''And on this Christian holiday, Good Friday, the whole of South Africa became aware of the existence of Griekwastad. It all started when a fifteen-year-old boy named Don Steenkamp sped into town in his father's white Isuzu double-cab and screeched to a halt in front of the town's almost deserted police station. It was shortly before 19h00 when Don jumped out of the vehicle, dressed in black rugby shorts and a T-shirt, and ran into the station's charge office covered in blood...''
As a creole of African and European descent myself, Griekwastad ('Griquatown' in English) is a place of immense historical significance. Although South African history books still refer to them as 'bastards' (persons of multicultural heritage), the Griquas had been among the first of many groups of creole peoples to abandon European Dutch society at the Cape of Good Hope and, under the leadership of captains, migrated further inland to free themselves of colonial rule. Fueled by the desire for self-determination, theirs had been acts of resistance, at the time. The Griqua migration had a surprising domino effect upon the formation of modern South Africa, and Namibia, in that it resembled the great mfecane migrations that irrevocably changed the political and demographical landscape in southern Africa.
After having settled among the Griqua in what is now known as the Northern Cape, a rudimentary settlement was reportedly established by one William Anderson of the London Missionary Society in 1801. It was, however, the indomitable and ambitious Griqua captains, Andries Waterboer and Adam Kok, who were ultimately responsible for putting Griekwastad on the proverbial map, and its people and politics in the spotlight.
Under British colonial rule, Afrikaans-speaking whites settled among the Griqua on land made available to them but, tragically, a combination of colonialism and Apartheid, the Group Areas Act specifically, established and promulgated a white elite, the primary beneficiaries of massive tracts of good farming, commercial and residential land, at the cost of the indigenous creole population whose rights were curtailed and who were forcefully removed to badlands by racially discriminatory legislation. The results are evident to this day: the economic marginalisation, social deterioration and impoverishment of the creole community living in and around Griekwastad.
But, spoiler alert, you won't read about any of the aforementioned in The Griekwastad Murders by Jacques Steenkamp. Readers who are not South African nor acquainted with its history, may struggle to orientate themselves and connect with the town of Griekwastad based on Steenkamp's rather vague and sketchy description in two paragraphs, only, out of 386 pages, of a town in the Northern Cape that was the setting for a brutal triple murder in 2012. A murder so heinous, that it reverberated throughout southern Africa. After briefly mentioning the white settler, Anderson, Steenkamp, surprisingly, had so little to say about the town's rich creole history, politics and culture that even a short sentence about a monument honouring the famous Griqua captain, Andries Waterboer, just outside the town, could not be found anywhere in the book.
There is something to be said though for how we view ourselves and how others view us. Both are lenses, or prisms, through which we may evaluate the strength, credibility and quality of written narratives, in this case, true crime in post-Apartheid southern Africa. As we all know, events do not occur in vacuums; everything (and everyone) has context. The murders at Griekwastad in 2012 had occurred within a specific context; economic, social, political and racial. Authors study and approach their subjects from a specific angle and we, readers, are privy to an overall view of how well authors relate to their chosen subjects through their work; in other words, how well a story is told.
It is but moderately understandable that Steenkamp, being a white Afrikaans-speaking male, not a native of Griekwastad, an outsider, himself, and a journalist, would approach this story from the perspective of the white, privileged other. Then again, in this regard also, I have to mention that the lack of effort made to properly orientate the non-South African reader with research and facts related to the context and setting of the horrendous events of 2012, for example, the town, the farm, Naauwhoek, its environment, the community, its history, facts and figures especially, politics and demographics, made for disorientating and patchy first-person narration.
On Good Friday, 6 April 2012, a white teenager raced into the town of Griekwastad in a double-cab utility vehicle from a surrounding farm. He stopped at the police station and informed the two creole policemen on duty that his family had been attacked on their farm, Naauwhoek; that his father, Deon Steenkamp, mother, Christel, and sister, Marthella, had been killed but that he had managed to escape. The teenager was covered in blood. In the Isuzu double-cab truck (or bakkie) he had used to drive to the police station, two weapons were found: a hunting rifle and a revolver.
