Back to Jo’burg and the usual Jo’burg stories. Dinner conversation with old friends struggles to rise beyond the banal realities. These are just some of them:
A man called Mangaliso comes out of a spell in Leeuwkop prison with a desire to live a reformed life, an aspiration to normality, if such a thing exists in this tense environment, an aspiration encouraged by a few enlightened warders, social workers and dedicated acti-vists. He has been drawn into the therapeutic powers of theatre, and, now that
he is out of jail, wants to share this revelation with young people who might still be saved from his life of inevitable crime in the ghettos of abuse that we have inherited.
Mangaliso is walking purposefully towards his dream, his brain clear like a reformed addict, almost too heady to be true.
But one afternoon, in a spaza shop in his native township of Diepkloof in sprawling Soweto, the gang to whom he had sworn his juvenile allegiance catches up with him. “You don’t want to come back to the gang?” they challenge him. His resolve is firm. So one of his former colleagues pulls out a gun and holds it to his head.
“You think you’re too good for us?” the gangster says. “I’ll show you.” And, at point-blank range, he pulls the trigger. Mangaliso’s young and unexpectedly hopeful life is blown away in a crashing instant of fire and metal that penetrates his brain.
In Yeoville, a doctor who has established a medical practice in this tough and unstable neighbourhood is awoken in the small hours of the morning by a posse of armed men banging insistently at the door of his apartment. They are all wearing the uniforms of a well-known security company and say they have been told to search his premises for illegal drugs. So he lets them in, and is immediately assaulted and tied up by the 10 uniformed thugs.
“Before I knew what was happening, I found myself desperately bargaining for my life. If I didn’t give them the money they wanted, they would kill me.”
They demanded his bank and credit cards. While some were standing over him, taking down pin numbers and wondering how much they could download from his accounts in a few moments, others were going through his personal possessions, trying on clothes and throwing away what they didn’t like.
The leader of the gang decided that he liked the fit of the doctor’s leather jacket. He left five of his men to guard the doctor, having stuffed his socks down his throat to keep him quiet, and led the other five out of the apartment to the street.
They returned after half an hour. They had somehow managed to draw R15 000 from his various accounts. The leader of the gang, still cheekily sporting the leather jacket, looked the doctor in the eye and shook his head pityingly.
“The man who sent us here isn’t going to be satisfied with this,” he said.
“What else can I do?” the doctor struggled to communicate through the suffocating stink of his day-old socks.
“We’re going to have to kill you then,” said the gang leader. The gun came out and was cocked against the doctor’s head.
The gangster fired, but the gun jammed. He took a gun from a colleague, which jammed as well. A third gun did the same.
One of the gang members got spooked. “God doesn’t want this man to die,” he said. “Let’s just leave him.”
Other gangsters disagreed. He had seen their faces and could identify them, they said. They should finish off the job.
But it was the doctor’s lucky day, if you can call it that. They took his car keys and left him to struggle his way out of his bindings.
They managed to run up a R40 000 bill on his credit card before it was blocked by the bank.
The doctor has been like the walking dead ever since, telling his story with wide-eyed disbelief to anyone who will listen, wondering who it was who had fingered him, and when they would be back to finish off what they had started. That casual Jo’burg episode will haunt his waking and sleeping hours to the end of his days.
The victims and protagonists in these casual episodes are all black males. But the meaningless violence spreads across the whole spectrum of our rainbow nation.
In the same week a young white man confesses to the killing of his mother and her gardener with a gardening fork, a moment of mayhem in a placid suburb. He had first dispatched the family poodles with the same instrument.
“I hated them all,” he is said to have told the police when they came to pick him up. So he bided his time, and then killed them, not with a knife, but with a fork.
Fear, loathing and self-loathing know no colour line in South Africa. Is it something in the air we breathe?
The only thing that everyone is certain of is that no one knows the answers. The country sometimes feels like a ship winging wildly on a single anchor that is threatening to break loose. The passengers are fiercely proud of their vessel, but none of them really care about the others, or have bothered to find out their names. And none of them can remember when last they saw the captain.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza