The kugel version of the township chop-
shop has found its way to Kensington, reports John Matshikiza
I didn’t know what to do when I discovered the looted doors of my house in an elegant antique shop in Kensington, eastern Johannesburg. Everything had been stripped from my home with skillful precision, and the shell of my house looked like a war zone.
The shop specialised in old doors and fireplaces. There was more stock than the brain could take on board.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask the kugel lady who was loading a nice looking wooden fire surround into her 4×4 if I could take a closer look, because it looked very much like the one that had recently been adorning my bedroom.
How could she and I have such a banal piece of taste in common? What if the rest of my house was gradually being assembled where she lived? I left it alone, and decided to concentrate on rescuing my doors.
I went to the police. A satellite police station, a pleasant white building nestling in a green and previously whites-only park, was now deserted. As I got closer, I found that it looked as derelict and looted as my home.
Water was pouring from burst pipes somewhere behind the bolted doors. A forlorn pair of crutches leaned against the wall, and a pile of log books detailing the humdrum life of the charge room – with details of who showed up late for duty and why, and what prisoner had done what despicable act of defecation in what cell – stood in a neat stack on the stoep, waiting for someone to come and collect them.
There wasn’t a cop in sight. A neighbour told me the place had been closed for more than a year.
I had to resort to the infamous Jeppe police station. An eager young black sergeant took down my complaint while blowing cigarette smoke in my face.
I went back to the antique shop in Kensington in the company of two innocent- looking young sergeants. One was black, the other white. Both of them were totally on my side.
The proprietor of the shop stammered out his red-faced story at us. The doors, he said, were part of a job-lot he had bartered with a neighbouring dealer.
”I do doors, he does wood, so I gave him a load of flooring wood and he gave me the doors. That’s all I know about them.”
I led the cops to the neighbouring shop, only to find the proprietor, a man called Ricardo, was out of town, buying more stuff in East London. ”Shame, and he’s got such a terrible flu,” Ricardo’s daughter told us.
But she nevertheless called the old man on his cellphone and asked him if he remembered who had sold him the doors. She had a memory of it herself, but wanted to check with her old man.
Ricardo confirmed that some guys had rocked up in an old Ford Escort, with doors in the boot, and he’d done a deal and thought no more about it. He didn’t know their names. He’d just given them cash and sent them on their way.
I asked the daughter if she remembered what the guys looked like. Yes, she said, she’d know them if she saw them again.
This is where the explosive racial question kicked in. Knowing my neighbourhood, with its new black identity and the desperate township faces that prowled around it, faces that had driven the old white faces away in a hurry as the 1994 election drew near, I didn’t want to ask the obvious question. I knew the answer.
But my cowardice was in for a shock.
It was the white cop who spoke up: ”Were they white guys?” he asked.
”Yes,” said Ricardo’s daughter, not batting an eyelid.She gave a description.
The black cop and I were looking blank. But the white cop nodded his head.
”I think I know the guys,” he said. ”I was at school with them.” He thought it was one of the brothers, named Fred. But he wasn’t in a position to do anything. We went away.
I was desperately confused, shocked at discovering the kugel version of the infamous township chop-shop in a reasonably laanie suburb where white people whose lives skirt around black people come to adorn their lifestyles with ”Victorian” originals.
Nobody asks where these ”originals” originate. They buy ”backdoor” like darkies. But I couldn’t prove it.
Then a white woman phoned me out of the blue. She had read about my experience, and felt she was experiencing some kind of dja vu. A year ago, she said, she had wandered into one of those same antique shops in Queen Street, looking for a present for a friend, and found herself staring at the fireplace that had been looted out of her home in Yeoville. She recognised it because part of the woodwork had been chipped off.
Misery loves company. We confirmed each other’s existence by this ugly shared experience.
But she knew more than me. The man who had robbed her had been seen scouting her place before the robbery. He was a white man with grey hair who drove a red car. Her inquiries around the antique shops confirmed his description – a guy called Tony who had been a regular dealer in the area for 20 years. No one had ever asked him more about himself, and where he got his goods. He was just part of the chain.
Vivien van der Sandt finally got her fireplace back, after a fight in which the police played an unhelpful part. I also got back four of my 10 looted doors, after the same kind of battle. In this we are one.
The fear and the personal disruption will never leave us. But the question about what kind of society we live in has at least lit a spark of recognition. It’s not a happy spark.