A Toronto Star opinion piece:
Oscar Pistorius will likely get off because fear animates much of South African lives
A great many South Africans will believe the general gist of Pistorius’s story, enough to arouse reasonable doubt, and certainly enough to convince them there was no premeditation, Cathal Kelly writes.
On my first night in Johannesburg, I accidentally shut the rape door behind me, trapping myself in the bedroom.
Most middle-class homes in South Africa feature ‘rape doors’ — sliding jail doors that compartmentalize a house so that no intruder can get at you if — and this is the phrase commonly used — “your perimeter is breached.”
It was funny for a minute. Then I realized that since all the windows in the bedroom were barred, I had no way to get out in case of a fire.
We phoned the couple we’d rented our pleasant bungalow from and explained the situation. The owner laughed a long time, and then said he’d be by in the morning to release me.
South Africans are afraid of many things. Fire is not one of them.
This is the atmosphere in which Oscar Pistorius’s credulity stretching explanation of why he shot girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp to death as she cowered in a bathroom will be received. It’s the reason he’s going to get off.
We spent six weeks there covering the 2010 World Cup. There is no sufficient way to explain the paranoia about home security that grips average South Africans, except to say that fear animates much of their lives. The home we rented was typical.
It was surrounded by 10-foot walls. The walls were topped by electric fencing. When you look down a Jo’burg street, it gives the appearance of the frontage of a prison — all high walls, topped by electric fencing (for the well off) or razor wire (for the not-so-well off).
A submarine door accessed the street, but we were warned never to use it. People enter and exit using the garage door, which was solid-oak, three-inches thick and would not stop once it began coming down if someone was under it. This is to prevent anyone coming in behind you as you enter — an infamous home-invasion tactic.
Inside were the aforementioned rape doors. There was a gun locker (empty) in the master bedroom. Each room had a white button labelled ‘Panic.’
“What happens if I hit the button?” I asked the landlord as lightly as possible. I presumed it triggered a silent alarm. No, it summons the private-security company that is constantly roaming the neighbourhood in SUVs with blacked-out windows. The country is wracked by violence, but South Africans do not trust the police force and would not bother calling them.
“If you hit that button, someone will be here in 90 seconds with a machine gun,” he said. He wasn’t kidding.
Many of the media companies that covered that event hired drivers and armed bodyguards to squire them around. We work for newspapers, so we counted on our wits, which worked out better than you’d think.
On Tuesday morning, you may have heard Pistorius’s version of events. He could not sleep on a hot night, and had walked out on his stumps to take air on the balcony around 3 a.m. He heard a noise. It occurred to him that the bathroom window was open, and that there was a ladder on the property. He thought Steenkamp was still asleep in bed, and called out to her, telling her to phone police.
He also called out a warning to the presumptive burglar. He collected a pistol he kept under the bed. He approached the bathroom door. Having given the first warning, he began firing through it.
Pistorius said it had not occurred to him that Steenkamp might be inside. He returned to the bedroom, and then saw that Steenkamp was not there.
“That’s when it dawned on me it must have been Reeva in the toilet,” he said, according to a prepared statement.
You may not believe it. I may not believe it. A great, great many South Africans will believe it — not all of it perhaps, but the general gist. Enough to arouse reasonable doubt, and certainly enough to convince them there was no premeditation.
They will be able to put themselves in that situation — a night-time panic, a gun close at hand, and the sense that they are on their own.
Many factors can still queer this storyline, one that will only ever be presented from one side of things — the shooter’s.
If it turns out that Pistorius was routinely violent with women, or that he threatened Steenkamp publicly, or that she told a friend she feared for her safety. All that puts Pistorius’s story in doubt.
There is also the wrinkle that South Africa has no jury system for murder trials. Pistorius’ case, still months away, will be heard by a judge, assisted by two “assessors.”
There may still be forensic evidence that disputes his story. And there is also the chance that it really happened this way. It’s just foolish and tragic enough to be true.
But if this is all there is to it — the word of the killer in a country filled with potential judges who also feel threatened in their homes — Pistorius is about to become the Afrikaans O.J.
