A young black man is caught indiscreetly fondling a bottle of Klipdrift brandy in a liquor store in Johannesburg’s notoriously naughty Hillbrow area. He says he was merely comparing prices because he was going to a birthday party. But the store workers (no doubt black fellers like himself) saw his actions differently.
Before he knew what was happening, a security guard was stalking towards him, grabbing him by the arm, and locking him up in a storeroom at the back. He left the young man cowering in his makeshift cell while he went to call the baas.
You better believe it: the security guard comes back with the baas in two shakes of a duck’s tail, and without so much as a token trial the store owner decides the young man is guilty of attempted shoplifting and must be punished.
The first stage of the punishment is to make him drink a whole bottle of cane spirit by himself right there on the spot, in that cramped storeroom at the back of the liquor store. When he proves not to be up to the challenge, the baas and his acolytes hold his jaws open and pour the rest of the bottle down his protesting throat.
The newspaper doesn’t say whether he was still able to stand upright of his own volition after that, but according to the account in City Press, it must have been one of those situations where fear overcomes intoxication, and he was able to take what was coming to him like a man. Or whatever.
What kind of psychosis is this? You punish someone you accuse of shoplifting liquor by making him drink liquor? But there was worse to come.
The baas then, apparently, went off and came back with a five-litre tin of red wall paint. He ordered one of his gaping black minions to paint the man red like a fire engine. And, of course, the man did as he was told — he emptied the can of paint over the hapless young man’s head, making sure that it was spread nice and even over the rest of his body.
And, having completed their decorating job, they then collectively joined in an orgy of beating the guy with an iron rod, to the extent that he finally got fed up, saw a gap and ran off into the streets. He was naked, apart from a film of red paint on his face and body, blocking his pores and making him feel like his skin was on fire.
It doesn’t say what the neighbours said as he ran past, his tormentors in hot pursuit.
It also doesn’t say what the proprietor of the convenient local restaurant, in which the young man sought refuge, had to say when this fully grown red humanoid ducked through his doorway, pursued by a baying mob from the bottle store.
Whatever the case, the restaurant staff called a halt to this bizarre Hillbrow hunting game by calling the cops and offering the young man a large black bin liner to cover his most sensitive parts, until the said cops showed up and took him to Hillbrow hospital.
The cops also arrested the bottle-store owner, who was hanging around displaying not the slightest ounce of remorse, and took him down to the station to be charged with what City Press calls ‘grevious [sic] bodily harm” and causing public indecency.
I suppose a legal case of some kind will splutter on and off over the next few months and then disappear from the newspapers. The bottle-store owner will get off with a nominal fine and continue to ply his trade, selling naughty fire water to ever-swelling numbers of thirsty Africans anxious to desensitise their minds, at any cost, to the miseries of life in the City of Gold.
Both the police and the Human Rights Commission are reluctant to jump to the instant conclusion that this is a racist confrontation. But it is hard to see it as anything else. There have been precedents in the recent past, as you will remember — a young farm labourer painted silver from head to toe by a local white farmer as a lesson to his peers for trespassing, and a 14-year-old girl painted white by a Pep Stores manageress and one of her employees for alleged shoplifting.
Like I say, what is the pathology behind this? What is going on? What is the hidden symbolism that links these violent, pathetic gestures, and to the unspoken and unspeakable ways we have of looking at and seeing each other in post-Madiba South Africa?
One would have thought that a beating would have been enough to satisfy the fury of the traditional white store owner or farmer we all know so well — and pardon me, but racial hatred plays a significant part in this constituency’s self-inspired, natural-born right to mete out whatever punishment it will when it feels its private domain has been violated.
In the old days of Mark Twain’s United States, people could be tarred and feathered for similar misdemeanours. In the Deep South and in the old South Africa, the punishment would have been a public lynching — mob violence as an arrogant substitute for the rule of law.
This puzzling practice of covering the suspect with household paint seems to be a backlash against a new dispensation where, thanks to a horribly liberal Constitution, such divine rights are no longer at the disposal of a ruling minority.
The interior monologue seems to be: ‘Oh, so this Mandela has told you black is beautiful, has he? Well, how about trying red? Or silver? Or white like me? Black-is-beautiful se moer.”
And so it goes on. Picasso would have been impressed.