A few days after Daniel Iancu and Martin Wolmarans along with the latter’s ex-wife and kid crashed their BMW X3 and lieutenant-colonel Armand van Reenen slept fitfully, Dingaan Mngomezulu, a freelance journalist working undercover on a diamond smuggling story in Botswana, decided to call his girlfriend in a moment of loneliness. He’d been in the bush for six weeks and because the story forced him to be with a group of illegal miners, he’d had no contact with the outside world and thus knew nothing of the shit storm in South Africa. While he was relaxing in the bathtub with a beer and thinking about phone sex, Dingaan turned on his satellite phone and dialed his girlfriend’s Johannesburg number. No answer. It didn’t even ring. What the hell, did the tsotsis (black criminals from the township) steal the fucking cables again? So, he dialed her cell phone number. “The subscriber you have dialed is not available. Please try again later.” Like hell. He tried the next-door neighbor. Same result. He tried the office. No joy. Fellow journalists. Again nothing. What the fuck? Then he turned on his pad… News came in. There had supposedly been a white-led coup in South Africa. Security services were rounding up backers and sympathizers, foreign embassy staff and families were ordered to stay in their compounds. There were some SABC-supplied videos of whites being arrested and blacks with placards demanding their homes. It was repetitive, there was nothing new. Every private TV station was off the air, only the government-owned SABC was broadcasting.
Dingaan smelled a rat. More than that, he smelled a story. He was one of South Africa’s millions of AIDS orphans and hadn’t had an easy life. His father had been an ANC ward councilor in the township neighborhood. A good, caring man who was passionate about the welfare of the residents and worked like mad to develop his ward. After his first term ran out, he stood again for election. It seemed like an easy contest, but things were getting darker and in the last few months he’d refused a lot of bribes. Somebody needed a corrupt councilor and one night two hitmen shot him in front of his modest RDP house after a long day of knocking on his constituents’ doors. His mother cradled her husband’s head as he drowned in his own blood. Either the hitters had panicked, or they just didn’t have the decency to put a bullet in his head, so Dingaan came home from the shop to see his mother’s face spattered with her husband’s blood. Things got worse from there. Without his dad’s salary, the kid might have lost his place at a former whites-only school, but his academic performance was so good that the school principal (a white guy) convinced the Education Department big shots he knew to pitch in a few bucks, pinched money from the school’s donations fund and even forked out some from his own pocket to keep the youngster in school. It was in those days, after he’d seen what bullets can do, that Dingaan decided to change the world with words.
His talents were recognized and armed with a glowing recommendation signed by all of his teachers, he got a full scholarship to study journalism at Wits University two years later. It was the only bright light in his mother’s otherwise darkening existence. The senior Mngomezulu had been a good man, but he wasn’t perfect. He loved the ladies and had had numerous affairs. Stupidly, he didn’t like to use a condom and was infected with HIV, which he’d passed on to his unsuspecting wife. The grief over his death combined with the financial problems that came afterwards compromised the woman’s immune system so much that she ended up in hospital, where she was diagnosed with AIDS. There was no money for fancy new treatments, so she had to rely on government healthcare. Because it was incompetent and corrupt, the ANC government fucked that up too. Supply of tablets was erratic, queues lengthened, doctors left in droves and a few bouts of pneumonia coupled with an awakened case of previously cured TB later, the still grieving mother died a year before her son graduated from university. Dingaan Mngomezulu was a bright young guy. He suspected the ANC killed his father, but he’d always know it had definitely killed his mother with its incompetence, corruption and neglect. In a sea of over 60 million people, he was just one more enemy the ANC had made for itself without knowing, and it was about to bite the party in the ass big time.
Returning to South Africa was easy, no problems at Customs, and he drove to Johannesburg. On the way back he noticed the occasional overloaded car and frightened white occupants driving like bats out of hell. He got a bad feeling, but drove on. He lived with his girlfriend in a modest apartment on De la Rey street in Yeoville, just a few streets down from the famous Rockey street. It used to be a white neighborhood, but had become increasingly black and drug dealer-infested since 1999. As he returned home, it seemed like a normal day. Black people were riding to work in minibus taxis, police drove around, there were some army trucks, but nothing really stood out until he got closer to his suburb. That was when Dingaan began to see broken furniture in the streets, a few black people lugging TVs and hi-fi systems. Maybe they were moving, he thought. His girlfriend wasn’t in the apartment they shared, so he dumped his travel stuff and picked up his equipment bag. Driving towards the Eastgate shopping center (used to be the biggest mall in the southern hemisphere once) where his agent had a small office, he had to go through the slightly more posh suburb of Observatory. There he saw some gates had been ripped off and to his shock even an elderly white man lying dead in a yard. Instead of going directly to the office, he took a drive through the suburb and then began to see what looked like hell on earth. Black people roamed around, carrying furniture in and out of houses, smiling and chatting, seemingly unaffected by the dead bodies around them. Carefully, he snapped pictures of the scene and moved on.
