Gugulethu, South Africa
Published on 1/26/2011
In Gugulethu, South Africa, life can be cheap, and death can be bought quickly. In three hours an interested party can find and hire a hit man. To find a hit man ready, able, and, most importantly, willing to kill a stranger, one need only ask around, as the newspaper Cape Argus demonstrated in early winter of 2010. In one day’s research, the paper found three assassins willing to kill for fees ranging between $700 and $2,000.
Gugulethu is the largest and most violent of South Africa’s 65 townships. Created — though as often as not left undeveloped—in the 19
th
century for the country’s non-white populations, they have in recent years become urban killing fields. In Gugulethu alone there has been an average of one murder every two and a half days for the past five years. Despite efforts by the South African government and citizens, the townships remain one of the starkest reminders of South Africa’s brutal apartheid history. Though the vast majority of township residents are struggling to make their lives better, as witnessed by the designer boutiques appearing recently there, a dense, prevailing poverty remains. In such an atmosphere, there is always someone to seize any opportunity that presents itself.
For many, townships such as Gugulethu represent the real South Africa, the nation as it exists beneath the booming, polished tourism industry. For Shrien and Anni Dewani, newlyweds in the middle of long honeymoon at some of South Africa’s most luxurious resorts and hotels, life as it was lived in the townships was, according to some accounts, what the couple set out to locate on the evening of November 13, 2010. The Dewanis went looking for an unchaperoned South Africa. They found what they were looking for.
“They told me that they wouldn’t hurt her,” lamented Shrien Dewani in the days after he and his new bride ventured into Gugulethu. That assurance was a lie; like so many of the statements and assertions surrounding the murder of young Anni Dewani. The killers were quickly found, but, according to the testimony of one of their accomplices, Anni Dewani’s fate was much more perverse than any random act of violence.
Daily Mail
NY 1 — Native Yards 1 — is the name of the main road running through Gugulethu. The people who created South Africa’s townships didn’t find it necessary to name the roads that ran through the settlements with any precision. According to the authorities, within three minutes of exiting the main highway to Gugulethu on NY 1 the Dewanis and their driver, Zola Tongo were car-jacked. This much is undisputed.
Here’s the story according to Shrien Dewani. As he told the
in the days following the attack:
“Anni grew up in Sweden, and she felt as if the area around this hotel was just like at home: so clean and safe, and maybe a bit sterile. She had never been to Africa before, so she suggested that we should have a look at the ‘real Africa.’
“The stop was on the way back here and was intended so that we could experience a township. We were barely in the Gugulethu Township when the attack happened. We had just turned off the junction and were stopped at a set of traffic lights. It was two African male gunmen. They were banging their guns on the windows. One of them was using his gun to smash the driver’s window. Until this happened we had been completely oblivious. We were sitting in the back of the cab going through all the pictures of our safari.”
According to Shrien, the assailants forced the couple’s chauffeur, Zola Tongo, out of the car and drove off. For 20 minutes the attackers sped through the township, menacing the Dewanis before the gunmen forced Shrien from the car and drove off. Shrien, now 11 miles from where he had been abducted, hailed a passing car and immediately alerted the authorities. Shrien’s apparent distress compelled the Cape Town police to leap into action, and they scrambled a police helicopter to assist in the search. Unfortunately, it was too late.
Just before 8 a.m. the next morning, Tongo’s car and Anni Dewani’s body were found. The last moments of her life must have been terrifying. Although she had not been raped — a rare exception to the rule of township violence — she had been badly beaten. Her body exhibited extensive bruising, and her clothes were ripped. She had been executed with a single shot to the throat. Her BlackBerry, her Armani watch, and a diamond necklace she had been wearing were missing. At first it seemed as if this had been a carjacking and robbery gone fatally wrong.
Shrien and Anni Dewani were married in a lavish three-day ceremony in Mumbai on October 29, 2010. Following the ceremony, the wealthy British couple traveled to South Africa for an extended honeymoon in a series of South Africa’s most exclusive vacation properties. It must have seemed a dream come true — to escape the dreary confines of the looming English winter to spend a couple of weeks reveling in their new love and their new life in a warm climate.
Anni Dewani’s family had survived brutality and hardship in the past. Ugandans of Indian descent, they had fled the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin in the 1970s, accepting an offer of asylum from Sweden. Anni was born roughly a decade later, in 1982, and she thrived in the liberal Scandinavian nation. After excelling at school, Anni sought advanced training as an engineer and, after completing her studies, she joined the telecommunications giant Ericksson. As beautiful as she was brilliant, she also modeled. Anni excelled at her work, and according to friends and family she was quite happy in Sweden. Her life took on a new direction in 2009 when she visited her cousin in London. It was on that trip that she met Shrien Dewani, the man who would become her husband.
