Thuli Nhlapo The Free State town of Sasolburg was stunned this week by a horrific incident in which a black man was allegedly dragged to his death behind his white employer’s bakkie. Pieter Odendaal, the owner of a construction company, allegedly killed his employee, Mosoko Rampuru, apparently after the two had been drinking. A post-mortem has yet to determine whether Rampuru, whose body was badly mutilated, died before he was attached to the bakkie. It was in the early morning hours of Saturday that the police say they were tipped off by Sasolburg Afrikaans High School pupils that a white Isuzu bakkie went past their school dragging some object that resembled a human body.
The police discovered the body on the outskirts of town in Colenso street with a wire wrapped around the ankle. They then followed a trail of blood that lead them to a bakkie parked at Odendaal Construction. When questioned by police, who found him asleep over his desk in his office, Odendaal reacted like someone who did not know what had happened, one of the police investigators said this week. According to Mathilda Odendaal, one of her husband’s first words when she saw him after the killing was: “What have I done?” Mathilda Odendaal, told the Mail & Guardian: “Pieter is not an angel, that I know, but he is not at all the racist that the media has portrayed him to be. It’s a pity that everyone is now turning this mysterious murder into a racial issue,” she said. When his wife told him that he was suspected of killing someone, Pieter Odendaal asked: “Whom did I kill?” Odendaal apparently went berserk when told that he had killed John. “Please, Tilly, phone Angelina and tell her that whether I have killed John or not I will take care of her and the kids,” said Odendaal. According to Johannes Radebe, who was Odendaal’s longest-serving employee, Odendaal was demanding – but not the kind of man to drag an employee to his death.
Odendaal, he said, would sometimes shout at them but had never used racist slurs. Radebe described Odendaal as a man who never lifted his hands to any one of them. Odendaal’s wife claimed that on her husband’s arrest, a Sasolburg police officer, Gift Maseka, had told her: “Your husband must be sentenced to 50 years in prison for being such a racist.” Police representative Steven Thakeng confirmed this week that Mathilda Odendaal has lodged a formal complaint about Maseka’s alleged comments. “The station acknowledges such allegations. What I can say at this stage is that an internal inquiry into the matter will take place.” Odendaal has three schoolgoing children. He served as a member of the school and church board. According to his wife, two of his children are coping well while the youngest has been in isolation and has not been to school since the news of what his father is accused of broke.