A policeman known for his fight against child abuse is found guilty of murdering the man who raped his daughter, writes Angella Johnson
The story would make a powerful Hollywood script, if it had not already been done in the movie A Time to Kill: a young girl is raped by a local man who is caught, arrested, then dramatically shot dead by the distraught father.
Substitute the film’s setting in the United States’s deep South for the black Cape township of Khayelitsha, and you get police Sergeant Mandisi Mpengesi instead of actor Samuel L Jackson.
Mpengesi, a member of the local child protection unit (CPU), knew from first-hand experience the trauma wreaked on families caught in the tragedy of child rape. Not only did he have to deal everyday with mounting caseloads in a city where it is estimated one in three girls will have been sexually abused by the time she reaches 14, but he was himself a victim of abuse.
“I was raped as a child and nobody cared,” he said in a 15-minute documentary, The Story of Sergeant Mpengesi. (Produced by Clifford Bestall, the film is due to be aired in Britain on Saturday May 2 as part of BBC2’s Own Correspondent series.) “I did not want other children to suffer as I did.” So he struggled for years to join what was then an all-white CPU.
Public prosecutors were delighted when they learned he was investigating a case. They nicknamed him Superman because of his tireless dedication and 100% conviction record.
Mpengesi saw his job as a fight between God and the devil. But when the devil came knocking on the door of his house last year, he was unprepared and lost control for one of the rare moments in his life.
It had started out as the happiest day of his life. After years of hard work in a unit which only started investigating abused black children post-democracy, he had just been given an office, an assistant and a car.
He arrived home that evening in a celebratory mood. When one of his six-year- old twin daughters tentatively asked to have a colouring book which he used to coax young victims to describe what had happened to them, Mpengesi brushed her off.
He did not pick up the subtle silent signal she was sending out. Eventually she whispered to him that someone had done “bad things” to her. “I didn’t want to believe her,” said Mpengesi. “It was as if a dark cloud had descended upon the roof.”
She told him the rapist was called Speedy and lived next door. Mpengesi learned the attacker was his neighbour’s brother, who was not at home.
Bundling the children into his car, he drove to the police station and opened a rape docket. But he discovered later that night the policeman on duty had gone home without trying to apprehend the suspect.
Mpengesi decided to do the job himself. As he drove deeper into the night, networking the township, he remembered the anguish of other fathers he had encountered in his work. “Now I knew why those fathers had wanted to see the suspect … they wanted to see him to do something.”
It was not for nothing that he was called Superman. Before the night was out, Speedy had been tracked and caught while trying to escape.
The twins identified him as the attacker. “He told me he was sorry and was willing to pay. I told him my child was not for sale,” recalled Mpengesi.
He arrested the young man, who was in his 20s, and took him to be locked up in a police cell, then went home to a fitful night’s sleep. “I was thinking about how my child would live with this … I knew she would suffer … and how it would affect her life … I knew how it had affected me.”
At dawn Mpengesi awoke and went to the station to pick up his assistant. At the gate the sentry, an elderly man whom he knew well, approached his car outraged and asked why he had not killed the suspect.
The words pushed the weary sergeant over the edge. He began hallucinating and recalls little of his trance-like walk to the holding cells, except that someone opened the door for him and his gun was in his hand.
Eight shots rang out and Speedy lay dead on the cold stone floor. “I realised then that everything was all over. I knew I would not carry on what I had fought for [the protection of children]. The battle was over.”
A less scrupulous officer might have claimed the prisoner tried to take his gun. Mpengesi pleaded temporary insanity and was taken to a mental hospital for evaluation. But he was pronounced sane and released to stand trial for murder.
If this were a case of life imitating art, Mpengesi’s story would have a happy ending. In the movie Jackson is artfully defended in court by an idealist young lawyer and acquitted.
Despite widespread support from local people who believe he’d done what they would have, Mpengesi was found guilty. He is currently out on bail awaiting sentencing.