Peta Thornycroft
THINUS VAN DER MERWE (31), a policeman for 13 years, was killed in a shoot-out under moulting jacaranda trees in Kensington, Johannesburg, just after lunch on Monday.
If it had been in the Gauteng school term, he would have died at more or less the same time as suburban buses bump along the hills and valleys of Highland Road, stopping every few streets to drop off pupils of the local primary school.
Highland Road marks the southern boundary of Kensington, lined on both sides with jacarandas which droop and sway over a dazzling variety of solid, old homes in this middle-class suburb. The street could be a backdrop for any nostalgic glance at a safer time in South Africa.
The garden walls are not as majestic or impenetrable as those which surround Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Some are still low, pre-cast concrete walls of ox- wagon wheels. There are even ordinary garden gates which click open and shut.
But for most of Monday afternoon, all that orderly living ruptured. Helicopters hovered over a few houses in Kensington, in particular above my home and two or three neighbours.
It began at lunchtime when two uniformed policemen, Nick Jones (44), a superintendent at Cleveland Police Station, and his colleague, Van der Merwe, were cruising along Highland Road. They were doing what we had asked: they were patrolling our suburb, a visible police presence keeping the streets safe for our children.
For some reason, happenchance, a sixth sense perhaps, the policemen stopped two young men and asked them their business. That’s when the shooting started, and Van der Merwe died almost immediately from a bullet wound in his neck.
Jones returned fire and managed to radio for help. Then the police car crashed into a lamp-post. Within minutes reinforcement cars shrieked to the rescue and a suspect, aged about 18, was arrested down the hill in Alice Street, perhaps the prettiest road in Kensington and just metres from my home.
Jones, severely injured, was rushed to hospital; Van der Merwe’s body was wrapped in plastic and taken to the mortuary.
By this time the chopper had arrived. It stayed until after dark, hovering, swooping and soaring, the noise deafening, clattering above the camelias and winter seedlings, rotor blades bending trendy palms and extra-blue plumbagos flat in the tremors of their downward gale.
The chopper’s noise, into the cold dark of an early winter’s night, was the horrible sound of war – the sound many reporters in Southern Africa have heard before.
The last time helicopters flew so low over the suburb was before the general elections in April 1994, when Kensington was on the daily route from police headquarters to the worst of the township wars east of Johannesburg.
As I drove home in the early evening, I saw and heard the helicopter above my house and its bright, blueish spotlight lighting up the trees. A crowd had gathered and a man in a suit clutching a cellphone asked me to park in the adjoining street around the corner from my house. A polite and pleasant policeman, teeth clenched tight with cold and tension, escorted me into my house.
An armed and dangerous man wearing grey pants and a yellow shirt was either in my garden or in that of my neighbours, or in the street, the policeman shouted above the throbbing of the chopper hovering above the chimney.
Policemen leapt over our walls, on to our tin roofs, through our garages, and we cringed inside and closed the curtains.
When night settled in, the crowd drifted away and the helicopter’s searchlight was switched off. The sounds of war lifted and faded. Yellow-shirt, armed, dangerous and hopefully frightened out of his wits, had survived an onslaught the like of which Kensington had never seen before. Presumably he would spend the night in his hide-out, in some sheltered patio or behind some tree, maybe metres away from our bedrooms.
But the night would be bleaker still for Thinus van der Merwe’s children, Marnus (4) and Chantelle (2).