Chase Your Shadow (23 page)

Giant screens flashed images of two other runners who had left an indelible mark on the Olympic Games: Jesse Owens, the black American runner who confounded Hitler’s notions of Aryan racial superiority with his four gold medals in Berlin in 1936; and Cathy Freeman, the Aborigine who won gold for Australia in the 400 meters
in Sydney in 2000. Each had triumphed after overcoming poverty and prejudice.

Pistorius had no feet, no ankles, no calves, but in their place his charcoal-colored Cheetah blades. Wearing aerodynamic wraparound sunglasses, his one-piece Lycra uniform in South African green and gold, he went down on one knee to take up his position for the start of the race in lane five. The stadium fell silent, save for one man who shouted out to him so loudly that he heard it, bringing the glimmer of a smile to his face. ‘You sexy beauty!’ the man cried. Then his grandmother piped up with a word of encouragement in Afrikaans, and his uncle whistled in a special way he had – and hearing them both gave him, as he would gratefully acknowledge later, a much-needed sense of calm. The gun went off and he sprang out of the blocks, but less explosively than the other runners, as invariably happened when he raced against men with legs. All eyes in the stadium were on him, but what they saw over the first 50 meters was a runner who looked sluggish, as if his body’s machinery were rusty and needed greasing. He was losing ground fast and the dismay in the stadium was palpable. But within 100 meters he had gained his stride. Viewed head-on, he had a shambling action, ungainly in contrast to the feline mobility of the other seven runners. But viewed in profile he was smooth and powerful, and by the halfway mark he had eaten up almost all the lost ground, surging past athletes to his right and left, as he had done on that occasion nine years earlier at the schools’ athletics competition when he was sixteen, to the astonishment of his teacher, Paul Anthony, and all those present. Pistorius did not win the race, but he came a comfortable second, even giving the impression he had eased up over the final few meters.

He had qualified for the next heat, the semi-finals, and the crowd’s roar was for him. In place of the embarrassment he had feared,
Pistorius savored the euphoria of his life’s supreme triumph. All the blood and pain, the relentless work on the track and in the gym, the self-denying discipline, the disappointments and insecurities he had battled with to arrive at this point, were both justified and forgotten in the adrenaline rush of the moment. As he reminded one journalist after another during an hour of interviews after the race, he was not disabled by an accident of fortune, he was enabled by his God-given talent.

His uncle and aunt, his brother and sister, his grandmother, were hoarse with shouting by the side of the track, but it was his mother he remembered when he talked to the press. ‘I thought of her a lot all day today,’ he said. ‘She was a bit of a hard-core person. She didn’t take no for an answer. It’s definitely her sprit that has helped me to be here today. She always said the loser isn’t the person that gets involved and comes last, it’s the person that doesn’t get involved in the first place.’

He had been involved and he had achieved the dream he had set for himself. That in the next race he was not fast enough to make it to the final eight did not diminish his elation. Never had failure in the Olympic Games received such acclaim. He left with no medals, but he carried the South African flag at the closing ceremony. Pistorius had proved the point he had sought to prove and, what was more, his fellow able-bodied runners agreed as much. Endorsing his right to take part alongside them, the Dominican runner who had beaten him to first place in the first race said, ‘We’ve got guys out here doing drugs; any advantage that Oscar might have is the least of my concerns. He’s amazing. He’s inspiring.’ Kirani James of Grenada, who would end up winning the 400 meters gold, said of him, ‘I just see him as another competitor, another athlete. I really respect him. It is what it is.’

*

Except that it was not quite what it was, or seemed to be. It was never quite that straightforward. He had wanted to imagine himself as the public and his fellow competitors did, but there came a point, sooner or later, when he looked in the mirror and was reminded of his inborn vulnerability. He had wanted his life to be perfect and whole, yet even back then in London, where he had climbed the summit, a voice inside told him that it would never quite be. Then, six months after London, he had shot Reeva, and since then he had felt vulnerable every hour of the day. The memories of his athletic triumphs served more to mock than to inspire him now. When he lay in bed at night in his bare stumps at his uncle Arnold’s cottage, unable to sleep, there was no respite from the struggle with that fragile individual beset by anxieties of all kinds who was now awaiting trial for murder.

