En Passant: How dumb do they think we are?

IT USED TO be said that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and I see no reason why the same should not apply to the homes of Danes, Turks, Iranians, Kenyans, Argentinians, Canadians, the Vietnamese or Australians, or anyone in between. It should be “A man’s home is his castle”, regardless of his nationality.

And regardless of his home. Whether the man in question lives in a tin shack up at Vryheid’s dumpsite, in a larney mansion in Klip Street, in a pokey flat, in an airy townhouse or an exclusive residence in Constantia, Cape Town, wherever, that is his own personal castle.

Now there’s actually more to this than immediately meets the eye. It doesn’t only mean that a man can walk around his home in his underpants if he wants to, but also that his home is his home to protect from anyone else, uninvited, walking around, in underpants or not. A bloke called William Blackstone, an English judge, back in the late 1700s put it best in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. He said:

“And the law of England has so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a man’s house, that it stiles [I guess this means ‘describes’] it his castle, and will never suffer it to be violated with immunity: agreeing herein with the sentiments of ancient Rome, as expressed in the works of Tully; quid enim sanctius, quid omni religione munitius, quam domus unusquisque civium?”

As I understand it, and according to Wikipedia, that last bit of Latin means “What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by every holy feeling, than a man’s own home?”

You catch my drift here?

This respect for a man’s home has been taken further. There is a doctrine (it’s a doctrine rather than a defined law) called the “Castle Doctrine” that bestows upon a person’s home a type of immunity. In his home, which however humble is his castle, a person has “certain protections and immunities permitting him or her, in certain circumstances, to use force (up to and including deadly force) to defend themselves against an intruder, free from legal responsibility/prosecution for the consequences of the force used.” That’s what Wikipedia says.

This is a doctrine, you understand, this is not the law. You cannot shoot Jehovah’s Witnesses or someone claiming to be doing a survey for Eskom because they are knocking on your castle’s door during Isi-bleeding-Dingo. And we’ve all heard the arguments about shooting intruders in your yard or in your home in the dead of night. The judge is going to want more of an explanation than, “Ja, but, it’s my castle, your honour”. Ask Oscar Pistorius.

But the point is, and we all know that crime is like a rampant aardvark, you don’t nowadays allow anyone, willy-nilly, to roam about your home, day or night. Even more so now is your home a castle. If you saw a man with a ladder, in your yard, with the obvious intention of climbing on to your roof, in effect storming the battlements of your castle, you would be justified in accosting him and asking him what the hell he thought he was up to.

I am confident that if a man arrived at my flat while I was at work, and claimed that he was there to fit burglar bars or renovate the bathroom, Doris would say, “Hold on, pal, you’ve got the wrong flat”. Were I to come home, and a kitchen wall had been knocked down to create a breakfast nook, I think I’d notice. Anyone would, wouldn’t they, anyone whose castle had been mucked about with?

I live in a flat, but say you’re in a house, and there’s someone, I dunno, putting up palisade fencing, say, which you know about, but then you notice an excavator digging a hole for a swimming pool, you’d notice, wouldn’t you. Especially if the bloody builders had been messing about for a couple of years, and there was always dust, plus the noise, and those damned tipper trucks reversing over your rose garden… I mean, assuming you weren’t brain dead, you’d notice, hey? You’d have some idea of what they were up to, surely, as they were in and out your castle grounds?

And if you didn’t, if you were so blind as to be unaware of the scale of the assault on your castle, your wife would notice, trust me, this is what wives do, they notice. And if you had two wives, three wives, four wives even, one of them would soon enough be drawing your attention to the builders traipsing cement through the kitchen for months on end, and did you know that when they were digging that trench for the sewerage they accidentally cut the water pipe, bloody hell, the house had no water for the whole day! Wives will tell you.

And then, they expect us to believe that Jacob Zuma was unaware of the scale of the “security measures” that were going on at his homestead at Nkandla, at his castle. Hau! He and his party must think we are really, really, really, really, really stupid.