The terror of guns after uncle Errol’s murder
MY UNCLE Errol looked so much like the American actor Errol Flynn that people remarked on it. Well, they did in “the olden days”, as my great godson likes to call them.
Like his namesake – who will always be remembered for his 1938 portrayal of Robin Hood – he was tall and slender.
His face was perfectly symmetrical, the necessary characteristic for classic good looks, science tells us. Uncle Errol was a handsome man, very handsome some would say.
He had a head of black hair that he oiled, as was the fashion, and slicked back. I remember him with a beautifully trimmed moustache that quivered on his upper lip – as though it had won the lottery of happy moustaches, residing as it did on such a striking face, on such a petulant lip.
My debonair uncle didn’t walk – he had a swagger that was at once an affectation and a mark of supreme confidence. The world loved Uncle Errol. And he loved it back. He graced the world with the benevolence that the beautiful dispense with ease.
Franz Kafka, the German novelist who wrote about the absurdity of life, so aptly said this: “Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
That applied to Uncle E, although I would have changed it to “beauty has the ability to see beauty”: the beautiful, I think, see a very different world than those who are plain, or scarred, or maimed, or . . . just not physically beautiful.
Beautiful people have an easier time in general, they go through life being feted and adored and accepted much more easily than people who are not beautiful.
I’ve tested this theory myself. Of course I have one example, with no empirical evidence, and merely anecdotal research. Still, as a young drama student at Rhodes, my friends and I went from Grahamstown to Port Elizabeth to collect money for Rag (reach out and give) – in other words, for charity.
Young, healthy, firm, lovely students that we were, standing at traffic lights dressed in tutus, with crowns on our head, shaking our vessels as we begged for cash (for the needy), of course middle-class drivers rolled down their windows and put money into our buckets. All of our buckets.
But there was one of our number, T, who was magnificent, who was, as my mother would have said, a classic beauty: delicate, small boned, perfectly symmetrical (like Uncle Errol). She had long dark hair and a smile that lit up her face.
It lit up the faces of drivers, men and women, who stopped to fill her bucket with money.
At the end of that day, we tallied our takings. Robyn, who’d put on a belly dancer outfit and danced for the drivers and sung lustily, came in second – but not even a close second, I have to say.
We’d sung ourselves hoarse and performed like circus seals to entertain drivers.
Our beautiful friend, on the other hand, had done nothing but stand at the robot looking beautiful. But she had twice as much as the rest of us put together in her bucket.
Drivers wanted to make her happy, to gain favour with this siren, this goddess whose beauty was captivating.
We, the others, had paled into insignificance in her presence. We were relegated to the back of the line. Not that we minded. She was as sweet as she was lovely.
And so it had always been with Uncle Errol. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the school drawer, but despite having really average marks and not excelling academically, he managed to win every other prize: for personality, on the sporting field, in the debating team. People liked him.
Which was part of why hearing that he had been gunned down in his driveway was, until now, the single most shocking thing that I have ever heard in my life.
Yes, I was shocked at the death of my father, and of my mother. But it was not unexpected and they died of natural causes – old age and heart attacks, both of them.
I was ridiculously shocked when I heard that my brother Shaun had choked on a piece of steak and was in a coma in a hospital in Los Angeles.
Still, I had a chance to prepare myself for the worst in the two weeks before they turned off the machines and he was certified dead. Also, it was a horrible freak accident.
But Uncle Errol’s death was a blow to the head shock; a cold water thrown in your face kind of shock. He died in a hail of bullets.
He was shot, an act of violence perpetrated by one human being on another. He was killed with a gun by a gunman who actually set out to kill him.
I was 15 years old in 1973. I believed in the goodness of man, an innocent in the world. I could not get my head around my uncle’s murder.
It was shocking in the way that injustice or unfairness is shocking.
Apparently Uncle Errol had the licence to run the Wesselsnek (northern Natal) leg of a bus route that someone else wanted, so they shot him dead to get it.
We mourned, as a family, and pledged to fight against gun ownership, and guns in general for the rest of our days.
If this all sounds simplistic, it is. It is all that is needed to put an end to the acceptability of gun ownership. Just say no.
This week, I was shocked rigid for the second time in 43 years by the fact that a 64-year-old man on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel planned and deliberately fired randomly into a crowd of people at a country music concert.
One man, 23 guns – 58 dead, more than 500 wounded. Why? American gun supporters, most of them members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) that advocates for gun rights in America, believe in the right to bear arms – as laid down in the Second Amendment.
Tell that to the mothers and children and families of the innocents gunned down this week.
But even as I write that, I am reminded that South Africa has the second highest rate of gun-related deaths in the world, second only to the United States.
I was standing in a long bank queue watching CNN news on the television. I said to the woman behind me: “It’s a shame, isn’t it? Americans and guns!” I shook my head.
The man ahead of me whipped his head around and said his best friend had been shot – in Benoni. Another man said he had lost a co-worker, shot in the head during an armed robbery. Another man piped up that his sister had been shot, but not killed, in a hijacking gone wrong . . . The last woman said her domestic worker had been shot dead, apparently because she refused to let armed robbers into her Sandhurst home. Four gun stories in one bank queue. And I want the Americans to change their gun laws?
I think we need to mobilise and start a campaign right here, on our own soil.
It’s the anointed time!