A Goosebump Moment

Here is one of those South African stories that gives you goosebumps, or a least which gives me goosebumps. This one was told in today’s New York Times by Barry Bearak, the husband of the husband and wife team that covers southern Africa for one of the last really great newspapers left standing.

Bearak was writing about the crime wave that wasn’t, about how hordes of barbaric South Africans somehow managed not to machete World Cup fans and their teams to death, how hundreds of thousands of visiting pockets were left unpicked, and how their owners were returning home miraculously unmugged, unhijacked and otherwise unmolested. Read the piece. It’s a delight.

Other than the line about South Africa’s criminal classes having proved themselves to be even more inept than the French team which Bafana Bafana put out of everyone’s misery so beautifully on June 22, of particular delight was the story of the Englishman and the cab driver, or at least the way it ended.

On June 11, it seems, Paul Clark left his computer bag on the floor of a taxi. In the bag with the computer was $2400 in cash. The cab driver, Tom Tsepe, had given Clark his card so Clark was able to call him. Tsepe found the bag and returned it, computer still inside but money gone. Clark accused Tsepe of having taken the cash and the cab driver was hauled before one of the special courts set up for the rapid processing of World Cup-related crime.

Clarke ultimately had to admit he had no idea who had taken the money; it could even have been one his own friends. So Tsepe was acquitted, but not before spending five hours in a cell, losing a day’s work and having to hire a lawyer, all of which set him back around $1000.

Then came the South African moment. Bearak was there to capture it. Accused and accuser ran into each other on the way from court. I don’t know about you, but I doubt I would have said anything, let alone anything printable, to the Englishman had I been in the cab driver’s shoes.

But Tsepe, as Bearak tells it, did have something to say. “My friend, I’m sorry you lost your money.”

There is one of false note in Bearak’s otherwise beautifully executed piece. He attributes Tsepe’s decency and ability to empathise with someone who has caused him no inconsiderable distress to his being on his best behaviour because of the World Cup. No. The taxi driver said what he said because that is the way South Africans are.