by John Carlin
That was his impulse now, after the shooting. All the misery and shame he had been spared as he grew up hit him in one concentrated bolt, at the age of twenty-six, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day in 2013. His love affair with the beautiful and worldly Reeva Steenkamp, in whose fashionable circles he would have been unlikely to have moved had he not found fame and fortune, was an achievement that told the world he had won life’s race. Ending Reeva’s life, and in the same instant annihilating his own, had condemned him to the shadow existence he had fought so hard to avoid – inspiring compassion in some, derision in others, and ripping forever from his grasp all that he had striven with such fierce resolve to win.
3
One that loved not wisely but too well.
SHAKESPEARE, OTHELLO
HIS BED in the police cell was a blanket on a cement floor. Not that it mattered very much. He would not have slept that first night on any surface. Ever since he was a little boy he had lived in fear of criminals, now he knew what it felt like to be one. Worse was to come the next morning, Friday, February 15, when he was driven in a police convoy to a court in the center of Pretoria where he appeared before a magistrate who confirmed what he knew was coming. It took no more than five minutes for the magistrate to announce that the state would be charging him with premeditated murder. At the word ‘murder’, he broke into wild sobs. His sister, Aimée, who was sitting directly behind him with his uncle and other family members, put her hands to her face and wept. As for bail, the state opposed it and a hearing would be held at which a different magistrate would decide the matter the following Tuesday.
The name of the bail magistrate was Desmond Nair. Of Indian descent, which would have precluded him from occupying any judicial post under apartheid, he was highly experienced and respected. Magistrates and judges possess enormous power in South Africa, where the jury system does not exist. In theory they are supposed to perform their roles with the coldest impartiality, but that does not stop both defense and prosecution lawyers from paying close scrutiny to their backgrounds in the hope of finding some vulnerability that might help swing a verdict. Pistorius’s defense lawyers clutched at what they thought might be grounds for optimism in a remarkable case from 2011 in which Nair had presided over the bail hearing.
At the center of that case was an Afrikaner rugby player called ‘Bees’ Roux, who was arrested and charged with murder for beating a black policeman to death. At a pre-trial meeting, attended by Roux and his lawyer, as well as the state prosecutor and the brother and wife of the victim, Roux expressed sincerest regret and explained what had happened. He had imagined that the policeman, whom he had encountered at night, had planned to rob him, possibly kill him. An exceptionally large man, Roux struck the policeman with force, knocking him unconscious. He sought to revive him, Roux said, but it was too late. In tears, Roux apologized to the policeman’s relatives and implored their forgiveness. They granted it. First the brother, also weeping, embraced Roux; then the policeman’s widow made a short dignified speech in which she thanked Roux for his candor and said that she did indeed forgive him. The prosecutor proposed a deal. Roux would plead guilty to culpable homicide, the South African legal term for unpremeditated manslaughter, he would pay the family of the dead policeman compensation and receive a suspended sentence of five years in jail. The presiding magistrate concurred, and Roux was a free man.
Would Nair, seeing the possible parallels between the two cases, show similar leniency over Pistorius’s bail application? His lawyers tended to think so. There was another, more personal, reason that might help their cause, too. Research by the defense had revealed that Nair was in the midst of his own family tragedy. His first cousin had recently killed her two children, then herself, with poison. Pistorius’s team hoped that at the Tuesday hearing Nair’s private suffering would sharpen his compassion for the fellow sufferer who stood before him with sorrow written all over his face, and that Nair might rule in his favor.
But Tuesday was still several days off, and as Pistorius was led out of the courtroom where he had just been charged with murder and into the police car that would take him to another police station, in the middle-class and previously all-white Pretoria suburb of Brooklyn, his thoughts dwelt on the horror of what he had done, but also on those that might lie ahead. He would be spending at least the next four nights in a cell; if he were denied bail, it would be for every night until the trial was over, whenever that might be; and if in the end he were found guilty, he would be spending much of the rest of his life in a dank and dangerous prison with some of the worst criminals in the world for company. Should he be found guilty as charged, of premeditated murder, the sentence would be twenty-five years, minimum.
The scrum of TV cameras outside the courtroom, mobbing the car that drove him back to his police cell, brought home to him how fascinated the world was with the prospect of a figure as heroic as he had been falling so low. The mystery behind Reeva’s death made the drama all the more compelling. Had the story of what happened at his home in the early hours of Valentine’s Day been cut and dried, had it been beyond dispute from the beginning that he had killed Reeva Steenkamp either deliberately or accidentally, interest in the case would not have been so great or so enduring. What was to keep the story bubbling, month after month, all the way through to the eventual verdict, was that the events of that night remained so open to speculation. Endless debates would be held at dinner tables across the globe on the question of whether he had wanted to kill her or not.
