The Colour of Murder
by Heidi Holland
(Penguin)
In The Colour of Murder, journalist Heidi Holland combines pacy writing with wry observation and painstaking research to paint an illuminating portrait of the troubled Van Schoor family and South Africa as a whole.
The book’s central subjects are Louis van Schoor — the former security guard who killed scores of black people in East London with virtual impunity from the late 1980s to the early 1990s — and his daughter, Sabrina, who hired a goon to kill her mother, apparently as a punishment for her racism.
However, as Holland writes in the preface, this macabre story had, at the time of Van Schoor’s trial in 1992, “huge capital in South Africa as an apt compression of what the whole country was going through”. Holland contends that the saga’s protagonists were burdened by 300 years of history and “through their actions, spoke the actions of their predecessors, glorious or otherwise”.
She does not have to work hard to substantiate. The facts speak for themselves. The East London-based Daily Dispatch shunned every damning story its journalists tried to write about Van Schoor until it was passed on to the Durban weekly, Sunday Tribune. The legal system consistently overlooked Van Schoor’s mounting murders. Many white East Londoners at the time of his trial were known to proudly display the infamous “I love Louis stickers”.
Blacks, on the other hand, not least her lawyer Siphiwo Burwana, championed his daughter as a freedom fighter for her matricide and brazenly having sex across the colour line in her conservative hometown of Queenstown. Perhaps the most jaw-dropping fact is that, when Louis van Schoor was released in 2004 after serving just 12 years for the murder of seven people (he is widely believed to have killed about 40), he was still unrepentant, apologising only “if any of my actions caused them pain”.
When Holland steps into Queenstown to reconstruct the matricide and the factors surrounding it, she paints a picture of a community still stuck in a time warp, where whites and blacks continue to rub shoulders abrasively. Her book is enjoyable primarily for its exhaustive research, where every interviewee and every story gradually adds to our perspective on why Sabrina snapped and betrayed her whole family.
Holland, in an analytical style offset with uncanny attention to detail, paints a damning picture of the terse racial relations that still persist in many parts of this “rainbow nation”, especially its courts. She also effectively examines the effects of years of internalised abuse, using Sabrina as a case study.
However, in her habit of constantly using the Van Schoor case to illustrate a bigger picture, Holland falls into the trap of over-generalising. For example, when she meets Malherbe Marais, one-time public prosecutor, to talk about Sabrina’s case, she lets him get away with painting all black legal practitioners as incompetent. Later on in the book, she speaks of “hapless coloured Queenstonians who have confounded us by failing to meet commitments, by contradicting themselves endlessly. They are not the most reliable of witnesses.” Although she later retracts this statement somewhat, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Still, we all have our missteps and prejudices, which, ultimately, are what the book is about. In weaving disparate strands of information together, Holland does a sterling job.