FULL CIRCLE

Gert Jordaan was somewhat of a ladies man, but a perfect gentleman. Quiet spoken, this well read fellow had more than a few talents – eloquent, a sketch artist of some repute and a salesman with the natural ability to talk the most reluctant of buyers into a deal and clinch a sale. It is no doubt that his smooth talking had duly impressed a young lass by the name of Ria into another of his ephemeral relationships. She was a charming lady in her late twenties, he a middle aged man who had neither married nor yearned for a settled, stable life. Beguiled by her inscrutable smile, Gert enjoyed her company. It was she who invited him to a service at a Chapel in what is today Maud Mafusi Street, Albert Park, Durban. In the mid-1960s the little chapel was home to various small denominations before being sold on to the Salvation Army and today, the Albert Park Methodist Church. Ria’s family often invited guests for Sunday lunch at their apartment nearby after the morning service. Gert, as Ria’s “tag along” found himself at the dinner table on that Sunday.

The topics for discussion that day ranged from religion to politics and Gert would throw in his penny’s worth, contributing in an engaging way to the tone of the general chatter. It was clear that he had an agile mind and he fitted in well with polite company. It was not obvious to anyone present that he had had a rather ignominious start in life and that the social graces were a veneer that well concealed a lifestyle that might have been alarming to the other guests present. This was possibly the least frenetic period in his life, having held a job for two years already as a second hand car salesman in Durban’s motor town. A regular paycheque and ample commission, he was able to rent a small cottage behind a house in Wentworth on the Bluff. He drove one of the vehicles from the sales lot as a perk of the job. Fastidiously attired and with impeccable manners, he presented a likeable persona. Those who engaged with him were impressed and would have been astounded to learn about his alter ego.

Gert had been born in prison. His mother had been briefly incarcerated in the Johannesburg Fort (commissioned by Paul Kruger in 1892/3), and repurposed alternately as a prison, defence installation and again by the British as a men’s gaol after the South African War. His mother had been temporarily held there around the time of his birth in 1910 when a few cells were reserved for female prisoners. It must have been for a relatively minor offence, as she was released not many months hence. His father, though, was a disreputable chap. He was a burglar who plied his trade in the Witwatersrand’s wealthier quarters. An alcoholic, he was a troubled soul and given to bouts of rage – beating his wife and three children, of whom Gert was the middle one, mercilessly. His stints in prison were frequent and lengthy, but on the occasions he was not languishing behind bars, he taught his youngsters his nefarious trade. Gert, being a tiny lad as a child, was taught to slink through fanlights to open up house doors from the inside, so that his father and elder brother could enter and ransack the premises, emerging with loot they sold almost as quickly as they stole it. Gert was about eight years old at the time and his brother about fifteen. They had a younger sister who died before her fifth birthday from Diphtheria, undoubtedly contracted in the slums of Fietas where the family lived in squalor. His mother turned “tricks” in the streets of Fietas when the father was banged up in jail. With the proceeds of prostitution, she fed her little family and put them through school. 

By his early teens he had his first encounter with the “law”. Caught for petty theft, he slipped out of the grasp of the police as he escaped from a charge office into the night. Like his father he was to become an habitual criminal, though not a violent one – at least as far as his victims and the public were concerned. Chased by police, however, he had no compunction about engaging in a shoot-out with them. He had an affinity for firearms, at one time possessing about thirty handguns, all of them stolen. A kleptomaniac and burglar, his crimes earned him less jail time than the aggravating circumstances of his legendary escapes. Somewhat of a Houdini, no prison could hold him for long, and time added to his sentences exceeded the sentences by a considerable extent.

Gert committed his crimes alone, for the most part. On the odd occasion that he teamed up with a buddy to stage a burglary, he regarded the accomplice more as an impediment than a helpful partner. One such escapade brought home to him the danger of working with someone not as skilled as he in squirming out of the grasp of the long arm of the law. Shot in his leg and with a scar creating a path through his hair, police bullets inflicted a fair share of damage. His buddy, though, took a bullet to the heart and expired at the scene of the crime.

Sadly, it was not long after the dinner with Ria’s family, that he ran foul of the law again – after having kept a steady job for a few years. A shoot-out with police preceded another stint in the penitentiary in Durban. By that time, though, Gert’s age and fast life began to catch up with him. Upon his release in the early 70s, he found a place to stay in one of the slums of Chatsworth. Wealthy Indian businessmen in the area lived cheek by jowl with impoverished communities segregated by government Group Areas policy from other races. Gert, however, found a kind and compassionate Indian landlady who was willing to rent him a shack in her backyard in defiance of the strict segregation policies of the time. His own community had all but rejected him by this time and his long history of flirtation with crime prevented him from acquiring and holding a steady job. 

When his landlady discovered his lifeless body on the cement floor of his shack, his life had come full circle. A proper autopsy was out of the question, because rats had reached his corpse before that dear lady was prompted to investigate why he had not emerged from his shack for some time. The stench of death had alerted her to the likelihood of his demise. The only possession of any value that he left behind was a stolen Smith and Wesson revolver that was found beneath the bug infested mattress of his rickety old bed. 

Juxtaposed had been the complete circle of a life of crime, incarceration and escapes from custody on the one hand, and a meaningful, gracious, articulate and intelligent man on the other. This perplexing dichotomy – a perpetual struggle between good and evil – is part of the human condition. The two wolves continually gnaw at each other and, as the metaphoric parable so succinctly sums it up, the wolf one feeds is the one that wins.

©Paul M Haupt