In an engaging, factual manner, Steenkamp narrated how he became interested and involved in the unfolding drama surrounding the triple murders in Griekwastad after having found out about them, online. Farm attacks and murders in South Africa are emotionally-charged matters because white Afrikaans-speaking communities in that country appear to believe that there's a hidden agenda behind the attacks and murders, and the word 'genocide' is often used with alarming alacrity in reference to both. From extant media reports on farm attacks, it appears that some provinces in South Africa are more prone to attacks than others, and that the purpose of these attacks are to deprive through criminal means. In order to steal firearms, jewelry, cash, goods and vehicles, attackers brutally torture and murder the farmers. It was after the white teenager had reported that his family had been killed in such a farm attack, and the investigating authorities from Kimberley, the provincial capital, had arrived and looked over the crime scene, that something appeared to be amiss with the teenager's story.
Steenkamp pointed out in his narrative that that part of the Northern Cape province was not known for farm attacks and murders but, that's also all he wrote about crime in the Northern Cape. The reader has no idea what the crime statistics were for that year, for that area, for that town, or historically, who was most affected by crime, nor the nature of crimes specific to that area. Again, the lack of information made for a disorientating read, the more so because it is true crime.
His task as a journalist and an outsider was an unenviable one. The white community in Griekwastad was small with close ties to each other. At a restaurant across the street from the police station, where the traumatised teenager received sympathy and sugared water on the night of the murders, the white farming elite regularly gathered to socialise. Although not as crucial to the overall story as the farm, Naauwhoek, the restaurant offered the reader a glimpse into the town's social hierarchy. As a white, Afrikaans-speaking male though, Steenkamp was already 'inside' that community and only had to make the right noises to get pertinent information.
A newspaper journalist, he also had great difficulty in getting anyone close to the affected family to speak to him and it was not for lack of trying, either. He contacted the spokesperson for the police, the foster family and guardian of the surviving teenager, fifteen-year-old Don Steenkamp, he attended tent-pegging tournaments, contacted the attorneys for the boy, the school principal, the policemen, investigating officers and was always faced with a reluctance to communicate, bordering on secrecy, by the adults around the teenager. It is to be understood, of course, that a newspaper journalist would be confronted by a frustrating wall of silence especially when it became apparent that young Don Steenkamp, the only survivor of the 'farm murder', had also emerged as the main suspect.
After the boy's arrest and successful bail applications, Steenkamp kept the reader engaged, building up to the court case, by 'following the money', to use a tired cliche. He was curious as to who was responsible for paying for Don Steenkamp's expensive legal representation. It is during this part of his narrative that one is allowed to fully understand and grasp the power and the privilege that enveloped fifteen-year-old Don Steenkamp, as a member of the white elite. In South African law, for example, the 'bloody hand' is not allowed to benefit from its crime but, as Jacques Steenkamp disconcertingly discovered, even while young Don was scheduled to be tried in court for murdering his father, mother and sister, Marthella, in a criminal case made against him by the police, his grandparents, aunts and foster family tried their utmost to ensure that, in the event he was found guilty of murder and went to prison, Don would eventually leave prison with a fortune to his name. And, by fortune I mean an estate, including three farms, worth millions in South African Rands.
This book is the more horrifying for detailing, as it should, the last moments of the last day in the lives of Deon, Christel and their daughter, Marthella Steenkamp, the circumstances surrounding their deaths, and their son and brother, Don's behaviour and actions. The author, a seasoned journalist, could have done more to put some of the witness testimonies in court into greater perspective for the reader. For example, when Don Steenkamp had declared in his statement to the police that his sister, Marthella, had torn his T-shirt to shreds just before she died, the testimony of the blood-spatter expert in court should have been juxtaposed with the accused's version of events so as to heighten the significance of the expert's findings, which definitively refuted the accused's version.
In March of 2014, Don Steenkamp was found guilty by a black judge, controversial Northern Cape High Court Judge President, Frans Kgomo, a man of humble origins who had elevated himself out of debilitating poverty through education, and was subsequently sentenced to twenty years in jail for murdering his family. The irony and significance of this did not evade me. Jacques Steenkamp narrated that on the day of his sentencing, the teenager showed no emotion at having been found guilty. It was also at the sentencing that the repulsive motive behind the Griekwastad murders became credible, properly contextualised and young Steenkamp's guilt unquestionable. This true crime story is not for the faint-hearted and is backed up by extensive media reports and primary accounts on social media platforms.