Five minutes later he was driving past the Eastgate mall and made a right turn on Boeing road behind it, heading for an office block. There were clear signs of looting everywhere, papers strewn around and dozens of black people carrying out of the mall furniture, clothes and everything else they could. Some cops drove by, looked, did nothing. He took a picture of that too, but very carefully because cops had always been hostile towards anybody who filmed them. By the time he got to the office, Dingaan had a pretty good idea of what was going on and came to the realization that the ANC had finally begun to go after the whites. He didn’t bother to get out of the car when he reached the office. The building had been broken into and there were clear signs of vandalism everywhere, so he drove to a gas station in Bruma and filled up. The Hyundai wasn’t his, it was a rental, but it seemed like society was coming apart and he needed the car, so he endured the reflexive guilt that came with driving what was in effect about to become a stolen vehicle and headed towards downtown Johannesburg. It was a nightmare from the deepest bowels of Hades. Businesses had been looted, car dealerships’ lots were empty, broken glass everywhere. There was no live white person to be seen, but all around were black people driving with cars and trucks loaded with brand new furniture and household appliances, as if there was a national shopping spree going on. He turned around when he got to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, because by then it was just one mess after another. Newspaper houses were shut along with other media houses, cops standing guard in front of their doors. Financial institutions like Liberty Life and Metropolitan had been hit hard, with broken windows, papers flying everywhere and smoke coming from the broken windows on some floors of their office buildings. The pattern had become abundantly clear- “white monopoly capital” was on the way out.
To be thorough, he hit the freeway and headed for Pretoria. South Africa’s other capital looked the same- normal in black townships, but hellish on the way to formerly white neighborhoods. He took pictures, as many as he could, then headed towards where the foreign embassies were. Dingaan couldn’t get in because cops and soldiers blocked the streets. It was quiet there, though the message was obvious- nobody in or out, not without our say-so. He found a gas station and filled up again, then headed for the Botswana border. No phones or internet in South Africa, but he had a hot story and needed to tell it while his multiple entry visa still worked. Along the way he used up his cell phone’s memory with recorded voice notes and by the time he got to Gaborone, all he needed was three hours in front of his laptop to put the words together and attach the pictures. With a shudder of excitement passing through his body, he pressed Send then allowed himself to fall into bed exhausted and horrified by what he’d seen.
Four hours later, while he was in the throes of a nightmare, the satphone rang. It was David Marks of The Guardian in London, very excited. Dingaan confirmed the story was real and that he had even more photos besides what he’d sent. David Marks was a lot of things, but fool wasn’t among them. A sub-editor with ambitions to be even more, he’d seen plenty of journalists and newspapers get taken in by sophisticated “fake news” over the years, and was determined not to have the same thing happen to him. David told Dingaan that his bosses said he needed to come to London and if everything proved to be true, the story would run. First though, he had to be asked a lot of questions and “fluttered” (polygraphed) later. Due to South African government bungling and corruption, the passports were regarded as suspect and the previous agreement to allow South Africans entry into the UK without a visa had been repealed. It would have taken days, but this time the chief editor and owners of The Guardian agreed to hit everybody they knew at the Home Office to expedite Dingaan’s visa application- all he needed was to go to the British embassy with his passport.
Within hours, Dingaan was on a British Airways flight to Heathrow, and this saved his life. There was no time to play around. The Guardian had a car waiting for him and it drove straight to the office. There he was debriefed by David Marks and The Guardian’s entire editorial board, where he handed over the remainder of his pictures. Those men and women thought themselves tough, having seen plenty pictures of murder scenes and mayhem, but what Dingaan showed them made everybody nearly lose their breakfasts. Little did they know that it would get worse in the days to come… The pictures were checked by photo experts and found to be genuine, the cell phone and digital camera showing no signs of tampering. Everything checked out, even the embedded GPS coordinates. The next step was at once easier and harder, because they led him to a room where two unsmiling men waited around displays and wiring. In short order he was hooked up to the polygraph and then followed an hour’s worth of questions. Tired and sweaty, Dingaan came through and The Guardian editors decided to go with the story. In the meantime, they expected everything from spooks to priests would be interested in speaking with Dingaan, and once the story hit the wire, the South African government would probably try to get to him, so they put him up in one of their safe houses under the protection of the best ex-SAS security detail their money could buy.
End of Part 5. To be continued…
Mircea Negres
Port Elizabeth
South Africa
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