Former S.A. rugby player murders his daughter’s rapists
(UPDATE, March 31: the accused is not white, as everyone assumed,
he is black. Will the readers will supported his act still feel the same?)
Karl D. writes:
A former South African Rugby player whose daughter was gang raped and infected with HIV tracked down and murdered the rapists (save one) with an ax. The rapists were all black and it is believed the father is white as virtually all South African Rugby players are white. His identity is being withheld.
But how about this gem from the article?
Meanwhile some fear the tragedy could create fresh fissures in South Africa’s fragile race relations.
The vast majority of South African rugby stars are white and it is possible the suspect could be accused of deliberately targeting black victims.
The story is (naturally) from the
Mail:
Ex-South Africa rugby star ‘murders at least three people with an axe in revenge for gang-rape of his daughter’
A famous former rugby player has been arrested in South Africa after allegedly butchering at least three people to death with an axe.
A newspaper claimed the unnamed 34-year-old sportsman had launched a murderous rampage in revenge after his daughter was gang-raped and infected with HIV. [LA replies: he’s famous but he’s unnamed?]
Afrikaans daily Beeld reported that one of the star’s alleged victims had been decapitated during a string of brutal attacks which happened last week near Durban in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province.
It is believed the man’s head was found at least a mile away from his body in a separate suburb of the Indian Ocean city.
Police spokesman Vincent Mdunge told South Africa’s Sowetan newspaper the sportsman was being held in custody after being arrested yesterday.
The star is due to appear in court tomorrow to face three charges of murder and one of attempted murder in relation to a fourth alleged victim named Khangelani Mdluli, who managed to escape.
Lieutenant Colonel Mdunge said: ‘When they pounced on him they found an axe, which we believe is the murder weapon, clothes with blood stains and a hired car that we suspect he could have used during the alleged attacks.
‘He is currently being detained in one of our police stations.
‘We can’t disclose where for security reasons.
‘He will be charged formally with three counts of murder with aggravating circumstances and one of attempted murder.’
Police said the man was arrested in a planned raid on a residential property at around 1.30am yesterday.
He is accused of stalking his victims over several days in townships and slum suburbs around Durban before hacking them to death with an axe.
Detectives announced details of the horrific killing spree last week and appealed for information on the brutal crimes.
Investigating officers then said the incidents had happened between last Sunday and Wednesday in the Durban districts of Yellowood Park, Lamontville and Umbilo.
Detectives said they were convinced the same man had been responsible for at least three murders and that it was likely he could have also earlier claimed a fourth victim.
One of the dead men was named as Paulos Hlongwa, a 46-year-old whose body was found last week in Merebank.
Police said his head was later discovered in a dustbin more than a mile away.
The decomposing bodies of the other victims were found later last week.
Police spokesman Anton Booysen said one of them had been almost fully-decapitated.
He added: ‘His head was hanging by nothing more than a nerve.’
It is believed yesterday’s arrest came after officers received a tip-off from members of the public.
Local media today reported that the sportsman had played for the top-flight Blue Bulls rugby side, based in Pretoria.
Under South African law police are not permitted to name a suspect in a crime until they have appeared in court.
However officials indicated it was likely the star’s identity could be publicly withheld even after tomorrow’s scheduled hearing, in order to protect the dignity of his daughter following the speculation she had been raped.
Meanwhile some fear the tragedy could create fresh fissures in South Africa’s fragile race relations.
The vast majority of South African rugby stars are white and it is possible the suspect could be accused of deliberately targeting black victims.
Meanwhile, the suggestion that he was acting out of revenge for his daughter’s alleged rape could spark a new debate about the effect of crime in a country where many live in constant fear of violence.
The unnamed rugby star is thought to be an ex player of the Blue Bulls, a South African rugby union side whose Loftus Versfeld stadium was used in the 2010 football World Cup
Blue Bulls spokesman Ian Schwartz was this morning unavailable to comment on the arrest as he was travelling with the team to New Zealand.
The premier league side is based in Pretoria and enjoys a huge cult following among mainly-white fans, among whom it is known by its Afrikaans name Die Blou Bulle.
The Bulls compete each year in South Africa’s Currie Cup league and are one of the most successful of the country’s domestic teams.
This afternoon it was reported that the arrested former player lived in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province and had been visiting relatives in Durban.
The Cape Argus said the star’s identity was known by journalists but would be withheld to protect his daughter.
The newspaper also published an interview with a man believed to have narrowly escaped the axe killer.
Durban resident Khangelani Mdluli, 27, told police he was walking through the city’s Lamontville suburb last Tuesday when a man approached him in his car.
