Simon the Hammerman

Simon the Hammerman, by Tim Holmes (Drew it myself)

I find myself returning over and over to the compelling story– which reads more like a legend than a real life– of a mass murderer who I think might also be, incredibly, a saint: Simon the Hammerman.

Simon Mpungose was a real person who was executed in South Africa for multiple murders in 1985.  Simon was, I believe, the loneliest man in history.  Ostracized by his community, the Zulu, before he was born incredibly, he grew up as basically a wild child; orphaned and never educated or even socialized.  In his whole life he had only one friend; briefly as a child he lived with another kid in the bush.  But as he grew he eventually stole a loaf of bread from a white person and was sentenced to years of hard labor in a brutal prison camp in the terribly racist apartheid South Africa.  In the camp he had a powerful prophetic dream in which basically his god revealed to him that the white rocks he was compelled to smash with his hammer all day long were really not so different from the impenetrable white heads that ruled his nation so brutally.

But despite enduring the most inhumane upbringing possible, Simon was blessed with a good heart that could not be crushed.  So, when Simon's sentence was up and he was to be released he went to his (white) wardens to plead to be kept in prison so that he would not have to hurt white people– the very people who had abused his tribe for hundreds of years– as his god demanded.  But they laughed at him and released him anyhow.

Simon tried then to isolate himself from whites by looking for jobs in all-black industries like gold mining camps.  But every attempt to save people from his terrible mission was brutally foiled by the very people he tried to protect.  Eventually he lost to his vision, killed and injured a number of people and was arrested and tried.  He knew that death would be his just recompense and at his trial instructed his court-appointed lawyer not to defend him.  Instead the lawyer hired a psychologist to declare him insane, which he could not do, so impressed was he with Simon's courage and wisdom.

Before being led to his death, Simon delivered a powerful and poetic speech that is also a gentle but terrible indictment of a culture that very well could be ours.  (I urge you to read the full account in Rian Malan's stunning book, My Traitor's Heart)  He raises questions that I wish had never been asked.  But now that they are I cannot help but stand with him and say: here is a good man, innocent of his very real crimes by virtue of having endured a life of more torture than any single human can stand.