Okay. I had promised myself that I would not get embroiled in any Brett Kebble conspiracy stories. Fact is, it’s hard not to.
First off is the muted manner in which his gruesome demise has been treated by both the eminent and the rank and file of our brave new society. Sure, there was a big funeral at the cathedral in Cape Town where superstars and hangers-on of the liberation movement filed in, looking pious but basically putting on a good front for the television cameras. The entire African National Congress Youth League had their heads fashionably shaved so that they could look snappy carrying out the coffin. It was one of those classic moments of ”please do not adjust your television set, the problem is actually reality itself”.
I mean, you wha’? If there had been anybody there to actually shape the movie into something approaching true revealing drama a lot of questions would have been put into context. As it was, in true SABC/e.tv, wide-open aperture fashion, everything was just swallowed up and regurgitated verbatim.
To start with, those shaven heads. The whole world has forgotten that we used to shave our heads strictly as a sign of mourning for the passing of a dearly beloved. Somehow, somewhere, this significant action was sidelined and the shiny cranium became a 24/7, 365-day statement of where you were at style-wise. (It also became a convenient way of side-stepping the ageing process if you had got that far, and going cheese-kop rather than risking the black shoe polish dripping down the back of your neck when you started sweating on a hot day, revealing the white hair that was nestling underneath all that effort. But that’s another story.)
Anyway, Kebble’s funeral was yet another of those post-apartheid party events when you were not sure whether it was supposed to feel like a wedding, a funeral, or someone’s 21st birthday party. You were just supposed to be there, or be square. Any suggestion that there was something to mourn (like the violent and unexplained passing of someone you cared about) was rapidly buried behind the need to be out there looking good. The shaven head had nothing to do with the lately deceased in his sarcophagus. It had everything to do with how your shoes matched the tucks in your Italian suit, and the squeak of the leather seats as you sank your body into your high-end 4×4, wrapped the shades around your head, and figured out how to slip out of the funeral cortege once the basics had been taken care of.
Alas, poor Brett. Like Yorick, I never knew him. But he sure did something about putting his money (even though many say it wasn’t his to begin with) where his mouth was when it came to giving this society something to think about when it came to culture. Painters, tap dancers and Venda sculptors had something to look forward to at last. One has to wonder how many of our new black entrepreneurs are prepared to go that extra mile in putting who we are and where we come from on the map.
But in a sense, the very nature of Kebble’s assassination briefly brought our whole cultural agenda into focus. Whodunnit? Nobody knows (just like nobody continues to know who killed Henry Nxumalo, and why). The police certainly don’t know. The killing happened in a very public place which I know for a fact is constantly patrolled by a private security company because there is so much money going on behind the discrete walls of the suburban villas tucked in there that nothing is left to chance. And yet nobody saw or heard anything out of the ordinary.
Nobody, that is, except a mysterious character conveniently called Molefe, who is, or appears to be, equally conveniently, an illegal vagrant from Lesotho of no fixed abode. The cops and the security company all know that this Molefe was known to sleep rough in the undergrowth of the leafy park that edges into the road where Brett/Yorick was murdered, assassinated, bulleted in a botched-up hijack, or otherwise killed. But this Molefe, if he ever existed, has, with consistent convenience, conveniently disappeared.
The cops came to the scene of the crime, established by an amazing process of intelligent forensic deduction that a number of bullets had been fired and that Brett/Yorick’s luxury vehicle had somehow accelerated further down the road to come to a halt when it hit the security barrier over the busy N1 highway down below. They took a lot of photographs of the vehicle and then, on request from one of Brett’s financial/military advisers, handed it over to a local panel beating company — presumably to take out the dents from the impact and any unpleasant bullet holes in the leather seating that might have reduced its market value, should the bereaved family ever have any desire to put it back on the market.
This appears to be the sum total of evidence that has been eked from the top investigative brains of the country. The rest, I suppose, is all captured in the head of the missing vagrant Molefe, who one day might have a hell of a story to tell.
And if Brett was still around, he might have made a tidy little sum of money telling it. As it is, wherever he is, he is on the lam with no foreseeable outlet for his yarn of what might or might not have been a curiously complex, multiracial, international, local-yokel, blood-and-diamonds scam.
Which might or might not have made a great local movie one of these days. Etc, etc.
As Poirot would have said: –”Cherchez le Molefe. Point.”