Public principle and the individuation of conscience

The current owner of the Juno Street house in Kensington has built a garage blocking access to the abandoned mining cave which the Foster Gang set up as an emergency hide-away after a spate of violent robberies across the Reef in the early history of Johannesburg.

Foster was a charismatic psychopathic personality who, together with two members of his Gang, Johan Maxim, and Carl Mezar, wrought havoc in the small white community of his day. The drama was widespread and struck at the lives of a diverse group of South Africans.

The Gang was wanted for a string of robberies and the murder of three policemen and a passer-by, but nine other people also died. They included a Post Master who committed suicide after Foster and his Gang had robbed the Post office – he had been fiddling the petty cash and feared exposure; a doctor who was on his way to the Springs hospital to assist with an emergency operation; and the great gentleman-general and man of principle, Koos de la Rey, whose car was fired upon by the police, after his driver drove through a road block, believing it to be for his employer. **See note

Most tragic was the scene which played itself out outside the cave in Kensington in September 1914. The police had set up roadblocks around the city and surrounded the cave. A huge crowd had gathered.

The three men decided they would not be taken alive. Mezar was the first to die when Maxim killed him with a single shot. Maxim killed himself.

Foster had the extreme charismatic control of the psychopath, a fact which the Senior Police Officer understood well.  Foster asked for his wife, Peggy, the baby, and his parents and two sisters to be brought to the cave, promising that once he had seen them, he would hand himself over.

The Senior Officer refused to allow Foster’s wife and child to go inside the cave, protesting that he would kill them. Finally, under pressure from Inspector Edward Leach, he reluctantly agreed. 

For a while it seemed the idea would work, but after about an hour, Foster’s family stumbled out of the cave with the baby but without Peggy.

The crowd waited in silence and then a shot rang out, followed by two others.

Tormented by his culpability in the death of Peggy Foster, Inspector Edward Leach, committed suicide a few days later.

The Foster Gang saga is a drama of great classic theatre. It raises questions around sanity and insanity; the challenge of public responsibility; the dynamics of money, charisma and power; and relationships between men and women.

Perhaps this is one of the last occasions in which greater values played themselves out in a public event in the lives of ordinary people on the Witwatersrand. Perhaps it is a story of the end of public principle and the beginning of the individuation of conscience.

**They were on their way to meet the Boer rebels hoping to take advantage of the outbreak of World War One to liberate the old republics. De la Rey, personally, did not feel this wise, but in conscience, and out of loyalty, felt obliged to go and engage with his compatriots on the matter.