menu.
“You must send Engelke an e-mail and ask him if he will talk to you,” said the contact.
“Hmm,” I said. “And where is he?”
“Unfortunately, he's a bit far away.”
“How far?”
“He lives in Moscow.”
* * *
In October 2014, as I was about to close the chapter on my journalism life, I wrote a story for City Press under the headline “Spies plunder R1bn slush fund”. It chronicled an orgy of fraud and corruption; of how a top intelligence officer by the name of Arthur Fraser had allegedly squandered hundreds of millions of rand of taxpayers' money. Fraser, then second in command at the National Intelligence Agency (NIA, which later became the SSA), had embarked on a project to expand South Africa's intelligence capabilities. It was known as the Principal Agent Network (PAN) and had a limitless budget. Millions of rand in cash were transported in suitcases from a state money depot in Pretoria central to “the Farm” – the nickname for the agency's headquarters, otherwise known as Musanda, on the shores of the Rietvlei Dam, south of Pretoria. Much of the money in the PAN slush fund was squandered.
I had never met the bald-headed Fraser and he seldom appears in public. He was described to me as a broody, burly and soft-spoken man – he was apparently a bouncer in his younger days – who was the archetypal spy. What is the typical spy? To start with, they think that they are on a mission to save the world. The worlds of Matt Damon and Daniel Craig are slick, fast-paced and sexy. Their suits never crinkle, women always say yes, and their cars shoot missiles. Real-life spy sagas unfold with far less panache. Overseas research has shown intelligence agents at the CIA to be often college graduates with low-value degrees; they are outsiders or loners, they have family or friends in the intelligence or armed services, they can't work with money and love firearms. Much of a spy's work these days is sifting through data.
Spies and assassins are akin in that they have their own unique phrases and slang that only they understand. An assassin never kills but “eliminates”, “permanently removes a subject from society” or “makes a plan” with him. In spy lingo, a bodyguard is a babysitter, a dead drop is a secret location where material can be left, and a person can be a target, an asset or a sleeper.
Fraser remained defiant throughout the two-year investigation into him and boasted that he would never be charged. He set up a string of businesses after he resigned from the intelligence service and concluded multimillion-rand contracts with government.
There was little reaction to my exposé in City Press, which I attributed to corruption fatigue. Readers had simply had enough of the daily barrage of news of state pillage. It didn't bother me because I was about to embark on a new chapter in my life.
* * *
I was a journalist for thirty years. A columnist for a Sunday newspaper once wrote that if journalists were the “nagkardrywers” (sewage car drivers) of society, I'm grubbier than any of them. She said it is probably because I've encountered my fair share of loonies and psychos, civil war and genocide, warmongers and cut-throats, scammers and tricksters.
Hunter S. Thompson once said that journalism is a “cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage”. I think he exaggerated, but my mother till her death wanted to know when I was going to get a “real job” and was convinced that there are far worthier things to do. I'm not sure if baking milktarts and cooking waterblommetjiebredie would have met her expectations either.
I left journalism as the head of investigations at Media24 newspapers. When I wrote the Fraser exposé for City Press, I was already the proud owner of a neglected guesthouse, restaurant and bar in Riebeek-Kasteel in the Western Cape. The village is a mere eighty kilometres from Cape Town and one of the province's “happening” country spots and getaways. The guesthouse cum restaurant was once one of the grande old dames of the valley; a 150-year-old manor house that guarded Riebeek-Kasteel's south-eastern entrance on Hermon Road. She had been sleeping guests, feeding strangers and quenching thirsts for two decades.
Journalist and friend Chris Marais said of me and Sam in a magazine article: “Gone, for these two, are the days of flitting through Africa with a cameraman, a notebook and a notion of a good story to be told. No more killing fields of Rwanda, drinking sessions with death squads, TV production deadlines, dodgy spaza preachers, chasing junkies through the back streets of Maputo and sailing down the Congo River on a stinky market boat. Gone, too, are the days of the generous expense account, the top-end media awards dinners, the acclaim and the sweet result of seeing the bad guy brought to book after being exposed on air.”
Riebeek-Kasteel, surrounded by tanned cornfields and green vineyards, feels as though it is thousands of miles from Gauteng. It is wall-less, tractors full of grapes roar through the village, children play in the streets, and in winter the mist tumbles and tosses down Kasteelberg. The locals are engaging and gentle, and it is the kind of place where Sam and I can live forever.
We threw all our savings and pension into our new venture. We gave her a complete facelift and rechristened her Red Tin Roof. We donned her in new colours and enlarged the bar – and then added another one. We revamped her from head to toe and decorated her with our eclectic mixture of art and collectibles that we have accumulated from around the world.
Sam and I moved into the roof of the manor house, which was used by the previous owners as a conference venue. “You know what,” Sam said to me, “we live like white trash.” We've done so ever since.
The first few months were tumultuous and at times Red Tin Roof resembled a madhouse. The whole village descended on the place on opening night. Our credit card machine didn't work and we collected wads of cash in plastic bags. I grabbed friends and shoved them behind the bar to serve customers. Others were elevated to chefs to braai sosaties and skilpadjies (a Swartland delicacy of chopped lamb's liver wrapped in stomach fat). Then Eskom switched off the electricity.
Whether by choice or not, I have since then been banned to the kitchen. I had early on proved that I lacked the social finesse to deal with customers when I told a Spanish guest to fuck off when he complained about his Dom Pedro. Problem was that he had just sat down with his extended family for a long and boozy lunch. They stormed out. The Spaniard returned the next morning and demanded an apology. He got one, but after that Sam dragged me to the kitchen and ordered me to stay there.
I think I'm a bit of a feeder, and in Ann Patchett's essay “Dinner for One, Please, James” she says: “I love to feed other people. Cooking gives me the means to make other people feel better, which in a very simple equation makes me feel better. I believe that food can be a profound means of communication, allowing me to express myself in a way that seems much deeper and more sincere than words.”
Chris Marais writes: “It's a Sunday afternoon in Riebeek-Kasteel and we've just arrived to see Jacques and Sam and get a first-hand progress report on this, their latest adventure. We sat outside in the quietening courtyard. Lunch is a distant memory, and only the last few drinkers remain with what's left in their wine bottles. It's clear to see who is ‘front of house' and who is ‘engine room'. Sam is all smiles, elegance and welcome. Jacques is all kitchen confidential, a bit like the mad genius you had to drag out of the lab and into the sunlight.”
* * *
For the first year of my self-imposed exile I happily slaved away in the Red Tin Roof kitchen. That was until December 2015, when President Jacob Zuma fired his minister of finance, Nhlanhla Nene, and replaced him with ANC backbencher Des van Rooyen. Nene was a proponent of stern fiscal discipline and cutting government spending to allow for growth and poverty alleviation. That was not the priority for Zuma. He wanted control of the state purse.
Although Van Rooyen has a postgraduate degree in economics, he had no experience in Treasury matters. He was the mayor of Merafong in 2009, but residents chased him out of the township after burning his house. He was reportedly the preferred choirboy