Chase Your Shadow (25 page)

But among ordinary black people of both sexes and all ages who were not professionally involved in politics, the prevailing response to Pistorius was more sympathetic than it was among whites, regardless of whether or not they were inclined to believe the prosecution charge that he knew who was behind the bathroom door when he fired the fatal shots.

Time and again in conversation with older black women one heard them saying, ‘I think of him and it breaks my heart,’ or, ‘He lost his mother when he was fifteen. I feel I am his mother now.’ Young black men would say, ‘Look how he is suffering. He must not go to jail,’ or, ‘Anyone can do something terrible in a moment when they lose control. It could happen to anybody. We must forgive him.’ Over and over, from Johannesburg to Pretoria to Cape Town, random encounters with black people revealed sentiments along these lines. It was ‘Ubuntu’, as Archbishop Tutu would have been quick to point out, but it also derived from the long history of poverty and curtailed freedom that black people in South Africa had endured. Before, but also after, the end of apartheid, white people entertained the illusion enjoyed
by well-off people everywhere that they had control over their lives. Black people, even those whose lives had improved after apartheid, were more likely to carry with them a deeper knowledge, rooted in a keener experience of misfortune, that all individuals were subject to random forces over which they had little control. From this came a greater predisposition to put themselves in the shoes of others, even their enemies. Had blacks done to whites what whites did to blacks for centuries, whites would in all likelihood have shown far less mercy when the day of reckoning came.

Mandela said many times during the four-year transition between his release and 1994 when the terms of the handover of power were negotiated that he understood white fears of black rule. He understood that had he been born white in South Africa he would probably have assumed white racial prejudices. Having been born black, he shared most of his black compatriots’ readiness to judge people on their individual merits rather than on the color of their skin. Not all white South Africans understood that. A number chose to see Mandela as unique in his racial generosity. White South Africans came to venerate him as much as black South Africans did. When he died, three months before the start of the Pistorius trial, on December 5, 2013, his life was celebrated and his death mourned equally by South Africans of all races. But the truth was, as Mandela once said, that the ‘non-racial’ philosophy that had been the driving impulse of the organization he served for seventy years, the African National Congress, came from the people. It had not been imposed from the top down, but from the bottom up.

Judge Masipa was no exception to the general rule. She would be as fair-minded as any white judge in dealing with the white accused, and possibly more capable of imagining herself in his predicament. There was a particular reason to believe so. She, too, was, in practical terms,
disabled. A diminutive woman, barely five-foot tall, she was now sixty-six years of age and her bones were riddled with severe arthritis. She walked slowly and haltingly, swaying so precariously that she needed to hold onto someone’s hand to keep her balance when she tried to cover anything but the shortest distances. Pistorius could move more nimbly on his stumps than she could on her feet. In a country where everybody was afraid of crime she would know first-hand that to have limited physical movement increased one’s feeling of vulnerability. The defense’s hope was that in listening to the evidence she might detect a ring of truth in Pistorius’s explanation of what happened that might have eluded a physically more robust, ordinarily able judge.

14

He was a man of a strange temperament, Of mild demeanour though of savage mood
.

BYRON
,
DON JUAN

P
ISTORIUS HAD
always dreaded the notion that people might be sniggering at him behind his back. Now it felt as if the whole world were laughing in his face. In theaters and on TV South African stand-up comics were milking his shame with relish. Nik Rabinowitz, a merciless mimic, who captured his voice perfectly, portrayed him as a moany, trigger-happy psychopath.

During the first three months after the shooting packed houses guffawed at Rabinowitz’s jokes, but one day he was presented with an unexpected dilemma. He ran into the very man he was so profitably ridiculing at a lunch party in Johannesburg, finding himself alone in a room with only Pistorius and one other person present. Rabinowitz had a choice to make. Greet Pistorius or flee the room. For half a minute Rabinowitz froze, pondering what to do. ‘I thought, What if I introduce myself and he says he enjoys my shows? What if I like him? What if I feel sorry for him?’ Rabinowitz said, recalling the absurdity of his predicament with self-mocking delight. ‘The possibilities were frightening. I wouldn’t have the heart to make any more jokes about his legs, about shooting people in toilets.
It would ruin my act.’ Rabinowitz raced out of the room without saying hello.