In comments reported by the Argus, Mr Mdluli said the man accused him of raping his daughter before lunging at him with an axe.
He said: ‘He stopped the car, jumped out with an orange plastic bag and walked down the road towards me.
‘I continued walking but I looked at the plastic bag.
‘He said to me: ‘Did you know we would ever meet? You think I’m stupid. You infected my daughter with HIV’.’
Mr Mdluli said the man then pulled an axe out of a bag we was carrying and slammed it down towards his head.
He said: ‘As the axe came down towards my head, I ducked and it scratched my stomach.
‘I started running down the road as he followed me and swore at me.
‘He eventually gave up and turned back to head to his car, which was parked up the road.’
The alleged victim said he ran straight home after the incident, which had left him traumatised.
He added: ‘The incident has really affected me.
‘I don’t feel at ease when I am working night shift and have to walk home. I am scared and I don’t feel safe.’
- end of initial entry -
Daniel B. writes:
I thought the kicker of the whole Mail article was at the bottom where it said, “Sorry we are unable to accept comments for legal reasons.” I wonder what those legal reasons are exactly.
Gintas writes:
Wikipedia on the movie “Death Wish”:
Death Wish remains a milestone in cinema history, considered the first urban film to depict a civilian taking up arms against criminals. While this concept existed in many previous westerns, Death Wish was the first to place it in a modern setting. The film had unexpected resonance in cities like New York and Los Angeles, where crime had reached incredible levels during the early-to-mid 1970s. Moviegoers applauded Kersey whenever he shot criminals down and cinemas enjoyed record ticket sales during the movie’s first run.
The film was a watershed for Charles Bronson, who was better known in Europe and Asia at the time of Death Wish’s release, mostly due to his role in The Great Escape. Bronson became an American film icon who experienced great popularity over the next twenty years, during which he starred in four sequels to the film …
(I’ve added the bold in the text.)
And is not Bernie Goetz iconic as well?
LA replies:
I agree that “Death Wish” is a very good movie, and I’d like to see it again. But the analogy does not hold. In “Death Wish,” the protagonist does nothing criminal. He goes walking in dangerous parts of the city at night, and when some thug holds him up at knife or gun point, he shoots him dead. That is self defense. The man in South Africa hunted down and murdered the men who had raped his daughter. As understandable as his act was, and even noble from the point of view of true justice, it was murder. VFR does not approve murder.
Sophia A. writes:
Although I completely sympathize with this father’s
anguished and insane response, it is still savagery. Let it be a
warning to us, that when we let our society slide down to black norms,
it’s only a matter of time before we all start acting like animals.
Paul, the author of Stuff Black People Don’t Like, writes:
Oh, that story about the rugby player is going to be huge. HUGE.
He played for the Springboks, the team the Afrikaners cheered for that was featured in the film “Invictus” starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman.
You might recall that 25 percent of blacks in South Africa have admitted to rape.
Laura G. writes:
I thought that the piteous whine given out by the rapist was a pretty good kicker, too: “‘I don’t feel at ease when I am working night shift and have to walk home. I am scared and I don’t feel safe.” Oh. Not feel safe at night. Not at ease. Too bad, so sad. Cry me an effing river. One of the all-time great examples of a monstrous inability to empathise with one’s own victim.
LA replies:
We don’t know that the man who narrowly escaped the murder attempt is one of the rapists. The story does not say that he is.
Van Wijk writes:
You wrote: “The man in South Africa hunted down and murdered the men who had raped his daughter. As understandable as his act was, and even noble from the point of view of true justice, it was murder. VFR does not approve murder”
I see nothing wrong with what this man has done. Once these animals laid a finger on his daughter, their lives were forfeit. They got exactly what was coming to them.
Would you prefer the vigilante go through the “proper channels” of the infamous South African justice system, where it’s virtually guaranteed that the rapists would either be acquitted or released after only a few years? The South African government doesn’t care about the genocide against Boer farmers (probably because they themselves have some hand in them), so I fail to see why they would care about a white girl getting gang-raped. Whites are entirely on their own in SA, and that should be a lesson to us as our own country disintegrates.
LA replies:
If you are right that there is no law in South Africa, if you are right that murderers and rapists of whites go free or serve just a few years, then, yes, civilization has ended and the only rule is retaliation outside the law. But this is not something to be embraced with the eagerness with which you embrace it.
I am just now reading Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” written during the Irish civil war, which is about this very thing:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
If the only way we can survive is as weasels fighting in a hole, then so be it. But that’s not the way we want the world to be.
