Home isn’t where it used to be
- Sharon Gill
- Nov 5, 2011
- 5 min read
Home used to be the place where your family was safe, or the country you chose to live in. But things have changed. Do I feel safe in my own home? No. Do I think of this country as home? Not anymore. Home, for me, is going to be somewhere else.
Violent crime has become so commonplace that South Africans have lost the capacity to be shocked by it. It doesn’t make front page news anymore. Hell, it rarely gets a mention on page four of the community knock-and-drop.
If somebody gets stabbed or shot in England, Sky News runs the story repeatedly for days. If they covered every stabbing, rape, shooting or mutilation that happens in South Africa, they’d need a dozen channels and no 15-minute loops.
Another woman hijacked at gunpoint and then shot in the head as the thugs drove off in her car. Another man savagely beaten, robbed and left for dead in his own home. Another family robbed, with the man held at knifepoint by one thug while another rapes his wife.
When they’ve stolen what they came for, why don’t they just leave? It’s almost as if it’s not crime anymore – it’s entertainment. Something to do on a Friday night.
And then the after-event disinterest.
You could die of old age waiting for someone to even answer the Flying Squad’s 10111 number, let alone actually dispatch someone to the scene of the crime. And if they do bother to show up, it’s a rare police officer who accurately records the event. Even rarer for any effective action that might lead to an arrest. Unless you’re a local reggae star. Or a tourist from a civilised country.
My dad had the crap beaten out of him by four savages when they discovered that the 87-year-old pensioner had nothing of value for them to steal. When the police finally put in an appearance, they didn’t even go into the house to inspect the mess, the damage, the pool of my dad’s blood on the floor. They didn’t venture further than the driveway gate.
For the record, residents suspect it’s the same group of four youths that has been robbing houses in my dad’s street for the past five or six years – sometimes three or four houses in the same week, and some people have been robbed three times or more in the past couple of years. I have their names, phone numbers and robbery details. Which, I suspect, is more than the police have, since it’s often too much trouble for them to open a docket.
The first time the police contacted me after my father’s incident was almost a year later, when they phoned to ask me to retract a comment I’d made to The Citizen newspaper about police incompetence which got them into trouble. I said I’d retract it when they start making an effort to do their job properly.
This country has bred a generation of criminals who think it’s acceptable to get whatever they want by stealing it from someone else. And they get away with it because nobody cares.
The police don’t seem to care, otherwise they’d have nailed the bunch that’s been terrorising my dad’s street for more than five years.
The insurance companies don’t care. If they can’t wangle their way out of settling claims, they recoup their losses by hiking everybody’s premiums.
The hospitals don’t care. If you have medical aid, they’ll get paid. If you don’t, they refuse to even look at you. So you go to a government hospital where you’ll be lucky not to die of something filth related while you’re ignored until the staff tea break is over or the admissions clerk finishes picking her nose.
And we put up with it because we’ve grown accustomed to being treated like we don’t matter. To add insult to injury, we get bombarded with accusations and insulting platitudes.
The police say you were careless for not locking yourself in your house. Well, in order to get into and out of the house, you generally need to open the security gate. If you have a garden, you should be able to use it without having armed guards on standby. And when you return home, you should be able to drive into your own property without first sending in a SWAT team to check for armed thugs hiding in the shrubbery.
And if you survive a violent crime with most of your body parts still intact, your friends tell you how lucky you are. Bullshit! I resent the expectation that I must be grateful they didn’t kill me. What I’d be grateful for is if they didn’t rob me at gunpoint in the first place.
Those of us who want to stay in this country rethink our security measures. We reinforce the burglar guards on our windows. We put tamper-proof locks on security gates. We decorate our boundary walls with electric fences and razor wire. We install motion sensor lights and elaborate alarm systems hooked up to armed response security companies. And we wonder if it’s possible to buy a bazooka on eBay.
But too many people have had enough. A lot of my friends and most of my family, all of whom had more brains, more guts or more money than me, left South Africa a few years ago. The country’s crime levels and lack of career opportunities drove my own daughter overseas in search of a better and safer life.
And now I’m sick of living like a prisoner in my own home. Sick of being a neurotic wreck every time I go out. Sick of driving around with my car doors locked and windows closed and timing my arrival at intersections to coincide with green lights.
I loved what this beautiful country used to be, but I hate what I believe it’s become – a crime infested, AIDS-riddled, lawless shit hole run by corrupt, greedy, mentally defective fools who are too busy feathering their own nests, being pally with unsavoury characters like Bob Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi, and making exhibitions of themselves at media briefings, to realise that a large percentage of the people who voted for them will probably have starved to death before the next election.
I want to live in a place where I don’t have to live behind bars and gates, where I can sit in my own garden without hearing the neighbours’ ceremonial slaughtering of a goat for the weekend festivities, where my kids can walk to the shop without getting stabbed for their cell phones, where I can get out of my car without having a gun shoved in my ear, and where my dogs can be pets instead of guard dogs.
I want to live in a place where rape – corrective or otherwise – is a serious crime. Where politicians don’t encourage racism by singing hate songs. Where protesters don’t brandish placards telling HIV+ criminals: “Don’t shoot to kill, do sex to kill”.
And the hand-wringing bleeding hearts can shut up with the excuse that people steal because they’re hungry or they can’t find a job. A lot of my friends and I are battling to find work – not least because of “affirmative action”, and we haven’t gone on any thieving sprees.
The writing isn’t just on the wall. It jumps out and screams at me in my dreams: Get out before it’s too late.
At my age, it’s frightening to start over in a strange country, but that pales in comparison to the fear I live with every day in the country I used to call “home”.
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