Commentary

What we leave behind

THE PHOTOGRAPH ON the cover of yesterday's STAR is stark in its simplicity and effective in its emptiness.

There is a policeman, a bicycle and two men, their images blurred but for the colour of their clothing coming through, in the background.

There is no body and no blood, but it is still a murder scene.

The bicycle belongs ­ or, we should say belonged ­ to a man named Luke Smalling, who was shot and killed on Balcombe Drive.

A picture, they say, tells a thousand words and this one, with its emptiness tells a million. There are no mourning relatives, no blood dripping in the gutter, but it says so much.

You can almost see a relative coming to push the bicycle home, the last remains of a person's life.

It also raises the question of what we leave behind when we die. For, apart from the bicycle, what did Luke Smalling leave behind to show that he once walked the earth as a human being, a person who smelt the air and maybe moved to the music of his liking.

This is the kind of emptiness that we as a nation face, as we kill each other at a staggering rate every day. In the continuous 'making of duppy' there is this nothingness that is left behind, which no amount of parties and dance moves can fill.

And the emptiness is the same, whether a person leaves a F150 van tons of fans, or a bicycle lying on the sidewalk in an inner-city community.