Thomas Bertonneau writes:
On the South African rugby player—before there was a judiciary there was feud. One of the monuments of Western literature, The Oresteia by Aeschylus, concerns the interminable character of cyclic revenge, the ramifications of which threaten to engulf the entire society in chaos. In the third play of the trilogy, feud comes to an end when the Athenians devise to depersonalize punishment through establishing a court of law and codifying standards for objective judgment of criminal charges. (They have the help of Athena, their Olympian patroness; the association of a court system with a divinity suggests that the ancient Greeks regarded this innovation as the equivalent of a boon from heaven.) Feud seems to be the natural condition of mankind before the organization of civilized life, an important feature of which is law. When law breaks down, as it evidently has in South Africa, the only possible response will be a re-personalization of justice in feud and vendetta. Murder and rape are today pandemic in South Africa. Johannesburg, for example, is said to be the murder and rape capitol of the Southern Hemisphere. In all probability most cases of rape, in particular, go uninvestigated, untried, and unpunished. The psychic toll on decent South Africans must be immense, to a degree well nigh unimaginable to Europeans or North Americans. The rugby-player might be uncivilized, but so is his social context; the gang-rapists are more uncivilized than he, however we judge him.
Thomas Bertonneau writes:
In the original Death Wish movie, Paul Kersey’s wife and daughter are brutally gang-raped, and the wife murdered, by savages who spot them in a supermarket and follow them home; the law releases the perpetrators on a technicality. The Kersey character then tracks them down and kills them. He is not merely trolling Skid Row for provocations; he is looking specifically for the killers of his wife and the gang-rapists of his daughter.
LA replies:
I didn’t remember that. And according to Wikipedia, my memory was correct.
Buck O. writes:
We don’t know that any of the axe-murdered were the rapist in question. In fact, the story says only that there is a speculation that there was a rape. The lame reporter doesn’t say anything about these important elements of this story. Nowhere in the story is the question addressed. The “journalist” called it a “murderous rampage in revenge,” but he doesn’t say it’s against the rapist, or that they are alleged rapist, just that it’s in revenge after his daughter’s rape. That’s a critical element of this story. What kind of reporter would ignore that? Where are the facts? If you google: “Khangelani Mdluli,” you find repeats of the same story. I could find nothing about the rape or about whether or not the victims were the alleged rapist.
LA replies:
That’s right. For all we know, the rugby player was just picking out some blacks to kill, just as the man who killed James Beard in Texas was looking for a black to kill in revenge for the rapes he had suffered in prison. So that’s the next stage of being reduced to the law of retaliation. Not retaliation against the guilty, but a savage tribal war of all against all.
Doug H. writes:
I noticed on the UK website hosting this news article they have disabled commenting. The censorship in the UK is draconian, or is that too strong a term. Everyone, even the internet news comments section, is self censored out of fear that legal action will be brought against them. But I am puzzled somewhat by the attitudes of the people. If thousands of people will risk jail to demonstrate, such as the anarchists just did, then why are people afraid to speak their minds? Where are the people who have true grit like the man who went after his daughter’s rapists?
Will Western civilization wake up in time to save itself? From a Christian perspective, the answer would have to be no. These things must take place. Sad to watch though.
Charles T. writes:
Doug H. wrote:
“Will Western civilization wake up in time to save itself? From a Christian perspective, the answer would have to be no. These things must take place. Sad to watch though. ”
I am genuinely interested in what Doug H. means by the above statement.
Why does the Christian perspective teach that the West will fall? And, which Christian perspective is Doug talking about? And why the authoritative statement that the West will fall based on this Christian perspective? We do not know how this conflict will turn out yet. I agree, that we are in trouble, but, in fact, the West has not even attempted to mount a consistent defense…. yet.
And, why must these things take place? This sounds like the fatalism I see in pre-millenial circles. If people would resist Marxism and insist on maintaining their own culture, laws and institutions, these things—in this case lawlessness in our home countries—most certainly would not be taking place.
Let’s not give up yet.
Charles T. writes:
LA wrote in response to Van Wijk:
“If you are right that there is no law in South Africa, if you are right that murderers and rapists of whites go free or serve just a few years, then, yes, civilization has ended and the only rule is retaliation outside the law. But this is not something to be embraced with the eagerness with which you embrace it. ”
Mr. Van Wijk is right. I have been reading about the increasing brutality and lawlessness in SA for some time. When I read Van Wijk’s comment, I did not get the impression that he is eagerly embracing retaliation outside the law, or as I prefer to say, justified retribution in the absence of law. I understood Van Wijk to simply be pointing out the cold, hard facts of the situation in SA and that it could happen here as well. [LA replies: Eagerness was the wrong word. I was resisting the notion that things are so bad that anything is allowed now, including indicriminate murder of people of the other race in revenge for crimes committed by others of that race, because that’s what may have happened here.]
