The evil in our midst

On a November night in 1977, Robert Smit and his wife, Jean-Cora, were shot and stabbed to death in their Springs home. Before departing the chaotic scene, which investigators agreed bore the marks of a professional hit, the killers daubed the words “Rau Tem” on the walls.

On August 23 2021, Gauteng health department accountant Babita Deokaran was shot and killed in the driveway of her south Joburg home after dropping her daughter at school.

Smit, a former South African representative to the International Monetary Fund and a parliamentary candidate at the time of his murder, may or may not have stumbled across evidence of foreign bank accounts, or sanctions-busting, or slush funds ... no motive has ever been determined. The killers, much less whoever ordered the hit, were never caught.

Shallow graves, burnt-out cars, DJs shot while talking in the streets

The people who murdered Deokaran, who had uncovered R850m in dodgy transactions relating to procurement at Tembisa Hospital, are serving sentences ranging from six to 22 years. Who ordered her assassination is unknown.

What links the Smits to Deokaran is a rotten, blood-soaked thread.

It is the same thread wound around two doctors shot in the head and dumped in the boots of their cars. It is the body of a police informant blown up with explosives on an island in Jozini Dam. It loops around lawyers and forensic investigators and engineers gunned down outside their offices or on the highway. Shallow graves, burnt-out cars, DJs shot while talking in the streets. People fed to animals. People drugged, then pushed from light aircraft over the Atlantic.

It runs through every locomotive that “did not fit”, every cent lost to fruitless and wasteful expenditure, every hospital without running water, every pit toilet, every 9mm pistol sold from the armoury to a street gang ... winding itself tightly around all the things done away from the light and in the shadows.