SLR: Reflections on Friday’s tragedy – a tribute to Gordin

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By Simon Lincoln Reader*

It was too easy to dismiss Jeremy Gordin as a typical white Parkview media “lefty” in a suburb with an oversupply of them. I didn’t know him well at all, but he stormed out of a Thursday night dinner party in 2012 on the basis someone had made an unflattering remark about Julius Malema. I don’t believe he was genuinely offended: in the course of his biography of Jacob Zuma – a book suspended between criticism of the subject and praise for Gordin’s insight – he had seen something. It involved his own work, journalism, how echo chambers are formed then fermented. It’s not something you can speak of easily; others, I suspect he thought as he walked out, would have to see it for themselves. 

On Friday, a story of our past that held within it the hope to be a story of our future exploded, around the very same “Parkwold” Alan Paton fictionalised (possibly: Parkview / Saxonwold) in “Cry the Beloved Country”. Gordin was murdered in what Beijing24 describes as a “robbery gone wrong”. That the phrase “robbery gone wrong” has normalised, that it has resolved itself immune to inference, is one of the great mysteries of South Africa, particularly of Johannesburg. A “robbery gone wrong” was Absalom Khumalo’s crime in Paton’s masterpiece:  he did not mean it, he was scared – he went there only to rob. Perhaps, after he was murdered and his car stolen, Gordin’s assailants went onto another location where a robbery went right? Or perhaps, that same night, somewhere in Jeppestown or Kew Gardens, there was a “domestic issue gone wrong” – resulting in the rape and beating of a wife or girlfriend? 

The term “lefty” is today meaningless – as meaningless as “far right” – and for this you can thank the political responses to coof. This should have been realised in the 80s, when details began to emerge of enhanced psychedelic experiments within the hippy scene in California – when the lives of people like Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe started to humiliate the lofty principles of the “left” – but for some reason we persisted, and the image of a vapid, middle class professional protestor – outraged well into the evening of his years – was projected at mention of the “left”. Gordin is interesting here; he was, in his capacity of director of the Wits Justice Project, as genuine about the pursuit of justice is as possible – just as James Jarvis found his son Arthur, through papers discovered at his desk after his murder, to be so. Under Gordin’s leadership, that program achieved some success in bringing to sunlight miscarriages of justice and abuse within a broken criminal justice apparatus. 

But we no longer occupy Paton’s world. Forgiveness, portrayed as the most undersold of virtues, redemption and light finding a place inhabited by only darkness are almost impossible ideas, not just in South Africa, but most of the world. Now, in places like Australia and New Zealand, women’s rights campaigners are kicked and punched by biological males in the name of a trend (men claiming to be women) that didn’t exist until a few years ago. Leading the charge toward universal idiocracy is the mentally impaired President of the United States, a documented racist, who keeps lying about his role in South Africa’s “struggle”. Now there is war with Russia. Now there is no broken Church to rebuild – its the consistently wrong, upwardly failing, deeply damaged academics and “experts” to whom we must trust. Now there are scams, enjoying the support of corporations and using a twisted theory of injustice to shake down people into forking out, or leaving platitudes on their social media accounts.  All we thought to be true, all that we sought, all that we lived – hard lessons but cautioned with promise – have been replaced by the “narrative” – a collection of greed, bad ideas, technology, benzodiazepines, seed oils, commercial expediency, political opportunism and the systematic retardation of language: the “lived experiences” of some may result in a “robbery gone wrong” for others. 

“It’s getting too dark to see” – the summary of a letter Gordin sent his children recently, suggesting they consider leaving the country to live elsewhere. But be careful here: the dawn that was supposed to fill the hills of Ndotsheni is missing from other places too. We don’t know when it will return. 

My condolences to Gordin’s excellent colleagues at Politicsweb, in particular, James Myburgh, RW Johnson, William Saunderson-Meyer and Andrew Donaldson. 

*Simon Lincoln Reader works and lives in London. You can follow him on Substack.

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