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A week ago, Eva Kumalo saw her daughter’s alleged killer at Mzoli’s, a popular Cape Town eatery in Gugulethu. She was too scared to approach him.
“I saw him, but I could not go and speak to him. I wish I could ask him why. Why did my child have to die in such an ugly, violent manner? I don’t understand. What did she do? She did not deserve to die like that.”
The young woman’s life was cut short at the tender age of 23 on April 14 2013, when she was kicked to death in a dark street in Woodstock – allegedly by internationally celebrated artist Zwelethu Mthethwa.
According to a police charge sheet, CCTV footage shows Mthethwa pulling up next to Nokuphila Kumalo in a Porsche at 2.40am.
He allegedly started beating her and when she fell to the ground, he stomped on her.
Mthethwa’s murder trial started at the Western Cape High Court last Monday and continues tomorrow.
A pathologist testified that Nokuphila died of internal wounds, particularly a torn liver.
Eva, who is originally from Kimberley in the Northern Cape, gave birth to Nokuphila on February 11 1990 – the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
“I was about to give birth in the back of an ambulance when I heard on the radio about Mandela being released from prison,” says Eva.
The mother named her baby Nokuphila.
Soon after giving birth, Eva moved to Cape Town. Nokuphila joined her mother there when she was seven years old.
Eva worked as a griller at the Saddles steakhouse in Table View to pay Nokuphila’s school fees at the Intshinga Primary School in Gugulethu, where the youngster played netball and sang in a choir.
Nokuphila’s pet name was Ntombie.
She loved cheesecake and dreamt of becoming a doctor.
But she never finished school.
Cape Town sex workers have confirmed that she lived in the central-city suburb of Woodstock and worked the city’s streets with them at night.
Sex worker peers described her as “intelligent, smart and clean”.
Nokuphila frequently visited Eva in Gugulethu with parcels of groceries and money. She never told her mother how she got the cash.
Last week, a grief-stricken Eva rushed out of the courtroom when she saw photographs of her daughter’s broken body.
“I was sitting on a bench near the lawyers when they held up the pictures of her. I saw my child lying there in her bloody white T-shirt. I had to get up and leave the room. I went to sit outside,” she told City Press.
Ironically, these lifeless pictures are the only relics of Nokuphila’s life.
Eva does not have a single photograph of her daughter because all their family photographs were destroyed when her shack burnt down in 2009.
The 49-year-old woman has been through hell and is fed up with people asking questions about her daughter. Nevertheless, she opened up to City Press.
Eva described how it took seven months to save up enough cash to pay for a hearse to transport Nokuphila’s body back to Kimberley to be buried.
“So ja, I took my baby back home in a hearse. I was sitting in the front with the driver, all the way north. Ntombie in the back,” says Eva.
The mother of four – Nokuphila was her second child – says she’s not angry with Mthethwa, but she wants to know “why”.
Meanwhile, Mthethwa’s lawyer, William Booth, accused members of the Sex Workers’ Education and Advocacy Taskforce of harassing the artist outside court this past week.
Members of the rights group assemble daily on the court’s steps with posters.
In court, Booth contested the validity of the CCTV footage that implicates Mthethwa.
The 54-year-old artist lives in Vredehoek on the slopes of Table Mountain.
His photographs of working class South Africans have earned him international acclaim and have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
His former wife and fellow artist, Bongi Bengu, has refused to comment on their two-year marriage in the 1990s
