King Jonathan of Lesotho was in danger of being deposed, or he was deposing someone. One of the Squadrons from Bethlehem (not the one with 3 wise men and a virgin) had sent a troop to Bloemfontein as engineering support for a planned military invasion. We were patrolling the Lesotho/South Africa border from Ficksburg to Golden Gate.
We’d been manning a roadblock just outside Ficksburg for about 12 hours, checking cars and buses that were taking migrant workers back to Jozi. We’d caught teenager with a bag of shit quality dope. I was going to confiscate the dope and let the kid go, but some gung ho police sergeant insisted on taking him to the cop shop.
Tubby van Deventer (he’s dead now) was bored. He’d taken a rooikat (caracal for the non-Africans) off one of the farmers earlier the afternoon, and decided to play silly buggers. The cat was forced very unwillingly into an old battered suitcase, and the suitcase was placed next to the road, about 200 metres past the stopper group.
Within 5 minutes a very full Toyota taxi screamed to a halt, the suitcase was snatched and the taxi spun off. The rest was slow motion…. people started peeling out of the windows, the sliding door had opened and 3 guys just rolled out on to the tar. The driver just got out – he didn’t brake, didn’t stop. He just exited the vehicle, as the Americans would say. A rooikat probably weighs about 20 kg, but a pissed off caracal inside a minibus must’ve looked the size of a grizzly.
As for the cat, he got away. There was a farmhouse about 500m from the roadblock, and early the next morning the farmer brought us all some hot coffee and homemade rusks. He was bitching about a rondloper rooikat that ate his chickens the night before.
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