The problematic elements in the book are caused by the 'gaze of the other' that permeated the narrative. For example, Jacques Steenkamp, the journalist, was eager to engage the white foster family of the young accused, friends of the family and even attended tent-pegging events the murdered Steenkamp family members had supported and yet, he failed to meaningfully engage the creole farm-workers who had been living on the Steenkamps' farm, at the time of the murders. I was sincerely puzzled by this because the farm-workers were the very first witnesses who had seen young Don Steenkamp flee the scene of the crime, and only him - no one else. They were crucial in establishing that there were no attackers on the farm, as he had alleged. It also struck me as odd that Steenkamp had not extensively interviewed them to paint a more comprehensive picture for the reader of who the Steenkamps were and what they were up to of an average day.
Another example of an opportunity missed, to create atmosphere, Steenkamp briefly described the dissatisfaction of a crowd of creole people at the perceived preferential treatment the white teenager seemed to receive, after his arrest. This piqued my interest. I was curious to know what they had to say and how they felt, their underlying resentment, because Steenkamp himself had inserted the crowd into his narrative. Regrettably, this was merely an observation made in passing because he had not interviewed anyone of the affected creole community, the cultural majority in that province, to gauge their understanding and views of the horrific crime that had been committed in their midst, and which, initially, had implicated them as the perpetrators.
The same goes for Steenkamp's narrative regarding the black judge, creole officers and experts who testified in court. I found it surprising and unnecessary that he described one expert as 'arrogant', and arrogant that he questioned the competency of the judge at one point, which confirmed my notion that for him, a journalist, his status as a member of the white elite in South Africa was very much the only lens through which he approached his work, and more importantly, viewed others not of his community.
It could have been a great book, all the elements were there to create a multilayered, rich narrative with depth if only it had been thoroughly appreciative of the broader complexities of the context in which the murders were committed, along the lines of Truman Capote's true crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood. These elements alone would have provided it with the necessary dissonance to have the reader experience the true horror of the Griekwastad murders. We can but live in hope.
The Griekwastad Murders: The Crime that Shook South Africa was first published by PenguinRandomHouse South Africa in 2014, with an updated edition published in 2015. This book is available to order at www.bookbuddynamibia.com .
As a creole of African and European descent myself, Griekwastad ('Griquatown' in English) is a place of immense historical significance. Although South African history books still refer to them as 'bastards' (persons of multicultural heritage), the Griquas had been among the first of many groups of creole peoples to abandon European Dutch society at the Cape of Good Hope and, under the leadership of captains, migrated further inland to free themselves of colonial rule. Fueled by the desire for self-determination, theirs had been acts of resistance, at the time. The Griqua migration had a surprising domino effect upon the formation of modern South Africa, and Namibia, in that it resembled the great mfecane migrations that irrevocably changed the political and demographical landscape in southern Africa.
After having settled among the Griqua in what is now known as the Northern Cape, a rudimentary settlement was reportedly established by one William Anderson of the London Missionary Society in 1801. It was, however, the indomitable and ambitious Griqua captains, Andries Waterboer and Adam Kok, who were ultimately responsible for putting Griekwastad on the proverbial map, and its people and politics in the spotlight.
Under British colonial rule, Afrikaans-speaking whites settled among the Griqua on land made available to them but, tragically, a combination of colonialism and Apartheid, the Group Areas Act specifically, established and promulgated a white elite, the primary beneficiaries of massive tracts of good farming, commercial and residential land, at the cost of the indigenous creole population whose rights were curtailed and who were forcefully removed to badlands by racially discriminatory legislation. The results are evident to this day: the economic marginalisation, social deterioration and impoverishment of the creole community living in and around Griekwastad.
But, spoiler alert, you won't read about any of the aforementioned in The Griekwastad Murders by Jacques Steenkamp. Readers who are not South African nor acquainted with its history, may struggle to orientate themselves and connect with the town of Griekwastad based on Steenkamp's rather vague and sketchy description in two paragraphs, only, out of 386 pages, of a town in the Northern Cape that was the setting for a brutal triple murder in 2012. A murder so heinous, that it reverberated throughout southern Africa. After briefly mentioning the white settler, Anderson, Steenkamp, surprisingly, had so little to say about the town's rich creole history, politics and culture that even a short sentence about a monument honouring the famous Griqua captain, Andries Waterboer, just outside the town, could not be found anywhere in the book.
