If you have been following the news in the past week, the names of Boston Chilambo and George Koesyn should be familiar to you. If they are not, don’t despair, you are one of many.
Chilambo and Koesyn made legal history last week — for something they did back in 1999. They are the men who murdered Anieta Ferreira’s abusive partner, Chris Parkman. And just to prove how irrelevant they were, even the minority and majority judgements in Ferreira’s appeal, spelt the name of Koesyn differently — Koesyn and Kowsyn.
For their roles, they were jailed for life, just like Ferreira. But unlike her, the Supreme Court of Appeal dismissed their application for a more lenient sentence, which means they are destined to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
The court ruled that, unlike Ferreira, whose motives for wanting Parkman dead were ”understandable”, the two had no business wishing the abusive Parkman dead. They were motivated purely by greed.
On the surface, it is hard to argue against the reasoning of the court. But in the court’s own version, the past is important when determining the right punishment for offenders.
For a start, it is hard to accept that people arrested for the same offence, acting in common purpose and all without criminal records, should be punished differently.
The fact that Chilambo and Koesyn/Kowsyn (who were 22 years and 20 years old respectively at the time of the crime) have been repeatedly referred to as ”the two men” speaks to how much society has become desensitised to the criminal conduct of young black males. They are simply the usual suspects, undeserving of any further scrutiny.
That must change.
The court found that Ferreira was essentially a victim of a patriarchal and racist world — patriarchal in the sense that a woman’s litany of abuse was so well known, the police had been called three times but had responded once.
Ferreira was prevented from having contact with her children from a previous, also abusive, marriage.
According to the judgement, ”deceased assembled about 15 of his labourers and told Ms Ferreira to remove her underwear and display her genitals to the men. Her refusal to do so resulted in the deceased raping her that evening and threatening to hire ‘black men’ to rape her if she ever tried to leave him again.”
Being raped is a horrendous crime, but for Parkman, being raped by black men was the ultimate revenge. Parkman thought showing his farmhands (invariably black) the missis’s private parts was some sort of fringe benefit they would never enjoy at any other farm.
Perhaps, just as the court found that history of abuse played a role when determining sentences, I hope that in future courts will widen the focus to look into how this paternalistic, racist society has impacted on the lives of uneducated, unskilled and disempowered black males.
On the one hand, black males are — in the words of Kwaito star Mandoza: Uzoyitholakanjani Uhlez’ ekhoneni (how are you going to attain it by standing in a corner) — under pressure from their own communities to amount to ”something”.
The two men do not have a Lisa Vetten — whose study into why abused women tend to kill their partners swung it for Ferreira — on their side. The Department of Justice has not commissioned any research to look into why poor, young, black males are susceptible to committing crimes. Two young black men committing a murder, or any other crime for cash, is seen as the natural order of things.
As the court itself found: ”Ms Ferreira appraised the situation as becoming worse ‒ in her mind, murdering Mr Parkman was the only way of escaping him and getting her life back.”
Could it not be that for the two men, killing Parkman and walking away with R10 000 could be a way of ”escaping their reality and getting their lives back”?
This ”something” manifests itself to the poor and hopeless as acts of crime. Am I saying that poor, young blacks should be excused? Of course not. If there is to be a sociological study explaining why certain people end up committing certain crimes, then perhaps we should go the whole hog and study the circumstances of the biggest category of criminals — young black males.
If it does not help judges arrive at sentences that are rehabilitative in outlook, hopefully it will help social engineers construct a world kinder to the brothers.