Rabinowitz did not regret his choice. To portray Pistorius as a criminal buffoon, it helped not to know him. Rabinowitz traded on the fact that most of his audiences had only ever regarded Pistorius in caricature terms, as hero or villain. It would not have served his purposes to know that, in person, the famous Blade Runner could not just be likable, but he inspired loyalty. From Gemona, to Boston, to Reykjavik, to London, to Texas, to Pretoria, to Johannesburg, his friends stood by him, for the most part, and lamented his predicament.

It would not have been helpful to Rabinowitz to meet some of those friends, least of all one who was the exact opposite of Pistorius in almost every imaginable way.

Samkelo Radebe was black, Pistorius was white. Samkelo came from a poor background, Pistoris from an affluent one. Samkelo had been raised in a stable family and his mother remained ever present in his life, Pistorius came from a disrupted family and had been effectively orphaned at the age of fifteen. Samkelo had a law degree, Pistorius never completed his university studies. Samkelo had both arms cut off below the elbows, Pistorius had both legs cut off below the knees.

They first met at an athletics track when Samkelo was sixteen and Pistorius, already famous, nineteen. The one thing they had in common was that they were both fast runners.

‘I went up to Oscar, nervous, thinking he might be arrogant or aloof and, most probably, not interested in talking to a guy he’d never seen or heard of, like me,’ Samkelo recalled, drinking from a straw in a Johannesburg restaurant shortly before the beginning of the murder trial. ‘But I plucked up my courage and I said to him, “You’ve done us very proud.” And he shook my arm and said, “Thank you, that means
a lot to me,” and then he said, “I’ve seen you on the track. You’re really fast. Keep running. Work hard, and you’ll get far.” And I said to myself, “What the fuck? He’s seen me – me – and he says I must keep running?” It was crazy, unbelievable. I mean, he was so big. That made a huge impression on me. It changed my whole attitude. I did as he said. I worked hard, stopped playing and made it my aim to make the Paralympics team in 2008. After that meeting with Oscar I was on fire. On fire!’

Samkelo was a man who had every reason to have a complex, but betrayed no suggestion of one. He was short and wiry, chirpy in his manner, but walked with an athlete’s princely strut. He wore no prosthetics in public, went about in short sleeves, saw no need to hide his mutilated limbs from himself or other people. Betraying no self-consciousness on a first introduction, he would reach out his right stump, inviting one, with an impish smile and a wink, to wrap one’s fingers around it and give it a shake. He was good-humored, funny and clever, exuberantly determined to accept life on the terms he had received it. Hugh Herr, the MIT professor who had lost his legs in a climbing accident, had said that amputees like himself and Pistorius came out of their experiences ‘stronger than hell’. This seemed to be especially true of Samkelo, who had endured a loss far more punishingly restrictive than either Herr or Pistorius, and whose easy, impish nature disguised a big reservoir of moral courage.

How he had lost his arms was not a taboo subject. He would, quite matter of factly, tell anyone who asked that it had happened when he was nine years old when he grabbed a pair of live electrical cables while playing with friends in the Johannesburg township where he grew up. He was laid up in hospital for nine months and every day his mother came to sit by his side, looking cheerful and optimistic. It was only very recently, fifteen years after the accident, he said, that
his mother had confessed to him that she had cried every time on the way to hospital and cried all the way back home. ‘It shocked me when she told me because she was always smiling when I saw her,’ Samkelo said, ‘but it made me love my mother even more. It made me realize how fortunate I am to have the family I have.’

His other stroke of fortune was to have met his favorite sportsman at a point in his life when he was not sure what his own priorities should be. From one day to the next, he threw himself into disabled athletic competition, from 100 to 800 meters, to long jump, to high jump, to cycling. He set new records, won gold medals. ‘And all in the very year I met Oscar! It was absolutely no coincidence that I made it into the South African national team. Hard, hard, hard work was the key, and Oscar was the spark that got me going.’