There is something to be said though for how we view ourselves and how others view us. Both are lenses, or prisms, through which we may evaluate the strength, credibility and quality of written narratives, in this case, true crime in post-Apartheid southern Africa. As we all know, events do not occur in vacuums; everything (and everyone) has context. The murders at Griekwastad in 2012 had occurred within a specific context; economic, social, political and racial. Authors study and approach their subjects from a specific angle and we, readers, are privy to an overall view of how well authors relate to their chosen subjects through their work; in other words, how well a story is told.
It is but moderately understandable that Steenkamp, being a white Afrikaans-speaking male, not a native of Griekwastad, an outsider, himself, and a journalist, would approach this story from the perspective of the white, privileged other. Then again, in this regard also, I have to mention that the lack of effort made to properly orientate the non-South African reader with research and facts related to the context and setting of the horrendous events of 2012, for example, the town, the farm, Naauwhoek, its environment, the community, its history, facts and figures especially, politics and demographics, made for disorientating and patchy first-person narration.
On Good Friday, 6 April 2012, a white teenager raced into the town of Griekwastad in a double-cab utility vehicle from a surrounding farm. He stopped at the police station and informed the two creole policemen on duty that his family had been attacked on their farm, Naauwhoek; that his father, Deon Steenkamp, mother, Christel, and sister, Marthella, had been killed but that he had managed to escape. The teenager was covered in blood. In the Isuzu double-cab truck (or bakkie) he had used to drive to the police station, two weapons were found: a hunting rifle and a revolver.
In an engaging, factual manner, Steenkamp narrated how he became interested and involved in the unfolding drama surrounding the triple murders in Griekwastad after having found out about them, online. Farm attacks and murders in South Africa are emotionally-charged matters because white Afrikaans-speaking communities in that country appear to believe that there's a hidden agenda behind the attacks and murders, and the word 'genocide' is often used with alarming alacrity in reference to both. From extant media reports on farm attacks, it appears that some provinces in South Africa are more prone to attacks than others, and that the purpose of these attacks are to deprive through criminal means. In order to steal firearms, jewelry, cash, goods and vehicles, attackers brutally torture and murder the farmers. It was after the white teenager had reported that his family had been killed in such a farm attack, and the investigating authorities from Kimberley, the provincial capital, had arrived and looked over the crime scene, that something appeared to be amiss with the teenager's story.
Steenkamp pointed out in his narrative that that part of the Northern Cape province was not known for farm attacks and murders but, that's also all he wrote about crime in the Northern Cape. The reader has no idea what the crime statistics were for that year, for that area, for that town, or historically, who was most affected by crime, nor the nature of crimes specific to that area. Again, the lack of information made for a disorientating read, the more so because it is true crime.
His task as a journalist and an outsider was an unenviable one. The white community in Griekwastad was small with close ties to each other. At a restaurant across the street from the police station, where the traumatised teenager received sympathy and sugared water on the night of the murders, the white farming elite regularly gathered to socialise. Although not as crucial to the overall story as the farm, Naauwhoek, the restaurant offered the reader a glimpse into the town's social hierarchy. As a white, Afrikaans-speaking male though, Steenkamp was already 'inside' that community and only had to make the right noises to get pertinent information.
A newspaper journalist, he also had great difficulty in getting anyone close to the affected family to speak to him and it was not for lack of trying, either. He contacted the spokesperson for the police, the foster family and guardian of the surviving teenager, fifteen-year-old Don Steenkamp, he attended tent-pegging tournaments, contacted the attorneys for the boy, the school principal, the policemen, investigating officers and was always faced with a reluctance to communicate, bordering on secrecy, by the adults around the teenager. It is to be understood, of course, that a newspaper journalist would be confronted by a frustrating wall of silence especially when it became apparent that young Don Steenkamp, the only survivor of the 'farm murder', had also emerged as the main suspect.
