‘Deep down in that gangster lies my son’
THE first thing you notice as you walk up to Sharifa Barendse’s house in Newfields Village is the bullet hole in one of the windows. The brick-andmortar semi-detached house looks dilapidated and, even though the front door is ajar, the house is dark.
Your eyes adjust to an interior that looks trashed and bare: no doors on the kitchen cupboards, and interior doors full of holes that look like they were made by someone trying to break them down or break into the room.
A delicious smell of curry hangs in the air, somehow out of place in the gloomy house.
Sharifa Barendse, 52, is lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon in the room with the bullet hole in the window.
“You must excuse the state of the house. I’ve only recently returned after I rented it out for a couple of months. As you can see, the tenants tore the place apart,” she said.
She does not explain the bullet hole.
Her son, Zaakir Barendse, 20, has been charged with attempted murder for the shooting of Sulaiman Jacobs. She turned him in to the police.
“Where did it go wrong? I don’t recall an exact point in time. But it must have been when my husband and I separated. Zackie is the apple of his father’s eye. He took the separation very badly,” she said.
“He is my second-youngest child. I have five — four boys and a girl right in the middle. She doesn’t live here because she can’t handle her brothers.
“She lives with her father in Athlone and is studying further . . . she passed matric. Another son lives in Johannesburg. He is a poet.
“But the other three that are here . . . they belong to the Fancy Boys. The gang took my sons. Two of them are not so bad, but Zackie is a daredevil. He is up for anything. Yet the shooting of the innocent boy shook him.
“He came to me a few days later and said that they planned to rob a taxi that morning. Then they saw the Americans [gang] coming for them. The shooting started and he shouted at the people in the way to fall flat. But Sulaiman was hit. It was an accident.
“I think Sulaiman might have been okay if he wasn’t moved. I hear that his mom and another man took him to the day hospital in a car. That’s when the bullet must have travelled to his spine.
“Zackie told me to go to Sulaiman’s mom to say that he is sorry for what he did. He knows he will have to go to prison now. Imagine turning 21 in prison. He will be 21 next month.
“My oldest son, Moosa, went to the mosque and asked for forgiveness from the community on behalf of his younger brother. They realise that he is an innocent child.
“But what can you do? It happened and Sulaiman’s mom must make peace with it. Just like I made peace with what my son’s become. Deep down in that gangster lies my son . . .” —