‘We are not the last family this will happen to’
“We still talk about her,” said a neighbour of Nokuzola Kepentete when Grocott’s Mail visited her C Street home on Sunday 29 July ‒ more than six months after the murder that . Her eldest son, Nkosinathi Jordaan lives there, alongside a cousin and her young children.
“She was not someone who would just sit by herself ‒ she was always with people. She always had a joke, always had a way to make us smile.
A family member spoke about the night of the murder.
“You know, after Siphamandla did that thing, when we asked him, ‘What did you do?’ you could look at his face and it was like he had no emotion. He told us, ‘That thing happened ‒ but it wasn’t me.”
Outside the court on 25 June, Jordaan expressed shock.
“We expected life,” Jordaan told Grocott’s Mail immediately after the sentencing. “
Jordaan had spoken ahead of sentencing about the effects on the family of his mother’s death. At 63, she was a pensioner but held down a job as a domestic worker at a farm on the East London road.
“This was a terrible thing,” Jordaan said. “And it was not the first time he was violent. He once beat up his own mother. The whole family was afraid of him ‒ even his aunt.”
Jordaan agreed with the magistrate about how readily available drugs are in the community.
“Not in our street, but in other streets in our area, there are a lot of people who sell drugs,” he said. What made it really easy to buy and sell the drugs was that dealers sold them from their homes.
“It’s not like you have to go and put yourself at risk out on the street,” he said. “Someone can just go and knock on a dealer’s back door. And it can be their neighbour.
“The government and the community must stand up against it because we are not the last family this will happen to. This will happen to another family.”