Lester Walbrugh’s ‘Elton Baatjies’ shows us the treacherous terrain of stepping into who we are
Elton Baatjies is a tour de force. It is a carefully crafted book and its temporal sense of time and location are brought to life beautifully.
Elton Baatjies is based on the story of Norman Simons who stalked and killed boys on the Cape Flats between 1986 and 1995. Dubbed “the station strangler”, Simons is thought to have been responsible for sodomising and strangling 22 boys. The evidence at the time could only link him to the death of one, 10-year-old Elroy van Rooyen. Simons was a schoolteacher, which made his arrest particularly shocking.
Elton Baatjies is set in the Elgin Valley, about an hour’s drive from Cape Town. The story opens with Elton taking up a job as an English teacher at a local school. The community is in uproar because six boys have been raped, murdered and dumped down the side of the mountain …
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