find out soon enough.”
Then I felt an enormous punch inside my chest. Was it Winston Churchill who said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result”? He sure got that right.
The 9mm bullet bore a hole through the humerus bone in my left shoulder — without breaking it; smashed a rib in my back then ricocheted harmlessly toward my breastbone, without breaking it — rather than my heart or lungs. Everything the bullet did to my body, nature is going to undo.
Phillip’s luck was even more miraculous. He had been shot at point-blank range. The bullet entered his head just behind the right ear and exited just in front of his left ear. Astoundingly, it managed to miss both his spine and the artery to his brain.
In the seconds after the shooting there was one more dangerous moment to come — far more dangerous, I’ve since learned, than I realised at the time. Here we were, a couple of white guys, lying bleeding in the middle of a suddenly deserted intersection in the middle of a black township in the middle of a region seething with suspicion and hatred.
This is a corner of the globe where life sometimes seems scandalously cheap, where blacks get axed, speared, machine-gunned and “neck- laced” to death — almost always by other blacks — for the sin of commuting to work or attending a funeral, or having some money, or not taking part in a rent strike.
And it is an area in which white skin usually connotes cop, which in turn connotes repression, torture terror, massacre — to say nothing of three centuries of unpleasant history.
Was anybody in this inner ring of hell going to help? Once it was clear the shooting had stopped, a crowd began to gather — not, it seemed, a friendly crowd. Phillip was screaming, “My God, I’m going to bleed to death. Somebody help.”
The first wave of onlookers took a puzzled look at us and walked away. I still had my wallet in my hand — in the confusion, the tsotsis had failed to take it — and once again began explaining I was a journalist from the United States, here to cover the strike.
I wound up showing my press card to someone who I learned afterward was Felix Gabanakgosi, a computer technician. He phoned me at the hospital later and inquired about my condition. Then he explained he had been drinking at a local tavern when he heard the shots.
“When I got outside, there were some in the crowd who were saying, ‘Let’s just finish them off ,” Gabanakgosi said. “But I told the people, look, they’re human beings. At first I was afraid they might burn my house for saying this, but the crowd turned very quickly.” Once everyone was on our side, the crowd commandeered the next car that came by and helped us into the back seat.
The episode has naturally been chilling for journalists here. In years past when journalists worried about their personal safety in South Africa the focus of their concern was the police and the security forces. The townships tended to regard our kind as allies, because we were exposing the horrors of apartheid.
But the townships have gotten more dicey, more ambiguous in the transition to democracy. Some of the young black men, who became militant during the anti-apartheid struggle — those who boycotted school when the slogan was “liberation before education” – have grown up to become tsotsis, preying mostly on township residents. Others blend activism with hooliganism, using their automatic weapons to enforce boycotts by day and to relieve people of their wallets by night.
While Phillip and I were in the hospital, we each got a visit from Nelson Mandela, who warmly offered his sympathies and emphatically made the point that the African National Congress does not condone attacks on journalists.
But the scary thing about the attack on us wasn’t that it was political; it was that it wasn’t political. In all the years of the anti-apartheid struggle, only one journalist in South Africa lost his life covering the story. Now, when some 80 people are being killed every week in the townships, everyone who lives there, or has a job that takes him or her there, is frightened. Journalists included.
I also had a visit in the hospital from a police captain named Van Wyk. As he settled into the chair next to my bed, he asked: “Tell me, Mr Taylor, I have just one question for you. What do
you think of the townships now?”
I chose to play dumb. “Are you asking me for a statement?” “No, Mr Taylor. I am asking you what you think of the townships now.” “I think they’re pretty dangerous places.” “Yes Mr Taylor,” Van Wyk said, with four centuries of Afrikaner defiance surging through his ample frame. “Pretty dangerous places.”
That they are. But they are also places where the Felix Gabanakgosis of this world live. That’s the lesson I learned the first week on the job; the one for which I am eternally grateful; the one that provides hope that this haunted nation might yet find its way to a better tomorrow. — The Washington Post
Police arrest four suspects
Four men have been charged with attempted murder and armed robbery in connection with the shooting of two journalists in Evaton last week. The South African Police arrested the four on Monday after spotting them in the journalists’ hired car. The suspects are Simon Sethetho, 23, Alfred Matapane, 19, and Simon Domo, 18 — all of Evaton — and Enoch Molloane, 23, of Sebokeng.