Victims of Crime in South Africa – one family in Cape Town

 

 

In 1987 our small family left behind everything and everyone familiar in Johannesburg, where we had lived peacefully and happily for many years, and moved to Cape Town to "escape the growing crime problem".

Having initially put down roots in a town which was almost an hour's drive South of Cape Town city, with my husband commuting to work daily by train into the city centre, we later moved to the furthest possible southern point (Simon's Town) in 1994, settling in a town which we thought would somehow see our family shielded from crime and criminals who had all but hijacked South Africa's democracy - underpinned as it is by a Constitution, which incredibly, given our present location, enshrines, but then horribly fails to deliver, the "right" of every citizen to a safe and secure living environment.

On reflection now, how utterly foolish a thought this was as even though we were then living at the very end of the South Peninsula railway line, and in a quiet "backwater" town which was a hop and skip and jump away from the (unofficial) tip of Africa - with us sometimes laughing that the next step would have to be the ocean - crime still touched our lives to the extent that we found ourselves, a few short years later, so utterly traumatised that we virtually fled the country we had all been born in, grew up in and loved.

The first sign of a tide of changes - which we were later to feel swamped by - coming to our idyllic, laid-back, coastal lifestyle, arrived in the early 90's when a policeman, apparently doing his (new) daily patrol of our suburb, knocked on our door one evening and instructed my husband to come outside and lock up his car parked in the street. As we had always left this unlocked we were quite incredulous as to why we need to take these precautions.

However, from around that time onwards, little by little we began to become aware that the mood of the country and its people was changing. Small things initially - at first accepted and sometimes even jokingly excused away as being "just another day in the new South Africa" - but which, when ignored, defended and even condoned over years by the ruling government, were allowed to fester and grow into something so horrible, so evil and so utterly incomprehensible that thousands of well qualified, law-abiding and otherwise honourable citizens have had to disperse to the four corners of the globe in a bid to win back normalcy, decency and respect to their, and their family members' lives.

Non-paying black passengers - drunk on cheap spirits and "dagga" (marijuana) and made even more bold by their newly won "freedom" - boarding trains and harassing white paying passengers, urinating in the passages and robbing the unsuspecting and utterly helpless of their valuables and shopping at panga (a type of machete) and gun point - with impunity. My daughter, coming home one afternoon, traumatised and sobbing, telling us that she had experienced her handbag being snatched through the open train window at a station by a passing black - witnessed by a black station employee in his official uniform, with her cries for help going ignored by everyone, black and white, who witnessed this "opportunist" theft. My son and his friends being harrassed by a gang of black 'thugs' who boarded a train bound for our predominantly white suburb - and did so daily as a matter of routine we later learnt - demanding that they be given surfboards, clothing, dark glasses and wallets - at knifepoint. A beer bottle thrown out of a train window by black passengers, which exploded on impact with the beachside concrete pathway I was peacefully walking along, cutting my leg badly. My husband, sitting on a bench minding his own business, waiting for his train at Cape Town station, finding two blacks on either side of him digging knives into his body and urging him to walk with them, then strip-searched at a vacant plot of land nearby, taunted with references to "whitey", robbed of everything including his watch, and urged to draw money from his ATM card or die. Returning to the station, humiliated and shocked, only to then be ordered by a black inspector to get off the later train he had caught - at a predominantly black station in the dark of night - because he could not produce his (monthly) ticket which the thieves had removed from his wallet along with his cash; while the white mark on his arm where his watch had been being offered up as evidence of this frightening ordeal was laughed at. Me, in the meantime, home and worried sick about my husband's non-arrival at the pre-arranged time, telephoning the Cape Town railway station SAP office, only to be humiliated by questions as to why my husband wasn't home with his wife at night (he had been working overtime), my call being passed from one black officer to another, with references in between being overheard as to the "mad white woman" on the telephone, interspersed with loud laughter. My husband, being highly qualified and required to work more and more overtime to make up for the increasing number of vacant quasi-government posts which could only be filled through legislated "affirmative action quotas", then resorting to using a company car ("unofficially") in a bid to stave off further life-threatening "incidents" - as referred to by the police officers who suggested that this terrifying experience wasn't worth his or their time or effort reporting - then being "hijacked" at knifepoint by yet another black thug, watched over by a further two who were hiding in the shadows ready to lend their strength as needed.

Being robbed by a black "totsie" (vernacular for criminal or thief) at Christmas of hard-earned cash takings from my business when collecting payment from a client in Cape Town city centre, resulting in my (ironically) not being able to pay my black staff their wages at a time of the year when "goodwill" and "peace unto all men" is supposed to abound.

Row upon row of new shanties edging closer and closer to national highways, from whose bridges black commuters frequently hurl rocks at traffic passing by underneath. Burgeoning new "squatter camps" springing up almost overnight - places where hardened groups of police officers fear entering even when armed to the teeth - which teem with "gangsta's" (who proudly display their membership "numba's" emblazoned into their skin with rudimentary tattoo techniques), rapists, thieves, robbers and hijackers all working business hours along with the formally employed, committing their crimes in broad daylight, brazenly and fearlessly.

Prisons carrying double, and more, the capacity they were build to cater for, with sentences, when they are passed, being considered a minor inconvenience and setback to your "life of crime" as the likelihood of being given a "reprieve" by the very government which locked you away in the first instance is high.

Black beggars outside shop doors and on pavements in every town and city centre the length and breadth of the country, with predominantly white ratepayers - who pay more and more but who get less and less - mostly coughing up timeously and reliably for the upkeep of these "previously white areas", while the ballooning arrears of "historically black areas" are written off time and again.

