THE TWO FUNERALS
Finding out that your spouse is cheating on you is one thing.
But discovering that your spouse was cheating on you in their death makes mourning & grief a complicated experience.
Mrs. Bronwyn Peters' funeral was on Saturday, & Pastor Obi Akwanke's was on Sunday at the Jesus Christ Our Hope Church in Maitland, Cape Town.
Mrs. Peters' funeral service was held at her childhood church in Parkwood Estate called Parkwood Baptist Church along Hyde Road.
Mrs. Peters' mother is popularly known as Aunt Chantel by the Parkwood & Grassy Park community.
Aunt Chantel is a community builder, social activist, & philanthropist who runs a soup kitchen every week from Monday to Friday providing meals to poor people in her community.
She is a devoted member of Parkwood Baptist Church. Her husband Mr. Benedict Abrahams is a fisherman who owns three boats that dock at harbor house Kalk Bay.
What is at stake here is the reputation that Aunt Chantel has built in this community for many years. As you may know family is very important in the colored community.
The shameful adulterous death of her daughter is a dent in her family legacy & she won't allow people to create stories about her precious daughter Bronwyn even after her death.
Therefore news in this community around the circumstances that surrounded the brutal murder of Mrs. Peters & Pastor Obi in this community is different.
Grassy Park Weekly Bulletin Community Newspaper suggests that Jesus Christ Our Hope Church was a brainchild of Nigerian drug dealers in Cape Town.
To hide the proceeds of crime & to launder money they thought a church would be a perfect front for drug, sex trafficking, & money laundering.
The founders who opt to be pulling strings behind the scene hired Pastor Obi from Nigeria to position him as the face of the Church.
The Church was specifically planted to clean up dirty money.
However; according to Grassy Park Bulletin, Pastor began to feel big-headed & was helping himself with the dirty money passing through his church.
The Bulletin says; "Pastor Obi dribbled his Nigerian brothers to an amount of $65 Million dirty money"
It seems the Nigerian drug dealers lost power over Pastor Obi because of the numbers in the church that have grown unprecedented.
Pastor Obi was loved dearly by his congregants who fondly called him Papa.
According to the Parkwood-Grassy Park narrative of this story,
the Nigerian drug lords wanted to assassinate Pastor Obi & then hire another Nigerian who was loyal to them to run the church.
Precisely why Nigerian-originated churches across the World would rather have a Nigerian at the helm as the Pastor than a local person.
According to this story, they kidnapped both Pastor Obi & Mrs. Peters in the parking lot under the Virgin Active gym, & made Mrs. Peters drive to her house at gunpoint.
They forced them to undress & made it look like they were killed by a jealous spouse.
By turning their death into the murder of passion, the attention will be focused on who has the motive to kill the secret lovers, instead of finding the Nigerian drug lords. It puts Mr. Peters & Mamfundisi Tsakani as possible suspects in the murder of Passion.
"My daughter is no adulterer, these evil Nigerian gangsters made my precious daughter into a sacrifice for their dealings. We will not rest until the real killers are found" said Aunt Chantel.
Mr. Peters a software engineer has not said a word positive or negative since he returned from Durban. Dressed in a black suit, white shirt & black tie with his two children.
He can be described as a pragmatic, reliable, & well-organized man who takes time to analyze things before making a decision.
He is not your typical nerd but he has the tendencies of a nerd. Mr. Peters can be socially awkward especially in large crowds & among unfamiliar people. But though he is on the shy & quiet side, he is what I call an introverted extrovert. He didn't say a word during his wife's funeral service.
In his Preaching, Pastor Shawn Evance a 78-year-old Pastor of Parkwood Baptist Church described Mrs. Peters as a God-fearing young lady who loved God & the community of believers. He said Brownyn was found inside the synagogue of satan & she was caught in the crossfire of drug lords.
"I am not Xenophobic," Pastor Shawn said. "The only mistake Bronwyn made was to leave this church to join that Nigerian Church. I knew that nothing good would come out of it"
When Mr. Peters & Bronwyn started their careers they lived in Parkwood Estate. As they began to make more money they bought a house in Lakeside suburbs which was a huge upgrade.
But the trend in Cape Town especially among Christians growing up in the Cape flats or townships is that wherever their economic status changes, they change locations into the richer suburbs & also leave their churches to join the more modern affluent churches.
Bronwyn was put to rest at Capricorn's graveyard.
On Sunday the funeral service at Jesus Christ Our Hope Church started at about 9 am.
Mrs. Tsakani Akwanke dawned in a black mourning dress, black hat & dark glasses sat in front of the church. Mr. Peters sat next to her again very calmly.
The choir was singing the song "What a friend we have in Jesus"
before they were rudely interrupted by the community members from Parkwood & Grassy Park.
According to the schedule after the service, the coffin will then be heading to Nigeria.
Mamfundisi Tsakani refused to escort the body of her husband to Nigeria, this will be a final goodbye to her cheating husband who died in another man's matrimonial bed.
The fight started between Nigerians & the colored community as the church members began to take sides.
The Nigerians in defending their Papa suggested sister Bronwyn was a Jezabel that the devil used to entice the man of God sexually.
In the end, the jealous husband paid people to kill Pastor Obi. These words angered most colored people in Jesus Christ Our Hope Church, causing them to join the group from Parkwood.
The group from Parkwood stood around the coffin & demanded that the coffin won't leave the country until the killers are found.
The Police at Maitland Police Station were alerted and they rushed to Jesus Christ Our Hope Church to restore order.
As they tried to get the angry people from Parkwood to stay clear of the coffin, they accidentally pumped into the coffin & it fell.
At this point, superstition dictated the people's reactions, in shock there was silence, as the police tried to turn the coffin around,
the body & the garments remained on the floor.
As the Police & the guys from the funeral Parlor rushed to return the body of Pastor Obi to the coffin a layer of white sheet opened
& what the people saw is unbelievable. Crime even in death.
Stash of money in $100 bills formed the bed on which Pastor Obi's body was placed on an amount of $120 Million was discovered in the coffin of the man of God,
scheduled to leave for Nigeria that Sunday evening.
The funeral service effectively became the scene of the crime.
People left the church utterly confused as if the nature of death was not shameful enough. Who placed dollar bills inside the coffin?
Will be a subject of investigation, as most Nigerians began to exit the church one after another.
Meanwhile, opposite Peters' house lived an old lonely racist grumpy lady.
Bronwyn who was a jovial, outgoing & social person with a personality that made her loveable failed to charm this grumpy old lady.
Her testimony to the Police was key in the ongoing investigation.
Perhaps the killer did not do his work well.
According to the old grumpy lady on a fateful day, she saw a man coming into Botha Street from the veld.
The wire fence separating residents of Lakeside from the swampy veld was down and the municipality hasn't bothered to address this until the crime was committed.
According to the old lady a man wearing a black hoodie with a facemask, probably black, slander was seen coming into Botha Street, & 20 minutes later she saw him exiting Botha Street back into the Veld.
Police went into the Veld & found what they believe is the murder weapon.
It was wrapped in newspapers & put in a checkers' blue plastic bag. It was a semi-automatic pistol that normally takes seven bullets. No cartridge was found in the pistol.
Did the murderer drop it or wanted to get rid of the evidence?
With $120 Million found in the coffin,
& the murder weapon, who has the motive?
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tsakani broke down for the first time since her husband died,
& she kept saying these words in the Tsonga language which loosely translated as
"I don't know the man I married, I don't know"
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