Rodney Mpanga arrived in Middelburg a little more than a week ago. His furniture was moved here by a truck from Malawi, en-route to Gauteng to buy groceries before returning home.<\/p>\n
He sells his goods, with the required permit, from the park next to Lilian Ngoyi Road and Kees Taljaard stadium.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have many of his furniture pieces in my house. He has been comming to Middelburg for years\u201d a woman who stopped to give Mr Mpanga measurements for custom made baskets, said on Monday.<\/p>\n
In the early hours of Sunday morning Mr Mpanga had to flee for his life and watch helplessly as a group of men, presumably under the influence of alcohol, smashed into his handmade furniture before loading some of it on the back of their vehicle and driving off.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they stopped they were calling for me, saying that they wanted to buy something. I told them that I cannot sell so late at picked out furniture to load.\u201d<\/p>\n
The men threw the furniture from the vehicle as far as they went. Some of it were found behind the Tosca Centre. They were driving a bakkie with a trailer.<\/p>\n
On Sunday morning Mr Mpanga walked and picked up the smaller pieces of furniture. A concerned resident stopped and offered her assistance to retrieve the bigger pieces.<\/p>\n
Mr Mpanga says that he did not want to go to the police because of an incident that happened in 2010.<\/p>\n
\u201cA man took some furniture from me on loan and promised to pay me at the end of the month. When I phoned him to ask for my money, he started swearing and yelling. He refused to return the furniture.\u201d<\/p>\n
The man threatened to kill Mr Mpanga if he acted on his threat to go to the police.<\/p>\n
A description fitting the one given by Mr Mapanga put three of the men at a nearby bar on Sunday night. The bar and the people who work there asked not to be named.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were looking for trouble,\u201d a woman working on Sunday night said.<\/p>\n
The men were rowdy and made rude remarks but left the bar without incident. The vehicle description, a maroon pick-up pulling a trailer, was exactly the same.<\/p>\n
The Middelburg Observer is in the process of contacting the men but could not do so before deadline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three Afrikaans speaking men damaged furniture worth R9 100 belonging to a Malawian carpenter on Sunday morning 14 September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":18382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hasGravity":false,"cxt_article_byline":"Jana Boshoff","cxt_disable_google_ads":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"category_labels":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}