After giving her husband some takeaway chicken from a nearby
Nando’s, Nokwanda, Ngombane and the others started watching Ray,
a biopic about the American musician Ray Charles. One of the movie’s
early scenes shows the funeral of Charles’s brother, who drowned
when he was a child. In the scene, Charles’s mother flings herself on
the casket of the dead boy and cries and screams in front of the other
mourners. This got Ngombane talking about his own death. ‘Noby said
that if he died we shouldn’t have such a dramatic funeral for him,’
remembered Nokwanda.
They carried on watching the movie, but a little while later Tantaswa
noticed a car in the driveway in front of the house. Ngombane went
outside to inspect. Zandile, his and Nokwanda’s five-year-old daughter,
went after him. ‘I saw him go outside,’ said Nokwanda. ‘The next thing
we heard gunshots: two shots, then a brief pause, then more shots fired
quickly after each other.’ Those inside the house ducked for cover.
When the shooting stopped, Nokwanda moved towards the front door.
She saw little Zandile coming back into the house. Then she saw her
husband, who was lying face down. He had made it past the door and
into the kitchen, but now he was not moving.
Nokwanda screamed and called her brother to come and help her,
after which she called the police’s 10111 emergency line from a
cordless phone. Bongani also phoned the police from his cellphone.
When the emergency services did not arrive quickly enough for their
liking, Ngombane’s panic-stricken wife and her family decided to get
him to a hospital themselves. ‘Noby weighed 90 kilograms and he was
- 8 metres tall, but we dragged and pushed him until we got him into
my car,’ Nokwanda recalled. ‘We drove to the Mediclinic and got there
within five minutes.’