A few weeks ago Thea and I went for a swim at a big public pool. There was hardly anyone there because it was raining, but the lifeguard smiled and said come on in. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. We got in and started swimming. As I did backstroke, he limped towards the deep end, his feet slightly strangely splayed out as he went. And I realised who he was. And I thought this is really very very fucked up. This guy is just walking around this swimming pool on a normal Monday making sure no one drowns. This guy, who only a few months ago was all over the news in every country. Famous because men with chainsaws attacked him and tried to cut off his legs. His assailants only got half way through his calves, took a call and then disappeared. Mhlengi got to a hospital and his legs were sewn up. Perhaps it is just normal and the best thing to go back to working at a swimming pool after something like this happens. I don’t know.
I didn’t actually recognise Mhlengi from the newspapers, but because, in a separate coincidence, before all this happened, we met on a photoshoot for a story I was writing about his coach. Apart from being a lifeguard, Mhlengi is a triathlete. At this time, I was writing a lot of ‘triumph through suffering’ stories mainly about athletes conquering adversity through sport. People were telling me stories about strokes, heroin addiction, cancer, being blind, being desperately poor, having a broken heart, being run over and having a leaky gut. About being at your weakest and your strongest at the same time. Heavily influenced at one point by the movie Phantom Thread, I might even have compared the existential crisis of the upper echelon ultra-runner to knowingly eating a huge poisonous mushroom omelette.
I had never written about someone who had been attacked with a chainsaw however, but I decided to leave Mhlengi alone. CNN and the BBC descended and the world reacted. Hundreds of thousands of rands were donated to pay the medical bills. In my neighbourhood, where the attack happened, people starting drinking a bit earlier in the day. Fear and neurosis levels soared to record heights. Even the bushes on the roads where he cycled seemed to be simmering with PTSD*. People stopped riding bicycles. There are a lot of freelance tree-fellers in Glenwood and many went bust. More people moved to Durban North. Ex-pats felt justified. Everyone had a theory. It was a premeditated attack. Nothing was stolen. And then after a while it all died down again, and everyone kind of forgot, and then from time to time, said, I wonder if the guy who was attacked with the chainsaws is okay now. I mean come on.
Last Friday I went back to the pool. I wanted to ask Mhlengi if he was alright or if he felt abandoned now that time had passed. He said he had a lot of support, and he said that he was not scared, but he was ‘looking out’.
“What is the point of crying,” he said. “I grew up tough. From when I was a boy herding cattle I had to deal with the worms in their intestines when they died. When I was a child young virgin girls had to watch out because of muti and Albino people were never buried, for the same reason. My father survived two bullets to the torso, and one ricocheting off the wall. Since I have been alive I have been struck by lightning twice, but luckily it got the jukebox and my cellphone instead. I have been knocked off my bicycle three times. I was in a car accident where a truck killed my friend. I was an alcoholic and a drug addict and I got through that by running, cycling and swimming. I have been held up at gunpoint three times. And I have been stabbed in the head.” He showed me the scar. “I don’t think the same chainsaw people will come back. It will be something different.”
At this point he went to attend to some swimmers and I wrote a text to my friend Richard about all this. Richard said 'Holy jesus. what a fucking nightmare. Please go home and sit down quietly with a glass of wine and a Victorian novel.”
I asked him if he wanted to tell the story of the attack. He said he was tired of talking about ‘the incident’ and it made him emotional. Actually, I know that really he just wants to be a lifeguard and get on with his training. But anyway, it is not up to him, what gets written anymore. Because as usual, an agent now decides. An agent in London, who says he will take Mhlengi to the Olympics. Have a look at their website http://supremerocket.com/
The agent wrote to me. He said, “Dear Jess, ‘we want a story that can go hand in hand with our trajectory… we wish however a story of conquest and not a story of survival… a story of pure love for the sport and how that can bring the force you need to become truly impressive… we also wish to keep Gwala away from any political position (apartheid included) as he and all athletes are international and the sponsors, the fans and the people that work with him and donated and helped him now and in the future. So politics has no place in sports… let’s see that together we make a great material beneficial and inspiring to all.” For real. He wrote me that text.
*When you have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you are mostly just getting on with your day, keeping memories and anxiety, sadness, grief, anger, all that stuff just beneath the surface or away in a separate box. Sometimes though, for years afterwards, something or someone triggers the memory. Perhaps it is a small thing, like a car exhaust backfires. Perhaps it seems like something unrelated: someone shouts at you, or someone you trusted betrays you, or you experience loss, or you read about something that happened somewhere else. Anything, probably inconsequential to the person sitting next to you. And your whole body is transported back to the time you were first afraid. It feels as if it all happening again right then. All that terror, wham, right back. My Psychology thesis results showed that up to 70% of children aged 6 - 8 living in hotspots around Pietermaritzburg in the nineties had either witnessed the death of a loved one or the destruction of their home. Many had been hurt themselves. Their drawings were of tiny people with huge ears (listening for danger) in the corners of the pretty big pieces of paper I gave them.