We became brothers thanks to a ball. When I settled in Johannesburg a few years ago to open the newspaper’s Africa correspondent, at first a forced solitude overwhelmed me. Eager to fit in, I dodged the expat bubble, which offered effortless partying. To counteract boredom, I used the most universal language: soccer. Every Saturday, he would go to Soweto, a black suburb, and watch matches on dirt pitches for hours. That’s how I met Mophethe. He was surprised that a white man was on that broken concrete bleacher and he came over to chat. That first conversation ended with a visit to her sick mother, whom he rarely saw because she lived far away and had no money for transportation. Mophete was from a humble home, rogue as a pack of crows and a cheerful and loyal fellow. We became inseparable. If he had to do a story on the South African underworld, he had the key. When Paralympian Oscar Pistorius killed her girlfriend and claimed he mistook her for a burglar, he wanted to write about guys who burglarize houses in wealthy neighborhoods. When I told him, Mophethe raised an eyebrow, smiled, and led me to see his neighbor, who kept two homemade pistols under her mattress.
Over time, I got to know Tephiso, his first child from a turbulent relationship, his broken family —his father was in prison for shooting his mother in the stomach—, his neighborhood colleagues, who gave me tremendous beatings to FIFA, to his fleeting loves and to his future wife, Mthi, with whom he fell in love without remission. Mophethe, always generous, gave me the highest honor. He named me best man at the wedding and one of the small group that negotiated the lobola (a kind of dowry of cows and goats) to ask for Mthi’s hand.
Mophethe opened the doors of her family and her village in the mountains of Lesotho to me and we even shared the awkwardness of changing the first diaper of her second son, Mothemelle. She did more: she joined Barça out of friendship. Although he was not enthusiastic about football, my passion for Guardiola’s team sank him to the bone. Before games, he always appeared happy at home wearing a fake Barça shirt and with a bag full of beers.
To Mophethe, life did not spare happiness. When luck and her pocket smiled on him, the roots of her poor origins caught up in her throat. She made mistakes, racked up debt, and got lost in glass bottles. She didn’t know how to help him out of the maze. Ten days ago, he was found stabbed to death in her shack. A friend killed him for a debt of one hundred South African rands, less than five euros.
The last time we met, Mophethe swore to me happily that he had stopped drinking and we parted with a big hug. She was wearing the Barça shirt.