He had said once in a newspaper interview that what he most wished for was to live and die without regrets. But he had been deceiving himself, because even in the glorious year before disaster struck it had been impossible for him entirely to deny the limitations of his condition, the insecurities in love, the exaggerated fears, the bursts of irrational temper and the regret that accompanied it. He thought he had more or less learned to live with it. But not anymore – not now that Reeva was dead and the trial date was drawing near.

13

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

VOLTAIRE
,
A PLEA FOR TOLERANCE AND REASON

I
N
A
UGUST
2013 the date of the murder trial was set. It would begin on March 3 of the following year – one year and seventeen days after the shooting. On November 20, 2013 the indictment was served. There was a surprise. In addition to murder, the Director of Public Prosecutions for North Gauteng, Pretoria, had issued three more charges on which he would stand trial, all of them relating to contraventions of the Firearms Control Act that had passed into law in 2000.

These were trifles in comparison with the primary charge, and in the context of the general gun violence prevalent in South Africa. One held that he had fired a shot from his 9 mm pistol into the air through the open sunroof of a car in which he was traveling with two friends, one of them his then-girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, ‘on or about’ September 30, 2012. The second was that in January 2013 he had negligently fired a shot from a Glock pistol in a crowded restaurant, Tasha’s in Johannesburg, causing damage to the floor and endangering the safety of patrons. The third was that in February 2013, after the shooting, he had in his possession several rounds of ammunition for which he had no license.

Why, Pistorius wanted to know, had Gerrie Nel, the prosecutor at the bail hearing, who would now be the prosecutor at the trial, chosen to bring these three matters to court? The answer his defense team gave him was fourfold. First, that Nel could do so, even though the police had overlooked them before. Second, that in presenting the evidence Nel would endeavor to portray him as a reckless gun fanatic capable of carrying out murder. Third, that it presented Nel with the opportunity to bring Samantha Taylor to the witness stand, in the expectation that she would paint an image of him consistent with a volatile, angry, jealous lover who might plausibly have shot his girlfriend in a rage. Fourth, that if he pleaded not guilty, Nel might think he would be able to expand the possibility of catching him out in contradictions or outright lies during cross-examination, thereby casting a shadow over the veracity of his testimony on the main charge of murder.

Barry Roux, Pistorius’s chief defense lawyer, saw a value in pleading guilty to at least one of the firearms charges, maybe even to all three. In the event that Pistorius expressed due remorse in court, there was a good possibility that, on these charges at least, he would get away with a suspended sentence, or maybe just a fine. More important, he would come across as truthful, which would lend more weight to his version of the events of Valentine’s Day. Also, it would keep Samantha Taylor, who was apparently in vengeful mode after being dropped by him in favor of Reeva, away from the witness stand. South African trial rules in a murder case did not allow the prosecution to present character witnesses unconnected to the specific incident under scrutiny. Samantha Taylor could only be called to testify about a particular incident of which she had personal knowledge. Such was the case, or so the prosecution held, in the charge that he had fired a gun from a moving car. Yet, as Nel understood very well, her appearance
on the witness stand might allow him to reveal explosive aspects of Pistorius’s personality that might reinforce the prosecution’s case on the murder charge, in one important respect. Nel intended to demonstrate in court that Pistorius had killed Reeva Steenkamp after a violent argument. Taylor’s testimony might reinforce the notion that this was an entirely plausible scenario.

Looking coldly at the impending trial and the dangers the three minor firearms charges posed, it would have suited Roux for Pistorius to confess to them – but Pistorius had no intention of doing so. He told Roux and the rest of his defense team that he did not consider himself guilty of any of the charges: that the story of the shot in the air from a moving car was an invention; that while it was true that he had been holding the gun that went off under a table at Tasha’s restaurant, it had been an inexplicable accident, for which he had no wish to admit criminal liability; and that the bullets in his house belonged to his father, who did have a license for them, and that he had simply been keeping them for him in his safe.

