Chase Your Shadow Read Free

shooting. The news that the suspect was about to be taken to the hospital would give the psychologist the opportunity to observe him over the course of several hours, to try and gain a sense of whether he was telling the truth or not.
    Content to watch him out of the corner of his eye, asking nothing, Labuschagne accompanied Pistorius to the police car that would take him to the hospital. He sat in the front next to the driver, Pistorius in the back with another policeman, keeping his head down to avoid being seen. Neither of them spoke, save once when Labuschagne, trying to win his confidence, called out a warning for him to duck down because he had spotted a vehicle in the rear-view mirror that seemed to be carrying news photographers.
    The car dropped them off at the hospital that serviced the township of Mamelodi – a place the police would never have taken a white man under apartheid, the system of racial discrimination that had lastedhalf a century, ending twenty years earlier when Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president.
    Mamelodi was a poor and densely populated residential area on the periphery of Pretoria, which had been blacks-only by law under apartheid and remained blacks-only in practice now. The politics of South Africa had changed utterly since Nelson Mandela’s election as president in 1994 but Mamelodi remained poor, as did hundreds of townships like it. Addressing poverty and inequality was the task of Mandela’s heirs in government now, an incremental exercise plagued by official incompetence and the apparently inevitable corrupting effects on a political party, the African National Congress, that had been in power for twenty consecutive years. The verities of Mandela’s time, when the political and moral questions had been indistinguishable, had given way to the muddle of day-to-day governance in a country whose challenges were no longer unique in the world. But, while dissatisfaction with the party that had liberated black South Africa grew, Mamelodi and places like it had more access to electricity and running water than before. Also, a black middle class, a concept unimaginable in the apartheid days, had emerged and now consisted of some six million people out of a total South African population of fifty million. The power of the apartheid state had been deployed to defend a system in which black people could not vote, in which they were told where they could and could not live and what hospitals, buses, trains, parks, beaches, public toilets or public telephones they could and could not use. The principle had always been to keep the races apart so as to guarantee white people a superior standard of living. But now some members of this new black middle class lived in Silver Woods as neighbors of the country’s most celebrated white man; at least three of them would turn out to have been woken by the sound of gunfire in the dead of night and would later appear aswitnesses for Pistorius’s defense at the murder trial. One thing that had changed unambiguously and for the better during the twenty years of democracy had been the racial climate, one example of which had been that the Blade Runner was, or had been, as much of a hero among the people of Mamelodi as anywhere else in South Africa – the greatest national hero for South Africans of all races since Mandela himself.
    Had he visited the township twenty-four hours earlier it would have been cause for exuberant celebration. But the police kept his visit to the hospital at Mamelodi quiet, sparing themselves the commotion and him the distress of a potentially mixed welcome.
    Labuschagne and the man who, like Mandela in his day, had suddenly become South Africa’s most famous prisoner spent nearly three hours together at the hospital, most of the time alone – the police colonel on a chair, the prisoner on a medical bed – in a small consulting room. A doctor eventually came in and took scrapes from under Pistorius’s