His fame and her beauty – but especially his fame, because people felt they knew enough about him to venture informed opinions – enlivened the debate. But the fact that two other contemporary cases had whipped up the public imagination to a similar degree, even though the protagonists had been unknown when their stories broke, revealed the powerful attraction that unresolved mysteries exerted, with or without the celebrity factor. One was the case of Madeleine McCann, the little British girl abducted in Portugal in 2007, never to be seen again. The other was that of Amanda Knox, the American accused by the Italian authorities of the murder of a British woman, Meredith Kercher, also in 2007. In both instances, millions of people felt entitled to pronounce with assurance about what had happened on the nights in question.
One camp in the McCann case held that the parents, both of them doctors, had accidentally killed their child by giving her an overdose of sleeping pills, then disposed of the body and pretended to the world that she had been abducted by a criminal. Similarly, some observers of the Knox case said that the American woman, far from being innocent as she claimed, had participated in a satanic game of group sex that had led to her friend Meredith’s grisly death. Others maintained with equal conviction that the McCanns and Knox were telling the truth and had been grievously traduced.
Carefully selecting the copious evidence provided by the news media to corroborate their views, what people on each side were doing would reveal more about themselves, their prejudices and motivations, than about what really happened, the truth of which was known only to the strangers in whose personal dramas they chose to involvethemselves.
Another controversial case with which analogies were drawn was the celebrated O. J. Simpson murder trial in America. Global interest was also enormous, and the core allegation in both stories was a riveting one: famous athlete kills beautiful woman he loved. The majority view in the US, even before the trial began in Los Angeles in 1995, was that Simpson was guilty of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. But there the similarities ended. The Simpson case followed the classic lines of a whodunit. A body had been found and it was up to the cops to discover the identity of the killer. Simpson was accused of murdering his ex-wife; the job of the police and prosecution was to prove he had done it.
In Pistorius’s case the who, the when, the where and the how were not in dispute. And, thankfully for South Africa – even if it were no consolation for him – there was no racial element involved. In the Simpson case the acc
used had been black, the victim white, and American opinion divided accordingly. In the Pistorius case there was no clear division of opinion or splitting of sympathies along racial lines. As Justice Malala, a well-known black political commentator wrote, ‘For us South Africans, it is impossible to watch Oscar Pistorius run without wanting to break down and cry and shout with joy.’ Knowing this used to fill Pistorius with joy too.
One thing he had been proud of as a South African was that admiration for successful national sportsmen, not just for him, was color-blind. Blacks and whites and all shades in between had taken the rugby players Francois Pienaar (white) and Bryan Habana (mixed-race), and the cricketers Hashim Amla (Indian and Muslim) and Makhaya Ntini (black), to their collective hearts. Sport, as Pistorius recalled Mandela saying, was a great breaker of racial barriers. No one wished to be cut out of the celebrations when the national team won. All those sportsmen had inspired all their compatriots, just as he had done.
What made Pistorius stand out from all the others was that because of his unique physical condition he exemplified the country’s continuing task of overcoming the hard legacy of the past. Every South African shared in his triumphs, seeing them as occasions to applaud what all races liked to see as the indomitable national spirit. Everyone had wanted to identify with him because he fed South Africans’ self-image as a never-say-die people. The Afrikaners, whose forebears had ridden north from the Cape in the early nineteenth century to conquer a hostile land, never ceased to remind themselves and anyone else who would listen that the word ‘survivors’ best defined who they were. But the truth was that all South Africans were survivors. Survivors are, by definition, pragmatists. This shared characteristic was the chief reason why, unlike other warring peoples who had proved unable to rise above past grievances, black and white South Africans were able to agree to abolish apartheid and to make peace. They see themselves as problem-solving people, and it was this can-do attitude that gave rise to a uniquely South African expression, which the Afrikaners invented but all other races incorporate into daily conversation, ‘We’ll make a plan.’ Pistorius, whose life story it seemed to sum up, used it all the time. It meant, ‘We’ll overcome this obstacle. We’ll think of something. We’ll get to our destination.’
By triumphing on the world stage he had shown people everywhere that South Africans were indeed made of sterner stuff. He had set an example to all: if he could make a plan, if he could soar in the face of the cards life had dealt him, anybody could. He held up a flattering mirror to South Africans, reflecting back the image they wished to see of themselves at their best.
Not anymore. Now he reflected South Africa at its worst. Though people knew him only through the media, and knew less of Reeva Steenkamp and nothing at all of what had passed between them on the night she died, many had made up their minds that he was a monster who had killed her knowingly, not in a panic but in a rage, and they clamored for a punishment to fit the crime, one that would send a message that women had endured enough.
The figures showed how much. South Africa was tenth in the world murder rankings by country, with forty-five killings a day on average in 2013, and undisputed global champion when it came to violence against women. Every four minutes a South African woman or girl – often a teenager, sometimes a child – was reported raped, and every eight hours a woman was killed by her male partner. (The phenomenon has a name in South Africa: ‘intimate femicide’.) On the face of it, as many South Africans saw it, Pistorius had swelled those statistics. There was no shortage of opinion pieces in the press during the weeks and months that followed the shooting framing his case in the context of generalized gender violence.