After the boy's arrest and successful bail applications, Steenkamp kept the reader engaged, building up to the court case, by 'following the money', to use a tired cliche. He was curious as to who was responsible for paying for Don Steenkamp's expensive legal representation. It is during this part of his narrative that one is allowed to fully understand and grasp the power and the privilege that enveloped fifteen-year-old Don Steenkamp, as a member of the white elite. In South African law, for example, the 'bloody hand' is not allowed to benefit from its crime but, as Jacques Steenkamp disconcertingly discovered, even while young Don was scheduled to be tried in court for murdering his father, mother and sister, Marthella, in a criminal case made against him by the police, his grandparents, aunts and foster family tried their utmost to ensure that, in the event he was found guilty of murder and went to prison, Don would eventually leave prison with a fortune to his name. And, by fortune I mean an estate, including three farms, worth millions in South African Rands.
This book is the more horrifying for detailing, as it should, the last moments of the last day in the lives of Deon, Christel and their daughter, Marthella Steenkamp, the circumstances surrounding their deaths, and their son and brother, Don's behaviour and actions. The author, a seasoned journalist, could have done more to put some of the witness testimonies in court into greater perspective for the reader. For example, when Don Steenkamp had declared in his statement to the police that his sister, Marthella, had torn his T-shirt to shreds just before she died, the testimony of the blood-spatter expert in court should have been juxtaposed with the accused's version of events so as to heighten the significance of the expert's findings, which definitively refuted the accused's version.
In March of 2014, Don Steenkamp was found guilty by a black judge, controversial Northern Cape High Court Judge President, Frans Kgomo, a man of humble origins who had elevated himself out of debilitating poverty through education, and was subsequently sentenced to twenty years in jail for murdering his family. The irony and significance of this did not evade me. Jacques Steenkamp narrated that on the day of his sentencing, the teenager showed no emotion at having been found guilty. It was also at the sentencing that the repulsive motive behind the Griekwastad murders became credible, properly contextualised and young Steenkamp's guilt unquestionable. This true crime story is not for the faint-hearted and is backed up by extensive media reports and primary accounts on social media platforms.
The problematic elements in the book are caused by the 'gaze of the other' that permeated the narrative. For example, Jacques Steenkamp, the journalist, was eager to engage the white foster family of the young accused, friends of the family and even attended tent-pegging events the murdered Steenkamp family members had supported and yet, he failed to meaningfully engage the creole farm-workers who had been living on the Steenkamps' farm, at the time of the murders. I was sincerely puzzled by this because the farm-workers were the very first witnesses who had seen young Don Steenkamp flee the scene of the crime, and only him - no one else. They were crucial in establishing that there were no attackers on the farm, as he had alleged. It also struck me as odd that Steenkamp had not extensively interviewed them to paint a more comprehensive picture for the reader of who the Steenkamps were and what they were up to of an average day.
Another example of an opportunity missed, to create atmosphere, Steenkamp briefly described the dissatisfaction of a crowd of creole people at the perceived preferential treatment the white teenager seemed to receive, after his arrest. This piqued my interest. I was curious to know what they had to say and how they felt, their underlying resentment, because Steenkamp himself had inserted the crowd into his narrative. Regrettably, this was merely an observation made in passing because he had not interviewed anyone of the affected creole community, the cultural majority in that province, to gauge their understanding and views of the horrific crime that had been committed in their midst, and which, initially, had implicated them as the perpetrators.
The same goes for Steenkamp's narrative regarding the black judge, creole officers and experts who testified in court. I found it surprising and unnecessary that he described one expert as 'arrogant', and arrogant that he questioned the competency of the judge at one point, which confirmed my notion that for him, a journalist, his status as a member of the white elite in South Africa was very much the only lens through which he approached his work, and more importantly, viewed others not of his community.
It could have been a great book, all the elements were there to create a multilayered, rich narrative with depth if only it had been thoroughly appreciative of the broader complexities of the context in which the murders were committed, along the lines of Truman Capote's true crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood. These elements alone would have provided it with the necessary dissonance to have the reader experience the true horror of the Griekwastad murders. We can but live in hope.
The Griekwastad Murders: The Crime that Shook South Africa was first published by PenguinRandomHouse South Africa in 2014, with an updated edition published in 2015. This book is available to order at www.bookbuddynamibia.com .
Comments
Post a Comment