𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗢𝗚-𝗪𝗔𝗟𝗞𝗘𝗥 𝗔𝗧 𝗗𝗔𝗪𝗡

I was reading about xenophobia in our country and I realised we are fragile people, even if the stranger next to you is from another country.

Before sunrise, winters in Sea Point make the morning air damp. It smells of saltwater.

Early on Thursday morning 4 June 2020, in midwinter, a twenty-one-year-old man walked up St John’s Road from the direction of the sea. The streets were empty. Perhaps a stray dog barked, an old person shuffled by, seagulls scraped the sky with their cries.

Calvin Kevin Ilunga Kongolo, a dog-walker, strolled along the street, turned right into a cul-de-sac, and continued to the end of Monastery Street. He stopped in front of the house of a Reverend who preached at a church offering services in Afrikaans and English, and especially for refugees. The Reverend was beloved for her care of the displaced.

Calvin was Congolese. He carried a dog’s collar with him. Perhaps he paused to pray, or simply to stand still. Then he climbed onto the wall in front of her house, securing the leather strap tightly to a lamp post.

He used the part of the collar where a dog would usually push its head through, forcing his own head through it. The dog-walker placed his head into the collar; made for the animals he had cared for so dearly.

He jumped. Whether it was instantaneous or slow, we cannot know. Perhaps he struggled, perhaps his body went still over time. The streetlights began to dim as the sun rose.

Somewhere, a mother sat unaware that her son was dead. The little boy she had nursed at her breast now hung alone in a quiet street.

That morning, when the Reverend left her house, she came upon his lifeless body. On him was a verse from the Bible.

“I felt a deep sense of connection with this man,” she said. “What pain and hunger could have driven him here? He was someone’s child, someone’s friend, and he chose my house to say goodbye. I will never know why. Desperate and alone, this is how I saw his breathless form hanging.”

She placed a small altar of flowers around the lamp post. Rumours about the young man spread on social media. People went to place more flowers where he had died. They were pretty flowers, but sad. I was there to place my own.

Some said he had been dismissed by his employer. Others denied this, speculating that he had long struggled with depression. His former bosses, who ran the dog-walking business, said he had been upset about something and had resigned voluntarily.

From Gauteng, people on Sea Point’s Facebook community pages erupted over the phrase “he committed suicide”, arguing that it sounded like murder. It should read: “He died by suicide.”

Rowdy arguments broke out, many of them. Meanwhile, his body lay silent in a mortuary fridge. His family was too poor to bury him. Someone mentioned that a fund had been set up to send him home, to fly his young body back to his mother. The one who had given birth to him twenty-one years earlier.

Pics: Facebook