He hated that. He hated the unfairness of people assuming he was guilty before he had had a chance to tell his story in court, and it mortified him that they were choosing to portray him as a woman-hater. All the more so as Reeva herself had been an advocate for women’s rights, speaking out against abusers and rapists. He had always supported her – had shared in her outrage and horror at one very recent crime, one so savage that it was singled out by the president, Jacob Zuma, in his annual state of the nation address.
On February 3, 2013 a seventeen-year-old girl called Anene Booysen from a poor rural township near Cape Town was raped, mutilated and left for dead at a construction site near a bar where she had spent much of the night with friends. A doctor who had tried to save her life was quoted in the press as saying that after raping her the attacker had opened up her stomach and ripped out her intestines. Pistorius and Reeva had discussed the case, the two of them as appalled as anybody else in South Africa. Reeva was moved to make her feelings public on Instagram. ‘I woke up in a happy safe home this morning,’ she wrote. ‘Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals in SA. RIP Anene Booysen. #rape #crime #sayNO.’ She had spent part of February 13 polishing up a speech she was due to give two days later to students at a school in Johannesburg in memory of Anene Booysen and in honor of the ‘Black Friday Campaign for Rape Awareness’.
It might have seemed hard to square the idea of a woman with this kind of social conscience planning to share a bed with a monster that very night. Yet that was how many people chose to view it – most vocally the Women’s League of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, Mandela’s party. Pistorius had spotted members of the League outside the magistrate’s court where his bail application was being heard, calling for his head. ‘Real Men Don’t Rape And Kill Women’, one placard read; ‘Pistorius Must Rot In Jail’, another. Lulama Xingwana, South Africa’s Minister for Women, Children and People with Disabilities, joined the campaigners, stridently declaring that he should be denied bail.
The same government minister went so far as to blame Reeva’s death on the culture of the Afrikaners, ‘Young Afrikaner men’, she said, were ‘brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they can take that life because they own it’. She did apologize and retract her remarks afterwards, having perhaps understood, as other black women might have reminded her, that it was a shared problem, that no male sector of any racial group in South Africa could claim a monopoly on virtue in the treatment of women.
Some comments by Henke Pistorius did not help the cause very much either. Speaking to the press the day after his son shot Reeva Steenkamp, he said that the African National Congress had failed to protect white people from crime, hence the need for people like him to arm themselves. The racist undertones, revealed in the insensitivity shown by his failure to realize that black people suffered more from crime than white, caused a public furor – and still more embarrassment, if that were possible, for his son. Henke then made matters worse by stating, with ludicrously bad judgment in the circumstances, ‘As a family, we value life much too much to produce guns at every opportunity we can use them. I have been in positions where I could use a gun but we have been brought up in a way that we value the lives of others very highly.’
The snorts of those who had made up their minds that Henke’s son had attached so little value to Reeva’s life that he had deliberately killed her resounded across the land. They may not have known Reeva, but they took her death personally. Her fate symbolized everything that South African women found terrifying about the country they lived in – a culture of violence where men were desensitized to the harm they caused others, even if those others were supposedly their friends or loved ones; where notions of masculinity were so perverted that hitting and raping women was seen almost as a cultural norm, not least by members of the police force; and where guns and other lethal weapons were favored instruments of everyday persuasion. Men seemed to get away with murder in South Africa, and now this high-profile case offered an opportunity not to be missed to send a message to male society at large. The women who thought this way wanted revenge; they wanted Pistorius to burn on the pyre as an example to all men with misogynist malice in their hearts.
Yet the truth was that lon
g before prosecutors pushed for the state’s revenge in the murder trial, even before the bail hearing, Pistorius’s punishment had already begun. In the cell at Brooklyn police station where he was locked up after his first court appearance he slept once again on the floor. Aimée, Carl and his uncle Arnold came to offer their moral support, but their visits were cause for grief as well as comfort. The contrast between the carefree times they had shared a few days before and his circumstances now brought home how completely the landscape of their lives had changed.
He was no longer the miracle runner whose future blazed bright. He was a sobbing child in the body of a muscled athlete, who had committed a crime for which there was no possibility of redress. Not on this earth, at any rate. Uncle Arnold, who turned to God in times of hardship, found a church minister to visit Pistorius in his cell. Bible in hand, the minister spent hours by his side, reading from the scriptures, dwelling on God’s inscrutable mercy. Hearing the priest reciting the hypnotic biblical phrases brought some respite, but not enough to allow him much sleep during the six days and nights he would remain in that cell. He barely ate, and he suffered from chronic headaches. He was in no fit condition, emotional or physical, to consult with his lawyers, who in order to prepare their case for bail needed from him a cogent narrative of the events he was battling so hard to keep out of his thoughts.