Van Wijk also wrote:
“Whites are entirely on their own in SA, and that should be a lesson to us as our own country disintegrates. ”
These words are true. The Western world has abandoned the whites in SA. I called a well-known beneficent Christian ministry here in the US and asked if they had ever considered helping the whites who are suffering at the hands of the ANC. I got the cold shoulder. I ended my relationship with those people immediately.
Here is a video of the police in action in South Africa. The police in that country are simply uniformed criminals.
There is a wealth of material concerning the genocidal actions directed against whites in SA at this site. It is the Afrikaner—Genocide Archives.
South Africa was a prosperous first-world nation. In the space of seventeen years the ANC has, in the name of multiculturalism and tolerance, reduced the country to a violent, lawless third-world status. The world should be weeping or should be shouting in anger at the crimes the ANC is committing. All I hear though is … silence.
March 31
Brian R. writes:
The player is in fact black.
“Many South Africans had wrongly assumed he is white and that therefore there may have been a racial element to the attacks, but a police spokesman yesterday confirmed that he is black.”
Josh G. writes:
From the last paragraph of this article:
“Many South Africans had wrongly assumed he is white and that therefore there may have been a racial element to the attacks, but a police spokesman yesterday confirmed that he is black.”
Incidentally, I’m pretty sure I know who it is. There aren’t that many 34 year old black former Springboks. In another article, it was noted the number of tries (the rugby equivalent of a touchdown) he scored and also recalled the names of two other teams for which he played. If they are so worried about protecting the man’s identity why give out clues that literally narrow the field to one?
MW writes:
There is an excellent American black woman’s web site called “What About Our Daughters” which discusses the crimes of black men against black women and how they are excused and justified in the black community and by white liberals, particularly the crime of gang rape, which is common in the black community.
I HIGHLY recommend you read her blog entry from yesterday, March 30, 2011, where she analyzes in detail the response of the New York Times, the black community, and white liberals to the 19-black-man gang rape of an 11 year old Mexican girl in Cleveland, Texas three weeks ago.
Her web site is worth returning to whenever black horrors like these gang rapes occur.
Thomas Bertonneau writes:
In Part I of Death Wish, the relevant action in the supermarket begins at six minutes into the clip; the remainder of the supermarket episode, followed by the home break-in and the assault on Kersey’s wife and daughter, takes place in Part II. Note, however, that YouTube considers the scene sufficiently shocking that they require a precautionary rigmarole in order to access it. They are justified. The conversation, in Part I, between Kersey and his coworkers, is worth auditing. It frames the remainder of the film. The several Death Wish sequels descended from the analytical coherency of the first installment. Incidentally, an element of the story is Kersey’s conversion, in the face of savage criminality and the failure of justice, from a standard liberal to a dispenser of vigilante justice. As I see it the film does not advocate vigilantism; it simply suggests that when the law fails—when brutes go free on legal technicalities—anguish will build up among law-abiding people that must eventually express itself as direct action.
Thomas Bertonneau writes:
Speaking of Bronson’s Death Wish, another earlier and better film on the same topic is Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring, based on a medieval Swedish ballad about a man who avenges the rape and murder of his daughter by a pack of criminal vagabonds. Virgin Spring makes a worthy companion piece to Death Wish in that Bergman sets his story in an era (the thirteenth century) before there is a consolidated Swedish state and at a time when Christianity is making headway against, but has not yet superseded, heathendom. Thus in The Virgin Spring, before there is organized justice there is only personal vengeance; whereas in Death Wish, when organized justice abdicates there is once again only personal vengeance. The main character in The Virgin Spring, played by Max von Sydow, dispenses justice as an obligation under the old gods, and he does so ruthlessly, killing even the youngest of the vagabonds although he is a mere boy who did not actually participate in the rape. But the executioner dislikes his role. When he recovers his daughter’s body and sees to its burial, a natural spring bursts through the ground where she died, and he vows to build a church on the site. The film associates personal vengeance with heathendom and Christianity with the revulsion against personal vengeance. It is a powerful story. The nightmare of feud is a theme not only in Greek tragedy, but also in the Scandinavian saga literature. The Virgin Spring has an Aeschylean quality. Death Wish is on a lower level artistically, but in its script it manages to be intelligent. Death Wish is a film that probably could not be made today.
LA replies:
No kidding that Death Wish couldn’t be made today.
Thomas Bertonneau writes:
“No kidding that Death Wish couldn’t be made today.”