Pistorius would not budge. He would not tell what, he insisted, would be strategic lies just in order to appear truthful. Nor did Roux put any further pressure on him to do so. Defending the murder charge would be more complicated, but his client insisted he was not guilty of any of the firearms charges, so that would be the end of the matter.

The question that remained to be decided was the identity of the judge. In South Africa the jury system had been abolished in 1969, the apartheid government at the time having displayed a rare enlightenment in acknowledging that an all-white jury could not be depended upon to dispense fair justice to a black defendant. The cultural and
linguistic differences between the forcibly separated races were just too great.

On the other hand, placing all the responsibility for matters that sometimes concerned life and death in the hands of a solitary white judge during the apartheid years was not much of an improvement. The system produced some scandalous aberrations. In the late eighties, a white farmer who beat one of his laborers to death was given a suspended sentence, while fourteen black people judged to have shared common purpose in the death of one policeman were sent to death row.

Yet there had been no call for the jury system to be reinstated after the coming of democracy, when capital punishment was abolished. In a country with eleven official languages and what Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, called a ‘rainbow’ mix of races, religions and cultures, the consensus was that it would be wise to leave the final word in the hands of one eminently qualified judicial expert. The difference after 1994 was that judges of all races began to be appointed to the bench.

The inevitable flaw in the system was that some judicial experts were more able and experienced than others, and that all of them were human beings whose private experiences, views and political inclinations would diminish the possibility of their exercising their authority with absolute impartiality. In high profile cases, it was hard to believe they would be able to insulate themselves entirely from the biases of public opinion and the media. Judges do not live in a vacuum. Yet, on the premise that there was no such thing as perfect justice, and that juries merely dispersed more widely their individual fallibilities, South Africa stuck to what it knew.

Before the name of the judge in this particular case was announced, both the defense and the prosecution were anxious to know whether the
person chosen would be experienced in murder trials and would have a reputation for severity or leniency, for strong-mindedness or lack of resolution. The decision was made in December 2013 by Dunstan Mlambo, the Judge President of the High Court of Gauteng, the South African province that comprised both Pretoria and Johannesburg. Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa, a black woman, was chosen.

A High Court judge in South Africa since December 1998, at that time only the second black woman to be appointed to that position, Masipa stood out among her peers for her industriousness. One senior lawyer who worked closely with her said she struck him as someone who would have been the hardest-working student in her class at law school. He also described her as a good person, happily free of the wordy pomposity that sometimes afflicted the robed members of the South African bench.

Born in 1947, a year before the apartheid laws were written into the South African constitution, Masipa grew up in Soweto, the vast segregated black township south-west of Johannesburg where Mandela spent sixteen years of his life before his arrest in 1962. She lived with her parents and siblings in a small, red-brick, two-bedroom house identical to the one in which Mandela lived. When she grew up and married she moved to a home with one room which, as she would say later, served as ‘bedroom, sitting room, bathroom . . . everything’. Hers was the typical experience of an urban black person under apartheid.

That meant that, among other indignities, she had received a state education deliberately inferior to that provided for white people. The clear but unstated purpose was to ensure that black South Africans would lack the abilities necessary to challenge whites for the better jobs. But Masipa was part of a stubborn and talented minority of the black population who contrived to overcome the educational obstacles placed in their path. She learned to write excellent English
(her first language was Zulu) and obtained a degree in social work in 1974, finding the time along the way to marry and raise two children. On finishing university, she opted for journalism, a career in tune with her developing political consciousness, which grew more militant in 1976 when student riots in Soweto sparked a black resistance movement that had lain largely dormant after Mandela and other black leaders had been jailed in 1964. As Masipa reported on clashes between demonstrators and police, who were detaining black activists in their thousands, she became ever more politically engaged herself. One day, she joined a march in downtown Johannesburg, along with several female colleagues, in protest against the arrest of black male reporters from her white-owned newspaper,
The Post
. Five of them, including Masipa, were detained, locked up in a jail cell and taken to court, where they refused to enter a plea, declaring that they did not recognize the authority of the apartheid state.