At 30, Shrien Dewani was two years older than his wife. Raised in the suburbs of Bristol, England, Shrien trained and practiced as an accountant before resigning from his job in order to run his family’s chain of nursing homes. More of a practical businessman than a dreamer, he helped build the chain of homes into a highly lucrative business, making himself a millionaire along the way.
The couple’s first date was to see a performance of the musical The Lion King, and soon thereafter they were deeply involved. In June 2009, Shrien proposed to Anni, offering her a massive engagement ring worth nearly $40,000. The couple’s engagement seemed almost ideal, if a bit strained by distance. At first they alternated weekends between Stockholm and Bristol, but, after a few months of hectic travel, Anni resigned her position with the telecom company and moved to Bristol to help Shrien run the family business. She also entered as a contestant in the British version of the popular reality show, “Top Model.”
The Dewani’s seemed to live a dream come true, but their ill-fated trip into the heart of Gugulethu destroyed that dream. Anni was dead. Britain responded with a national lamentation, an outpouring of sympathy and outrage rarely seen in the stoic nation. To have a young life and blossoming love extinguished so callously by the lawless thugs of a South African slum was beyond belief to many Britons. It was understandable — who wouldn’t respond to the killing in such a manner.
South Africa struggles to maintain its image as a tourist-friendly destination. Fear that the nation’s tourism industry would be damaged compelled the already committed police force to work even harder, and mere days after the murder the killers were apprehended.
By November 20, two residents of Gugulethu, Xolile Mngeni and Mziwamadoda Qwabe, both in their early twenties, and, shockingly, the Dewanis’ driver, Zola Tongo, were charged with aggravated robbery and murder. But things may not have been as they appeared.
Almost as soon as the authorities arrested the three killers, they began to hint that the murder might have been a pre-planned assassination. On December 18, 2010, Shrien Dewani’s account of events began to unravel when Tongo testified that Anni Dewani was the target of a premeditated killing, one arranged and paid for by her husband.
UPDATE: Qwabe pleads guilty, says Dewani hired him, Mngeni and Tongo.
The Telegraph
According to The Telegraph, Shrien’s personal assistant retained the services of Zola Tongo prior to the couple’s arrival in Cape Town. Like many taxi drivers in South Africa, Tongo often served as a chauffeur and fixer for wealthy tourists — he would meet the travelers at the airport and remain with them throughout their stay. Tongo picked the couple up at the Cape Town International Airport and drove them to their hotel on November 12. According to Tongo, Shrien distracted his wife — saying she should call her parents to check in with them — while the two men discussed the details of Anni Dewani’s imminent murder.
“After we arrived at the hotel,”
reported Tongo saying at his trial, “Shrien Dewani approached me alone and asked me if I knew anyone that could ‘have a client of his taken off the scene’… After contacting a friend, we agreed that Shrien Dewani and I would be ejected from the vehicle and that the female occupant had to be killed.”
The price for his wife’s life? As reported in The New York Times, Tongo testified, “Dewani had given him $150 to set up the murder. Two other men were alleged to have done the actual killing, receiving the $2,200 that was eagerly offered for the job.”
They had to go to the agreed upon abduction site twice. As Tongo later testified, when his taxi arrived at the designated site the killers were not yet in place. Tongo then drove the couple around and took them to a restaurant. “Prior to entering the restaurant, Shrien Dewani asked me what was happening and said he wanted the job done that night,” claimed Tongo.
The alleged killers, Xolile Mngeni and Mziwamadoda Qwabe seemed to be pulled straight from central casting’s “African criminal” pool. Mngeni, in particular, fits the stereotype of an inner-city predator. According to the Mail and Guardian, over the past three years Mngeni has been arrested for a number of violent crimes, though many of the charges were ultimately withdrawn. In addition to assault and robbery cases in 2008 and 2009, Mngeni was the prime suspect in both a murder and an attempted murder.
The Mail and Guardian also reported that at the time of Anni Dewani’s murder Mngeni had been free on bail pending a trial for drug possession, but that a warrant had been issued for his arrest for failure to appear in court.
Money seems to be the sole motive for the alleged triggermen. Neither suspect had any resources to mention.
According to News 24 South Africa, after their murder there “was apparently ‘a bit of a party’ at a Sonwabo’s Place, a tavern in Khayelitsha and a favorite watering hole of the suspects. Qwabe apparently entertained others with his karaoke singing and bought drinks for everyone.”
Mngeni felt particular pressure to get money: He was the only one of his peers who had not gone through the traditional rite of circumcision, and this fact was reportedly a staggering embarrassment to the young killer.
