The Big Bad City
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008Day 240
“52 murders a day, a rape every half hour and a car theft every nine minutes”, those are the nationwide South Africa crime statistics and the majority of those occur in Johannesburg. I read this as we drove through the beautifully peaceful countryside about 1 hour south of “Jo’Burg”. Besides the statistics talking to people about the city had created a kind of fear. Nobody really has anything good to say and it seemed any story we heard was crime related.
The bus drove smack through central Jo’Burg, an area void of life. Businesses have all left to the more affluent and safer northern suburbs. It didn’t appear many people lived in the area. Such an odd thing for a city of 8 million people. Roughly the people with money live in the northern, and some eastern suburbs and then in the south you have Soweto. A township where an estimated 3 to 4 million people live. Soweto actually stands for South West Townships. It has one of the highest rates of murder in rape in the world, yet is home to an emerging black middle class and was famous for the uprisings of the eighties that led to the end of apartheid. Driving through this mess of a city didn’t exactly give me a good first impression.
Jordana and I elected to stay in Melville, a neighbourhood outside of the centre with a “villagey” atmosphere as the Roughguides describes. We walked through the gate of the Pension iDube and waited around the pool for the owner. This place was nice, it was a large house with a beautiful pool out back. Eventually we found Trish the owner. “Howsit, How did you get passed the gate?” She asked surprised. (Howsit is the South African greeting equivalent to what’s up) “Through the small gate, it was open”. We both replied back. “Oh my! That should never be unlocked”. She ran to the front of the gate to lock up. The entire house, like every other in Jo’Burg was protected by high walls topped by barbed wire and electrical fence. Trish showed us around and explained that we must never open the gate for anyone, even another guest. We had a key for the front gate which led to the driveway, then another key for a gate that led into the back of the house and the door to enter from. All were topped with razor sharp spikes and in our room was something called a “panic button”. I assumed to be used if a robbery was happening. I thought to myself, this is no way to live.
We settled in to our very comfortable room and Jordana cooked a great meal while I tried to sort out our travel plans for the next few days. Even though Melville was considered a safer part of Jo’Burg Trish advised that we shouldn’t walk the short way to the restaurants of the neighbourhood. It was less than 1km away. We were thinking of renting a car to do our own Kruger National Park safari. So stay tuned, driving a car on the left-side in Africa might just be our greatest adventure or mis-adventure yet.
Michael Coroneos