As the Schabir Shaik controversy refuses to leave front pages, a strange meeting I had with a friend of the well-known golfer, in the parking lot next to a crematorium, makes much more sense now.
The Papwa Sewgolum Golf Course seems like a perfect place to carry out a quiet assassination.
Here, between the silent, overburdened mango trees and rotting shacks, old Indian men dressed in skinny golf shirts, bomber-taupe golf shoes and biscuit-coloured shorts, indulge their colonial fetish of nine irons and black caddies.
The course is named after the great Sewsunker “Papwa” Sewgolum, who kicked Gary Player’s butt back in the sixties.
It’s a glory still talked about with some fondness over pints of Castle in the clubhouse. But far from the luscious greens of an Augusta, the Papwa Sewgolum Golf Course sits uncomfortably like a dampened oasis in a swamp of discontent, prejudice and municipal neglect.
There aren’t many golf courses that can boast a crematorium and squatter camp as neighbours. Little wonder then, if you are an old Indian man with golf clubs and enough under the mattress, you come here to Papwa, to die.
This might explain the spooks about the course.
So, it is with a mixture of trepidation and fascination that I agreed to meet Krish Dhudraj in the parking lot of the Papwa Sewgulum. I imagine a scream muffled under a duffel bag would pass for an irreverent cry of a passing hadeda.
To read the rest of my op-ed for The Daily Mavercik, click here.
