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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