Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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fragility identified by Coetzee and Steinberg, but also because it eludes the category of ‘white whinger’. The book grew out of an event that shook Bloom’s life to its core – the apparently senseless murder of his cousin, fashion designer Richard Bloom, aged twenty-seven, along with his partner Brett Goldin, who was twenty-eight at the time. According to the account by Antony Sher, who researched the incident for a documentary, Goldin and Bloom were carjacked as they approached their vehicles after a party on Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard. The year was 2006, a good twelve years into democracy. Their abducters were a band of young men high on crystal meth (or ‘tik’, as it is known in the Cape) looking for a car to steal. Sher takes up the story:
The group held them up at gunpoint, stole one of their cars, stripped and bound them, and forced them into the boot. They then drove to a motorway a few miles away, and onto a traffic island. Perhaps they were intending to abandon Brett and Richard alive and make their getaway, but the car got stuck in sand. After a long, frenzied struggle to free it, during which their naked victims were forced to help, they shot them dead. Either the mixture of frustration and intoxication led to the murderous act, or – as the men later claimed in their confessions – their victims cried out and had to be silenced. (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.)
Sher’s subsequent comment distinguishes his sense of horror from the more routine kind of white discourse about crime. The story is chilling, Sher continues, ‘because it isn’t about racism or sex, or anything other than chance’ (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.). The timing of Goldin and Bloom’s departure from the party ‘just happened to coincide with the group driving past’. The targets could have been ‘[a]ny of the other guests ... someone in the next street, it could have been you or me’. The renowned Shakespearean-actor-turned-writer concludes that his ‘birthplace seemed changed in a way that I didn’t like. Nowhere felt safe anymore’ (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.).
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