Coligny’s sad seeds were sown in apartheid and are still growing
• The death of teenager Matlhomola Moshoeu will be judged in court, but black and white have already made up their minds in this poor farming town
In the deeply divided farming town of Coligny, one fact underlines the vastly differing narratives of a tragedy that is, without exception, based on the skin colour of the person telling the tale: a 16-year-old boy is dead.
In the aftermath of this event in April, the town centre was almost reduced to ashes.
More than two months after Matlhomola Moshoeu’s life was cut short, farmer and businessman Pieter Karsten’s sunflower field is devoid of plants. Only red soil remains.
The teenager was caught stealing sunflower seeds on the farm, was loaded on a bakkie to be taken to the police station and was dead soon after that.
Violent protests followed his death after the police made no arrests. The black community said they knew who was responsible; Matlhomola was not alone when it happened.
Shortly after black residents began protesting, two men were arrested and charged with murder: Pieter Doorewaard and Phillip Schutte.
Doorewaard and Schutte work for the influential Coligny businessman and farmer Karsten, who is Doorewaard’s uncle. They appeared in court again on Monday and the case was postponed until August.
But residents of the small town are impatient with the legal delay. On both sides of the racial divide, they have already made up their minds who is guilty and who is innocent.
White residents insist that Matlhomola jumped from the bakkie after he was peacefully apprehended by Schutte and Doorewaard, who found him and a friend stealing seeds.
Black residents say the boy died because apartheid is still alive and well in Coligny.
Poverty is entrenched in the small town, which has an annual household income of R29,400 according to Wazimap, an open platform source that uses census figures and the latest data available from Statistics SA. The majority of its population is Setswana speaking, followed by Afrikaans. English is a foreign country in Coligny.
Rev Tewie Pieters of the Dutch Reformed Church describes Matlhomola’s death and the protests as a culmination of tragic circumstances.
He says residents of the informal settlement outside Coligny known as Scotland use the sunflower field as a shortcut to their homes. Many of them pluck the heads of the sunflowers to eat the seeds.
Doorewaard and Schutte had apprehended quite a few people caught red-handed stealing sunflowers in the months before Matlhomola’s death, he says. They took them to the police station and nothing happened.
The accused told the court during earlier proceedings that the teenager was the third person they had apprehended in the field. They claim they merely wanted to take Matlhomola to the police station, but he jumped from the back of their bakkie as they rounded a bend and fell to his death.
“That day was like every other day — that day just went tragically wrong,” Pieters says.
While he believes someone could have killed or beaten Matlhomola, it could not have been Doorewaard and Schutte.
They are good men, he says. External political forces are influencing the community, he believes, because the town has been quiet since the protests that erupted after the accused had been granted bail.
Since then, there have been service delivery protests in nearby Lichtenburg, with the mayor of Ditsobotla, the municipality that services Coligny, being held hostage in June.
Schutte and Doorewaard’s trial is the second case of murder being heard in the small Coligny Magistrate’s Court in 2017. The police charged them with murder, claiming that a witness saw one of the men throw Matlhomola from the back of the bakkie.
The black residents of Coligny, most of whom live in Thlabologang — of which Scotland is part — recount only the narrative of the witness when they speak about the murder.
Marta Motlhoki is doing her washing in a small plastic tub outside her ramshackle house. “How could they kill a person like that? They don’t catch black people decently, like humans.
“Apartheid is finished, but not in Coligny.”
Her husband, Koos Mooki, worked as a farm labourer until he was fired last week. He says he was hit by a tractor while working and is in severe pain. His boss finally lost patience and dismissed him for not being able to work as hard as the rest.
He has lost his income of R1,500, of which R500 went to his employer for rent. He shakes his head and reiterates his wife’s sentiments that apartheid is still alive in Coligny.
Pastor Reggie Maleme of the Apostolic Faith Mission says jobs are scarce in Coligny and the only way of making a living is through farming, as there is little other economic development.
Habits such as referring to white people as “baas” and “miesies” have been perpetuated by black residents in the township as much as white residents in town, he says.
If the town became more developed, racism and inequality would decrease. He blames the police for the recent racial tension, claiming that they always react promptly to the plight of white residents while ignoring blacks.
The house of Diana Swart was torched in the protests and ransacked and stripped in the days that followed. On Monday she walked through what was left of it in awe and pain. All that remains is the exterior brick walls; it has been stripped of burglar bars, fencing and the trees that stood in her garden.
Tears fall as she walks past the place where a mural recording her 32 years in Coligny was burnt to ash. She lived in the house for 14 years. Her dachshund, Vlooi, burnt to death.
Protesters stormed her property in April, demanding petrol from Swart. A policeman told her to leave and she fled. She insists she never thought this would happen to her because she works closely with Coligny’s black community.
Swart and Pieters deny there is still an apartheid culture in the town, which is situated in the harsh landscape of what once was called Western Transvaal. It is a short distance from Ventersdorp, the heartland of Eugene Terreblanche’s Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging.
Pieters looks agitated as he emphasises that if the town’s white inhabitants were racist, the story of Coligny would have been an entirely different one in the aftermath of the protests that ripped through the town. Shops were looted and many buildings were torched. The Muslim community was also hit hard.
During the short court proceedings on Monday, Doorewaard and Schutte looked down as the case was postponed to August 7 for further investigation and for the director of public prosecutions to take a decision on the matter. The two are on bail. Just behind the suspects sat Matlhomola’s parents, Sakie Dingake and Agnes Moshoeu, listening attentively to the Setswana translation of the proceedings. After the accused left the courtroom, Moshoeu recounts how she just started crying when she received the news of his death.
Dingake says his son was not naughty. “He was a young laaitie,” he says in Afrikaans.
They do not know what he wanted to be when he grew up.