Thursday morning I woke up to get into my car and drive to work. To my surprise, the spare tire, which is on the back outside of the car, was stolen! As I was driving out the driveway, I asked the gardener if he knew what had happened to the tire. He looked (or tried to look) shocked and said, “Oh, Sh*t!” He said he didn’t know what had happened. I drove to work and then after I taught my class, I went to Mat’s office to tell him what had happened. Mat had driven to work before me and he then told me that when he went to his car, he found his trunk open with the spare tire missing from his trunk, along with his coffee mug, jumper cables, and wrench that takes the lug nuts off tires. He had left the doors unlocked to his car so the burglar popped the trunk, stole the items, and wanted to close the trunk quietly but didn’t latch the trunk all the way, so it came back up. We immediately suspected the gardener. We’ve had 2 past gardeners steal from us and so we’ve come to realize that if there is theft, most likely it is an inside job and it is the gardener! So, for the first time ever, we called the police and filed a report. They came out, had a look and asked if we suspected anyone. We said that we would suspect the gardener for many reasons: the dogs didn’t bark which means it was someone familiar, the alarm sensor in the carport didn’t go off meaning that someone knew where they could and couldn’t step for the alarm to be quiet, the gardener cleans our vehicles and the burglar knew there was a spare tire in the trunk (as not all people have them here), the person knew that we often forget to lock the doors of our cars at night, the person knew that all of our tires had special lug nuts to prevent stealing except our spare tires. For all these reasons, we suspected the gardener. The police took the gardener in for questioning. To our naïve surprise, they held him for 24 hours with no food and they beat him to get a confession out of him. Mat took him food and visited him several times. No confession was given but the gardener was quite shaken. It was horrible and we felt terribly bad if the gardener was innocent. We later learned from our neighbors that several other houses on our street had similar petty theft. Because the gardener is a good worker and because there were other instances of theft, we now were not sure if the gardener had done it.
When the gardener came back from jail, we had to make a choice on what to do: deem him as the burglar and fire him or deem him as innocent and keep him. We had warned him upon taking the job that if there were ever an instance of theft, he would be immediately fired. Well, we decided to tell him that we didn’t believe him to be the burglar and that he could stay on if he wanted to. I still am not convinced that the gardener didn’t do it, but I’m hopeful that if he is guilty, he learned his lesson and won’t steal again. If he is innocent, then hopefully he got a good warning as to what would happen if he ever stole.
It is funny how Mat and I have reacted differently to this situation. Mat didn’t want to suspect the gardener and thought the evidence wasn’t clear. He took the American approach of “innocent until proven guilty.” He was very upset when he found out that the gardener was beaten and thought the police were horribly cruel and unjust. I automatically suspected the gardener and took on the local thinking of “guilty until proven innocent.” I wasn’t as upset when hearing of the beating. I figure that the police know their people the best. They know that 80% of theft is from one’s domestic workers. They know that the Africans here won’t just confess, even if all evidence clearly and undoubtedly points to their guilt. The criminal will deny their actions all day long (a burglar can even be caught on video stealing and will still deny it was them). They also know the local thinking that if you have more than them, then they can take your stuff and justify it not as stealing, but as simply taking something you don’t need or won’t miss. There are no fingerprints taken from crime scenes, no DNA tests, no blood samples, no fancy criminology and so old fashioned methods are still in place. The police know that a little bit of pain makes the mouth talk and I accept that things just work differently here.
This concept of “guilty until proven innocent” has been something I guess I’ve learned over the last three years and have changed my thinking towards. In the US, you automatically and fully trust people (bring fix it men onto your property without knowing them, you buy from strangers online, etc) until they do something to take your trust away. Here, you automatically and fully distrust people until they consistently earn your trust.
I personally hate this way of thinking, but have slowly come to adapt to it as it is usually true. I find it very hard to trust the gardener even though he is a fantastic gardener that works extremely hard. I think my trust with him is forever broken and I’ll always be very cautious around him. But maybe that isn’t such a bad thing…