Monkey business in Milton Park

For about three months, little Charlie had been living happily in the woody glades of Lawson Avenue. He had won the hearts of the  locals. They gave him his name, put out fruit and looked on him as a pet. The shy, black-faced vervet often sheltered in an empty neighbourhood rabbit hutch.

But this suburban idyll came to an abrupt and cruel end. Acting in response to orders from local politician Dennis Divaris rangers from National Parks came to remove poor Charlie.

To the horror of the neighbours, two low calibre shots rang out.

Charlie, hit and wounded, was cowering in a tree. Blaming old or damp ammunition, the rangers returned an hour later with a powerful hunting rifle and ended Charlie’s pain by blasting him out of the trees.

”There was no question of Charlie being rabid, diseased, or vicious. If a child had been attacked, I would have been the first to agree to putting him down, but he harmed no one and wasn’t tame enough to go near people,” said one aggrieved householder.

Charlie wasn’t tame enough either to be hand fed and bananas left out for him at the same spot every day discreetly disappeared. ”It was as if he trusted us.”

Divaris now came into the firing line ahead of upcoming elections.

”I question the political judgement of anyone who could believe Charlie constituted a danger or a nuisance,” said another neighbour “Instead of relocating him to the wild, he had Charlie killed. How could anyone vote for him?”

Poor Charlie had joined the political fray.

Divaris decided against a lawsuit against his detractors when his past haunted him. Now a bootlicker in the new order, he had been a stalwart of Ian Smith’s right-wing Rhodesia Front.

It wasn’t difficult  to go to the library of parliament and look up his rabid speeches in the official record, Hansard, as a Rhodesia Front MP and a parliamentary whip.

He lost his bid for re-election and sold his house in Milton Park.