There was recently Taken with Liam Neeson, but—and in this you are right—it had nothing like the complexity of Death Wish, not to mention The Virgin Spring. On the other hand, almost every commercial film other than the teen sex comedies and the romance films is a revenge-story of one kind or another, in which the chief scapegoat is a traditional authority figure that the plot represents as corrupt and tyrannical, and whose immolation it sets up and justifies. Setting up a traditional authority figure as a blocking agent for the rebellious protagonists and then representing the blocking agent’s violent comeuppance is a primitive type of “community organizing.” As in actual sacrifice these cinematographic immolations galvanize the primitive audience and create passing solidarity through symbolic participation in cathartic violence. See for example Machete. This fact is another sign of the cultural atavism of our times.
LA replies:
What you say reminds me an English teacher I had at the University of Colorado in the the 1970s. He was a New York leftist named Bruce Basoff, and his pet theory, derived from Freud and various French ne’er do wells, was that the primal act of culture is the ganging together of the sons to kill their tyrannical father. It would seem that the standard plot of contemporary movies, as described by you, follows this leftist pattern to a “T.”
Doug H. writes:
You asked if we would still feel the same knowing the grieving father seeking revenge were black. My answer is yes. Blacks perpetrate more violence on other blacks than they do on whites. I feel he has the same right as anyone else to seek justice in whatever form he feels he must. I can’t imagine the horror this must have wrought on his family. It simply reinforces what is known. Blacks commit a majority of the crimes in proportion to their numbers even amongst themselves. I can only say how I would react. After a Hispanic man came in my house at 4 AM and was found in my daughter’s bedroom, I went out and bought a small home defense model Mossberg shotgun. I bought a German shepherd dog. I bought a home security system. Thank God we had had an ant invasion in her bedroom early in the evening, and she was sleeping on the couch with her dog. The little dog woke her and she ran into our bedroom where my wife is totally defenseless, attached to a home dialysis machine. I just stood there open mouthed in my underwear wondering what the hell was happening. Another miracle, he was unarmed and ran out of the back door. Don’t ask what little help the police were. I woke up, armed up, and realized, I am the only one who with God’s help can protect my family.
Sophia A. writes:
I write with respect to taking the law into one’s own hands. I’m with you: my personal sympathy for the anguished father’s reactions doesn’t preclude me from acknowledging that the real issue here is breakdown of law and order.
I do not know whether Sir Thomas More actually said this, or whether Robert Bolt put the words into his mouth, but here is what More said about law in the great play A Man For All Seasons:
“”What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? … And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
The problem for us is: what on earth does a civilized man do when he is in that place, where man’s laws really have been uprooted?
What then do we do?
We haven’t come close to that yet in the US, but I think they have in the former Republic of South Africa. I therefore feel loath to judge the father.
Steve R. writes (on 3-30, before the news came out that the killer is black):
Re the possibility that the rugby player was just picking out some blacks to kill:
If we are giving no credibility to the rugby player than we can ignore these words of his:
“Did you know we would ever meet? You think I’m stupid. You infected my daughter with HIV.”
Now one part of this discussion, I thought, was about when retaliation might be appropriate. To attach that discussion to this incident, I presumed that we were giving some credibility to the father of the child likely to die from the disease passed on by the rapist—that he was not just picking out random blacks to kill.
A word about the spirit of the act of the rugby player: it is my understanding that in Judaic law, at least in the case of murder, the relative of the victim is in the first position of meting out punishment. The relative may ask the authorities to perform the execution in his stead.
If it is virtually certain that the S.A. authorities would not have brought the rapists to justice and the rugby player was absolutely certain of their guilt then I hope I would have had the courage to act as he did—no matter what the consequences in that God forsaken land.
Charles T. writes:
We have an identity; here, and reported by the BBC here.
Also the Melbourne Age is reporting the SA police are stating there is no rape link in this case.
Interesting.
Gintas writes:
You wrote:
“Shock race switch in rape-revenge murder case”
Maybe the decapitations should have tipped us off.
Sophia A. writes:
I have to say I’m surprised that the father is black. Really, this changes nothing. The situation is the same: a once civilized (if massively imperfect) society, falling into African norms. A girl gets gang raped and infected with a horrific virus; there is NO justice. Father wreaks revenge. Sheer savagery—it’s typically African.
Having said that, I am proud of the fact that I stood by the idea that it would have been savagery had the father been white. In a sense, it would have been even more savage. Because it would have been a white man dragged down to the law of the jungle.
Either way, what a world we live in. And it is getting worse.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2011 01:17 PM | Send