Netflix premiered the documentary series of the late Orlando Pirates and Bafana captain Senzo Meyiwa on April 7. The streaming service promised episodes that would delve into the evidence and reveal who killed the goalkeeper.
The documentary series unfortunately did not reveal anything. But one thing it managed to do was to recycle our anger and remind us about the collapse of crucial institutions of state over the past decade.
Besides, the documentary could only work with what was actually available from the police – which was nothing.
As a result, the series was failed by the reality we live under.
We live in a country that has extremely high rates of crime in the absence of quality policing and intelligence services. If anything, citizens are on their own.
Criminals can do whatever they want to anybody at any time and nothing will ever happen to them.
Meyiwa’s murder case highlights this crisis.
But there are three other problems with the Netflix documentary.
First, the case is not completed. In fact, the murder trial is only going to begin this month. In other words, the documentary series was unable to dig deeper into the evidence that the prosecuting authority has at its disposal.
Items such as phone records from all the suspects and those who were present at the crime scene on that fateful day could not be revealed. Meyiwa’s postmortem analysis was not done, dockets were not revealed, statements of all the witnesses who were in that house were not tabled, while DNA collected from the scene also could not be revealed.
In essence, the crucial material of the case that would help all of us watching to make our own, informed judgments did not come through.
Second, the documentary is heavily enveloped with interviews of people who do not play any meaningful role in the actual case.
Sports broadcasters, journalists, a biographer, weird experts, friends and Kelly Khumalo’s ex-boyfriends dominate the discourse of the documentary and they even thumb suck about things they are not even trained in – such as analysing a crime scene or suggesting how suspects ought to be questioned.
No interviews are done with lawyers, prosecutors, forensic investigators, evidence technicians and certified crime scene reconstructionists.
It is only advocate Gerrie Nel from AfriForum who comes close to being relevant in the documentary but even his appearance and role in the matter later proved to be insignificant as well.
Third, I was worried about the ethical considerations that were ignored in the film. The amount of exposure that the home of Meyiwa and Khumalo’s mother received, their locations, and how they look, was all cringeworthy.
In addition, it was heartbreaking to see the ordinary life that Meyiwa lived – a life that resembled any normal wage earner in SA despite his achievements.
This was a painful point of learning for me in the documentary, a revelation that I want to commend the film on as a young professional and as a person who is trying daily to shape his manhood and fatherhood in positive terms.
More than anything else, the documentary was a basic piecing together of previous television, radio and newspaper interviews that are already publicly available. By international standards of crime documentaries, this one was lukewarm.
It was premature, it was disjointed, it exaggerated its importance but at the same time it provided informative details about the story for those who weren’t paying attention to the news in the past.
But why make a documentary series then when there’s so much material that’s unavailable?
The answer is simple: to maintain the public profiles of the celebrities interviewed in the film. To recycle our emotions. To keep us talking about black pain without a purpose. To get us tweeting again. To remind us of how useless we are in defending our own people and heritage. To make money for Netflix shareholders out of another puzzling chronicle of poor governance from the dark continent.
Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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