Samkelo gesticulated exuberantly with his stunted arms as he spoke, excited to talk about his athletics career and the role the champion who would become his friend had played in it. Five years after they met, in 2011, the two were competing side by side at the world disabled games in New Zealand. ‘Me and some of the other younger athletes hung out with Oscar and he completely confirmed that first impression he’d made on me. He was just a regular guy. He was a superstar, but he never made you feel that he thought he was superior. He showed us pictures of the cars he’d driven, places he had been, of his home. But it wasn’t showing off. We really wanted to know all about him. But he also helped us with practical stuff, telling us what we should do and not do to avoid getting injured and be in peak condition when we needed to be.’

The highlight of Christchurch for Samkelo was when he represented South Africa in the 4 × 100 meters relay alongside his boyhood hero. Samkelo ran the first leg. ‘Oscar said to me before the race, “If you false start I’m gonna run all the way around the track and smack
you.” I said, “You won’t catch me.” He said, “Trust me, I will!” We were smiling and laughing but then he turned serious and said, “Okay, let’s have fun, enjoy it, do what we have to do.” It was captain talk and we accepted it as such. He said enjoy it and we did. And we won the race. For me Oscar was a big brother.’

But Samkelo also saw something in his big brother during that visit to New Zealand that took him aback. He discovered that the man he had put on a pedestal was much more emotionally fragile than he let on. For the first time in his seven years as a disabled runner, Pistorius lost a race. It was in the 100 meters, against a one-legged American runner called Jerome Singleton. Samkelo was there watching.

‘Oscar cried after the race and on the team bus on the way home it was really awkward for the rest of us. He was so upset, fighting back tears until he just let go and wept inconsolably. I remember thinking, Wow! This really is his life, his whole life.’

Samkelo, then at law school, reflected that he had done well to spread his options more widely. Running fast gave him joy and made him proud, but studying for a degree consumed his energies as much, giving his life a balance, a perspective, and a contact with the real world of everyday work that his friend lacked. Samkelo did not receive sponsorships or the free use of fast cars but he had a future beyond sports. Seeing Pistorous break down on that bus in New Zealand gave Samkelo a glimpse of the vulnerability behind the superhero facade. Yet, he said, it made him value his friend’s virtues all the more.

Just as vivid for Samkelo was the recollection of Pistorius’s generosity on a night out in Christchurch after the games were over. ‘We wanted to go out and see the town but we were a bit nervous. We didn’t know our way around and we also had very little money. So he said, “No, guys. I’ll pay. I’ll look after you. Let’s go.” And he paid for the taxi and took us to a bar and he bought the drinks and made us all feel so
special. He’d say, “You guys still okay? You ready to go home? If you want to, just tell me.” He was so considerate. He knew this was his world, but not ours. He really was like a big brother, herding the kids around, introducing us to this grown-up, foreign world.’

Samkelo never socialized with Pistorius outside of athletics, but they formed what would become a lasting bond a year after New Zealand when they ran together in the 2012 Paralympic Games in London. The Olympic Stadium was as full every day as it had been a month earlier for the Olympics themselves. At previous Paralympic competitions, in Beijing, Sydney and elsewhere, there had always been plenty of empty seats, but for several of the events in London there was standing room only. Scalpers sold tickets at inflated prices outside the venues. There was wall-to-wall coverage on British TV and the broadcasts were transmitted live around the world. Big banners in London read ‘Paralympics, we are the superhumans’. The more sober message the event’s organizers strove to convey was that the games were ‘about ability, not disability – about what people can do, not what they cannot do’.

There was more than an echo there of one of Pistorius’s favorite catchphrases. The MIT professor Hugh Herr, who followed his performances in London keenly, picked it up. ‘It was Oscar, fresh from making history in the Olympics, who drove the whole thing,’ Herr said. ‘The image projected with brilliant orchestration by the Brit marketing people was that their stories here were not about cripples but about gladiators, and Oscar was the big brand around which the marketing strategy was built. His story was THE story. Everyone knew it. He was at the top of that wave, the king of the Games.’