“He was desperate to get money to go to the bush,” Lennox Mngeni, a cousin, told News 24 South Africa. “This thing always bothered him. All his friends were circumcised so he felt inferior…he felt women didn’t see him as a man.”
Zola Tongo’s involvement seems the strangest. As a cab driver, he was the most successful member of his family, and he had only his livelihood to lose for the small profit. But Tongo confessed. In exchange for his testimony he received a relatively lenient sentence of 18 years. Though no picnic, it’s conceivable that Tongo will live to see the light of day after his sentence. His accomplices, should they be sentenced after their February 2011 trial, may not be so lucky.
Still, as with all deals, the fact that Tongo’s damning testimony was offered in exchange for years of his life cast some doubt on his accusations. After all, why would Shrien Dewani have his lovely new wife murdered? There is no good answer to this, though any number of reasons were offered to dislike Shrien Dewani.
Although he has been arrested for no crime, Shrien Dewani is now reviled; he has become the object of vigorous accusations. Assuming the worst, Britain was scandalized that the heir to a healthcare fortune could be so callous, that he could instigate such brutality. Moreover, Dewani seemed to lack a motive. Shrien Dewani controlled what wealth the couple possessed; he suffered no financial difficulty, and his marriage was so fresh that some misguided marital desperation couldn’t have been the motive behind his allegedly murderous designs.
South Africans became enraged by what appeared to be Dewani’s cynical calculus: who would question the motive for a robbery and killing in a South African township? After all, the world’s gut reaction to a killing in Gugulethu would be just another killing in Gugulethu, only this time a wealthy and perhaps naive British newlywed. What did she expect going into the lawless townships?
Dewani anticipated this reaction and, according to The Telegraph, his representatives have repeatedly claimed that South African authorities are implicating him in the murder in order to protect their country’s tourism industry.
Most damming, at least from the point of view of the public, are the inconsistencies in Shrien Dewani’s story as well as his refusal to return to Cape Town at the South African authorities’ request.
To begin with, Dewani has proven inconsistent in the most fundamental details of his wife’s abduction. After obtaining the services of Max Clifford, a master of public relations, Dewani released a statement claiming that he and he wife had been held in the car for 40 minutes, not 20, before he was ejected. More importantly, he claimed that Tongo, and not Anni, suggested the trip to Gugulethu.
More salaciously, The Telegraph reported that Leopold Leisser, a “German-born, gay escort” claimed to have had sex with Shrien Dewani three times in Birmingham and London. The Sun also reported “a burly male escort who dresses in a military-style leather uniform told Scotland Yard that Dewani had paid more than £1,100 for sex on three occasions between September last year and April.” Both claims were ultimately shown to be false when Dewani conclusively proved that he was not in either of the two cities in question on the dates provided by the prostitute, but it was clear that public sentiment had shifted away from Dewani.
South African officials have a series of closed-circuit TV films purportedly showing Shrien Dewani withdrawing cash and meeting, clandestinely, with Zola Tongo. The last, and most damming, of the meetings occurred at Dewani’s hotel several days after the murder. Closed-circuit TV shows Dewani giving Tongo a large package containing cash. South African authorities have questioned Dewani, from afar, and he claims that he was only paying Tongo for services rendered as a driver.
Dewani’s flat refusal to return to South African to assist in the investigation has also cast suspicion on him in South African eyes. Since Tongo’s testimony was entered into the record, the government of South Africa has been attempting to extradite Dewani. He refuses to return. After initially surrendering to Bristol police, Shrien became uncooperative with the investigation, refusing to submit to extradition. The official defense to this action, or lack of action, is that Dewani fears reprisal from a South African kangaroo court, one intent on making a scapegoat of Dewani in order to salvage Cape Town tourism.
Shrien Dewani is currently out on the equivalent of nearly $400,000 bail, and he has surrendered his passport. As recently as January 2011, Anni’s family has pleaded with him to assist the investigation. He refuses while maintaining his innocence. Most recently, on January 20, 2011 Shrien Dewani failed to attend an extradition hearing in England; his lawyers claimed that he was suffering from “acute stress disorder and a depressive adjustment disorder.” At other times, Shrien Dewani seems to contemplate returning to South Africa, although he has a series of strict conditions which must be met if he is to return. According to the BBC, in order to consider allowing his extradition to proceed without a battle, Dewani is demanding the right to be free on bail until the conclusion of the case — until the final appeal.
Until then, the killing of the lovely Anni Dewani remains unsolved; confusion reigns; the pain persists; and the charges remain. According to the BBC, Dewani “is facing charges of conspiracy to murder, murder, kidnapping, robbery with aggravated circumstances and obstruction of the administration of justice.”