Weaving a path between the cheap goods and greasy foodstuffs on offer by "informal traders" set up outside smart stores in clear contravention of local municipal by-laws, and, under the watchful gaze of the very officials charged with upholding these laws who think nothing of buying from these stalls which are known to also offer stolen and pirated goods.

Self-appointed parking attendants directing you to park in vacant spaces which you had identified well before they had, with demands then being made on you to pay outrageous sums of money to park in such places which are funded by your taxes, simply because you're white, can, and must, afford to pay whatever is expected of you. A punch in the mouth, foul language and threats of death by one such "attendant", when I, in the company of my aged mother, resisted this extortion of those now referred to by the ruling government as "wealthy whites" - with no response by the "flying squad" (South Africa Police) to my desperate calls for help while trapped in my car unable to drive away, as whites and blacks passed by ignoring the unfolding drama, with others having the time to even stand and watch wide-mouthed with idle cell phones in hand.

Coming home from dropping my son off at school one morning, after an absence of no more than 20 minutes, to find that the R15,000.00 spent on "securing" my home with heavy metal security gates to each external door and a high-tech burglar alarm system was no deterrent to those who simply ripped an open window right out of its frame.

They say that time heals all wounds but eternity will never remove the sounds imbedded in my memory of my daughter screaming and crying in the background while the police officer explained to me on the telephone that she - on Father's Day and at the tender age of 16 - had been raped by a black man, urging me to immediately join her at our local police station. The memories of the slow ticking of the white faced clock on the wall of the stark waiting room at our local provincial hospital, sitting on a hard, cold, wooden bench from where I heard, watched and responded from some safe place outside my own body which didn't, wouldn't, couldn't accept this cruel violation of my beautiful (physically, characteristically and spiritually) child who had simply been "in the wrong place at the wrong time" (as sardonically mentioned by one of the police officers) are all still with me, even years later. Having to then face, realise and accept, that this "incident" would at least - unlike all the others which had preceded it - be chalked up in the annals of South Africa's spiraling crime statistics under the clinical heading of "rape", together with the thousands of other rape cases which occur each year in South Africa, was of no comfort to me, nor will it ever be.

The final straw which "broke the camel's back", forcing us to make the bitter and painful decision to emigrate, came when we were told that the officer in charge of my daughter's case could only "afford" to spend one evening with her "reconstructing" what had happened - while my husband was paying thousands each month in taxes to the same government whose employees were increasingly being implicated in gross mismanagement and corruption charges, against the backdrop of rampant and reckless spending of public funds by a new black "elite" at the expense of an increasingly impoverished nation.

As I write this from my desk positioned at my bedroom window of our new home thousands of miles away from my birth country, which overlooks the greenest pastures upon which the neighbouring cows gently feed, I reflect on why, and how, we were so accepting - apologetic even - of the changing events we were not only witnessing in our country, but which were also increasingly having to confront and deal with at the same time.

I have gone over in my mind, again and again, in the years that have followed my daughter's rape (in particular) dozens of "what if" and "why didn't we" scenarios, until my mind is exhausted to the point where nothing makes sense anymore.

What if we had seen things for what they were, and where they were taking us and, why didn't we react, at least far sooner than we did? Did we not want to because it would be just too demanding of us to change it all at our late, and very comfortable, stages of our lives, or, were we so blinded by the miscarriage of what was truth and what wasn't by what we watched on national television and read in our newspapers and magazines, that we couldn't work it out for ourselves any longer even if we tried? We wouldn't step out of the safety of a vehicle in the middle of the Kruger Park where we knew a pack of lions might be feeding close by, nor would we allow our children to do so, so why did we continue to live in the lions den, not only being well aware of, but being constantly exposed - even when innocently going about our everyday business - to threats and dangers which were not only glaringly obvious but also increasingly warning that eventually at least one of us would suffer terrible harm in the near future.

Why too did we join the "at least" club, comforting ourselves along with our family members, friends, neighbours and colleagues who had suffered from crime just like us, with expressions of "at least we weren't hurt", or "at least it was only money" - which inevitably brought us to the ppoint where my daughter could then not, for years after her rape, enjoy a "normal" relationship with a man, rather choosing to be in the arms of a woman "born in a man's body". Hearing her "coming out" at the urging of her female partner - sitting there on the lounge couch dressed in men's clothing - was this more painful than the rape itself, or the tests that followed, or the waiting for months to hear if she had been HIV infected? These are thoughts and places that my heart, mind and soul will not allow me to go to, healing as I am now in this land New Zealand - which appropriately starts with the word "new" as in "new start".

I miss my country; its special, unique even, beautiful and familiar places, its weather, its mostly warm, friendly, people ... white, black, coloured ... but the faith, trust and confidence I held in the new leadership, who I, along with millions of other whites - many of whom have also now emigrated - voted for, is now but a painful memory, distanced not just by time, but by miles too. Too painful to speak kindly of, to recall with overly fond memories and certainly too painful to ever return to.

Today, after three years of living in this fair land, New Zealand, whose people have accepted, embraced and loved us without exception, my daughter holds in her arms a gorgeously healthy and happy 5 week old baby, born to her outside of wedlock, but with great joy, on the 31st of December 2001. For her this birth signaled not just the arrival of a new life to this small, but loving, family trying hard to re-establish themselves in a foreign land, but an end to her years of trauma associated with "being in the wrong place at the wrong time"; albeit supposedly having every right, as a citizen, to walk the streets of the country she was born into, and in broad daylight!

 

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