WHEN Reeva Steekamp was shot dead by her famous lover, Oscar Pistorius, the media went into overdrive. Today, the Times features an extract when June Steenkamp’s book, Reeva: A Mother’s Story

The beginning of the nightmare

Dromedaris Road, Seaview, Port Elizabeth. We are up and about before dawn. Barry sets off for the stables at Arlington Racecourse to prepare his horses for their morning exercise. I potter out to the overzealous dogs — and little Moby Dick, Reeva’s dachshund — to give them their breakfast. The sun rises just before 6am. I’m preoccupied with thoughts about the day ahead, about supervising progress at the Barking Spider, a pub we’re building at the Greenbushes Hotel on the Old Cape Road, when my mobile phone rings.

A voice introduces himself as Detective Hilton Botha.

“Hello, is that June Steenkamp?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a daughter, Reeva?”

“Yes.”

“There has been a terrible accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“Your daughter has been shot.”

Pause.

“You’d better tell me RIGHT NOW if she’s dead or alive.”

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid she has passed on.”

He says he thinks it looks like an “open-and-shut” case. “There were only two people present — your daughter and Oscar with the gun.”

I’ve heard enough. I’m hysterical, screaming, sobbing uncontrollably. This cannot be true.

Pain follows. And a TV show trial. And a crime that became a totem of the cause hungry. Take this from CNN: “The Pistorius case and the plague of violence against women.”

And that was before we know any of the facts.

You can understand why June Steenkamp wants to tell her side of the story and reclaim her daughter as an individual and no-one’s pet project or more re-educator.

Not that Pistorius faired much better. In the Guardian, Pistorius’ shooting was a sign that “love of guns and fast cars [speaks to] South Africa’s macho culture”. Pistorius was guilty of being part of a “culture of masculinity”. To say nothing of South Africa’s racism, desperation, rich elite and poverty, which it didn’t. The gun killed. If the cause fits your chosen narrative, bang the drum. Reeva and Oscar were products of the “seemingly endless cycle of male violence that did not end with Apartheid”. And, get this: “‘[C]asual everyday social violence… the defining feature of Apartheid…has endured and thrived in the two decades since.”

I thought the defining features of Apartheid were racism, exploitation and an undemocratic State. But that can’t slot that into the Pistorius story because Reeva was stubbornly blonde.

So. Good for June Steenkamp to give her story of loss and suffering. If it goes some way to demolishing the river of balls that swamped her daughter and Oscar Pistorius, then good.