This death thing is actually beginning to piss me off. It is true that you can never really know another somebody, really know them with all the secrets that they will probably carry to the grave. But in the difficult contours of life you can sometimes inch closer and closer to where another somebody might be at and make contact.
Sometimes you find consensus. Sometimes none. Sometimes it explodes into a whole ocean of possibility. Sometimes a whole ocean of death and disaster.
Usually it fails, but sometimes something lovely steps into the frame that everyone can agree on.
And then this thing called death, whatever it is, steps in and makes it all fall apart.
So is it death that I am really pissed off with (the mourners at the funeral, the raucous party at the wake) or is it actually life — human life? The things human beings do to each other, or fail to recognise in each other, until it’s too late? (And it always is too late.)
I guess I have to take full responsibility for the fact that I didn’t hear about Jackie Semela’s death until he had been almost two months in his grave. I must have been travelling somewhere or other, because the news completely missed me. It caught up with me while I was on yet another journey — sitting in a restaurant in Berlin with semi-exiled South African film director Oliver Schmitz, who told me that Jackie had been murdered in August in the course of a car hijacking outside his parents-in-laws’ house in Dube Village, Soweto.
I had heard nothing about this. It was doubly, triply shocking to receive the news over a meal and a glass of wine in West Berlin, so many thousands of miles away.
For days I refused to believe it. And there is this syndrome where you are inclined to slaughter the bearer of the news rather than seeing it for what it is — just more bad tidings out of South Africa.
The ironies were just piled too high on top of each other. Schmitz, you see, has taken up residence in Berlin because, after years of struggling, he has decided that staying in the country that nurtured him and which most needs his talents as a film-storyteller (you would assume) would be an act of folly.
Here’s the irony. His last South African film, made with some difficulty and only finally realised because he managed to get some foreign money into the mix, was called Hijack Stories.
It’s not exactly a cheerful film. Many of our country’s film moguls thought that it was irresponsible for him even to think about making it. Who wants to hear the bad news about car hijackings and their perpetrators, usually young black males? Others criticised the film for putting too much emphasis on the white victims of these hijackings, rather than highlighting the fact that it is more likely to be other young black males who fall victim to this particularly nasty crime.
So anyway, here’s Oliver Schmitz talking idly to me in the Paris Bar in Berlin about people we might or might not have in common back at home. And he mentions the death of Jackie Semela in the course of a car hijacking in Soweto, which, as I said, I had no inkling of, being out of the country at the time.
The irony lies in being told of a fatal hijacking by the director of Hijack Stories, who had tried to make a point about a ghastly aspect of our life through the telling of that movie and had been condemned to flee into exile for his pains.
You just don’t talk straight about South Africa in South African movies. People don’t like it. The rainbow is what everybody says the people at home, and the rest of the world, especially, want to hear about — even if there is no such thing.
Like I say, it was hard to know where the source of my grief and anger at hearing the news really lay. People get killed all the time in senseless crimes in South Africa.
The fact is that Jackie was a friend of mine who I had seen not four weeks before his death, in the streets of Grahamstown during festival time, handing out leaflets for his latest show with the Soweto Dance Theatre, which he had founded in 1989.
I don’t know if he was aware of it, but Jackie was one of the voices that persuaded me that there was a creative life to come home to in South Africa, a set of fresh voices beaming out from a video that someone gave me called We Jive Like This, telling it how it was in a refreshing sector of the performing arts, notably dance. I thought there was something to arrive to, after all.
So when I first met Jackie in the flesh, somewhere around the Market Theatre Precinct in the early 1990s, I already had a reference to him. We were friends and soulmates before we even met.
So his random death, revealed to me by chance so many weeks after it had happened, is a source of deep grief and anger. He was young — barely 40 years old — with a whole creative life in front of him. He was independently minded, intelligent, honest, modest, committed. And he had just begun to make a family — his two-year-old daughter was with him when he was hijacked and shot dead, and will surely never forget those moments for as long as she lives. She herself barely got away with her life.
It is all very well to pour out the helpless anger. But what is to be done?
Jackie Semela is one of many victims of the impossibly horrific social conditions we have inherited from apartheid and all the stuff that came before it.
What separates him from all those other nameless victims is that I know his face, I know his name, I still feel the breath of his inspiration on my cheek, as if we were still having a casual conversation on the wintry streets of Grahamstown in mid-July.
What, I ask again, is to be done? Somewhere the buck must come to rest in this chaotic society we have inherited.
Jackie, and the rest of us, tended to look over his shoulder at the past.
I think it is time we started to acknowledge the need to blame the present as well. In so carelessly losing Jackie Semela in the course of a senseless car hijacking, 10 years after we have finally won the privilege to stand up for ourselves, our revolution has surely suffered a dismal, unacknowledged failure.