Cape Town - The man who attacked a gardener with a sjambok in Claremont may be a local dentist, according to threats he levelled at his victim early on Sunday.
Gardener Muhammed Makungwa was late for work in Rondebosch, and was running down Palmyra Road when the driver of a white BMW X5 apparently tried to run him over. The driver then got out of the vehicle and beat Makungwa with a sjambok.
“I kept on running and he then tried to drive his car into me,” Makungwa said on Monday. “I stopped and he got out and started whipping me with a sjambok. He just went crazy and didn’t give me a chance to explain myself.”
Makungwa described his attacker as a white man in his 50s. The two went together to Makungwa’s employer, Nadia Kamies.
On Monday night Kamies told the Cape Argus that Makungwa was out of hospital but had been booked off work until Thursday.
She said the police visited her house on Monday and she supplied them with CCTV footage that clearly showed the attacker’s face, car and registration number.
“According to Muhammed, he’s a dentist in Palmyra Road,” she said. “But he also said that he was a soldier. And he said to Muhammed: ‘If I was a policeman and you were running away I could have shot you’.”
Makungwa is recovering at home.
“He’s quite scared and nervous,” Kamies said. “He’s a very gentle person and that’s what has made us all so angry that he had to go through this.”
Kamies said he was staying with her other employee, Oscar Namata, who came from the same area of Malawi as Makungwa did and got him the job with the Kamies family.
Police spokesman Captain FC van Wyk said two men had chased Makungwa. They had accused him of breaking into their vehicle.
Van Wyk confirmed that no theft out of a motor vehicle had been reported by the BMW driver.
“An altercation between the men and the Malawian resulted in the Malawian being assaulted and sustaining injuries to the face and shoulder. A case of assault with intention to do grievous bodily harm was opened, but no arrests have been made as yet.”
A similar incident last month saw swimming instructor Tim Osrin attack domestic worker Cynthia Joni in Kenilworth, while she was on her way to work. He later tried to justify his actions by saying he thought she was a sex worker.
On Sunday, two men were banned from the Cape Quarter shopping centre after a k-word slur sparked a fistfight.
A YouTube video showing the brawl next to an ATM at the centre in Green Point went viral. The video shows two white men using the ATM, while a black man in the queue behind them asks them to hurry up.
One of the white men turns around and calls the black man the k-word. They begin shouting at each other, which soon escalates into physical violence. At the end of the video, the white man is on the floor after he was punched and kicked by the black man.
The Cape Quarter Lifestyle Village posted on its Facebook page on Monday: “The Cape Quarter does not condone racism and violence… The safety of our shoppers is a priority… The individuals have been banned from the centre and we’d like to thank everyone for their concern.”
Cape Argus