The Attack
We were planning to go on holiday down to Jeffrey’s Bay on 14th January for a week. I have wanted to move down to the coast for many years, and we were now beginning to move on this dream. On Saturday night, 12th January, we went out with old friends to a local restaurant for dinner, and had lots of wine and good food. We went to bed about 11pm and fell soundly asleep. My son came in about 12pm, and he too went to sleep. At about 3am I was awakened by a bright torch light shining in my face, and somebody shouting “I shoot you, I shoot you”. It’s amazing how quickly you wake up under those circumstances. In a few seconds I realised there were at least 3 black men at the bottom of our bed, wearing balaclavas and gloves, each holding a handgun pointing at me or my wife. There is a scene in the Oscar winning movie “Tsotsi” exactly like this. To cut a very long 90 minutes short, these fellows bound our hands behinds our back with very tight cable ties, bound our feet with my neck ties from my cupboard, demanded to know where we kept our safe (we don’t have one), what the pins for our credit cards were, where the money was, etc, etc. All we could do was lie there stark naked like trussed turkeys, and do our best to keep them calm. To encourage me to be honest, they heated up our clothes iron and burnt me repeatedly along my right side. As it happened, I gave them an old pin number for the cards, which I still remembered well. We now realised there were 5 men in the house, when they bundled my son onto the floor in our bedroom as well. They proceeded to ransack the house, finding my gun behind the bed in the process. We told them repeatedly that we were poor, and after a while they appeared to believe us. One of the younger hoodlums went through my clothes one by one, rejecting each item with disdain. I told him that he probably had better clothes than me, and he agreed. One fellow who obviously suffered from inadequate potty training as a child, was fascinated by our genitals. I’m fairly sure his job description included rapist. He inspected both of our genitals, then climbed up on top of my wife. He then noticed she was missing a breast, which puzzled him. We explained that my wife had had cancer and that it had been removed. He asked if cancer was infectious and whether he needed a condom. We assured him that it was. After some probing around with his fingers, he appeared to lose interest, thank God. Finally, they all trooped out of the room and the house went silent. I staggered to my feet and looked out the window to see if they were gone, but could see nothing. My wife and son begged me to return to the bed in case they were still there, which I did. Suddenly they all burst into the room together, waving guns and torches and demanding to know the pin numbers again. We gave them the pins, which they compared to numbers they had written down earlier. They seemed satisfied we had given them consistent numbers. One of them cocked my revolver and pointed it at me, sighting down the barrel. I told him that the woman next door invariably summoned the armed reaction service whenever there was a gunshot in the area. After a brief discussion, they appeared to think better of shooting me too. They then loaded up all our electronic gear into the back of my truck, including odd things like a mirror, several paintings, wine glasses and kitchen implements. In retrospect, we figured they were probably setting up a townhouse somewhere, and were short a few items. They couldn’t work out how to get our security gates open, and it took about 10 minutes of careful explanation before they got it right. They pushed the truck all the way across the property to the road before starting it, making it hard for us to know if they were gone. However, I was pretty sure they were gone this time. I managed to untie my wife’s feet, and she went to the kitchen and got a small knife to cut the ties on our legs. She then managed to open the back door with her mouth, a farm gate with her foot, and ran up to the property owner’s house and raised the alarm.
We survived this event largely unscathed, except for a few burns and some numbness in our hands from the cable ties. For this we were deeply grateful. I think all of us will carry the events of that night to our graves. I am saddened and angered that my family now have 2 such memories embedded in their minds (They were also robbed and brutalised in 1993). We lost quite a lot materially, my truck, laptop and its contents, TV’s etc. Unfortunately I had decided to self insure about 6 months before, after a lifetime of insuring everything. Our children and neighbours gathered around and were incredibly generous. Our next door neighbour, whose husband was shot dead in an armed robbery about 2 years ago, offered us accommodation in a spare cottage on her property, set us up with cell phones within hours, and was wonderfully helpful.
Everyone asks “How did they get in?” Of the 3 houses on the property, ours was the most protected. We have a fence around the main property, an electric fence around our cottage with an automatic palisade gate, 2 dogs, and all the windows have burglar bars. The crooks avoided the electric fence (which is alarmed), broke a palisade off the gate with a single blow from a hammer and chisel, and twisted three burglar bars off their welding silently. The dogs never peeped, which given that one is deaf and the other blind in one eye, is not surprising.
The police were as ineffectual as they always are, showing up 2 hours after the event, drinking coffee while they painstakingly write out statements in long hand in bad grammar and worse spelling. We decided to call the papers, in the hope that they might publish the registration number of the truck, and also put a little pressure on the police. We finally got through to a reporter at the Star newspaper, who took all our details and story, and sent out a photographer. To our total amazement, a photo of my wife and I took up over half of the front page of the next day’s edition, pushing a story about our corrupt commissioner of police (and ex Interpol head) off to one side. That was not the 15 minutes of fame that I wanted!
South Africa reminds me of a person who has been diagnosed as HIV positive, but who remains amazingly healthy and vibrant for many years. Then one day the immune system crumbles, your energy evaporates, and running sores appear everywhere. For South Africa, that day seems to have been around 1st January 2008. Everybody and his dog are recommending expensive and painful treatments, in endless lekgotlas and indabas and bosberaads and high level strategy meetings. Everything in the body politic is inflamed, new and evil leaders have replaced old and incompetent ones, every single organ of state is on the point of collapse, the young and healthy (and white and competent) are leaving in droves, and there are black spots all over the landscape.
During late December we South Africans witnessed the spectacle of a mere 4000 ANC party apparatchiks deciding on the future of the country as though it were their personal fiefdom. With bad grace and worse manners they elected Jacob Zuma as party head and soon to be SA president. This is a man with a Standard 6 education, who learned to read after the age of 20, who is accused of massive fraud of public funds, accused and acquitted of rape, who believes that a shower will prevent HIV infection. This is a stupid choice made by stupid people, but we all must pay for it. Personally, I like to believe he will never become president, that he may well end up in jail, but that he may be instrumental in breaking the power of the ANC in South Africa. At least that’s what I believe on the good days (both of them).
The primary focus of popular anger is currently directed towards Eskom, who have been cutting power for up to 9 hours a day in some areas, due to our current power shortage. People get really pissed when they can’t watch their favourite soapies, when their local bar has to close early, or when the intensive care unit shuts down unexpectedly. Johburg’s diabolical traffic becomes much, much worse when all the robots shut down. However, since only about half the robots work even when there is power, we have learnt to cope with 4 way intersections quite well.
Will SA host the 2010 World Cup? That is a question you may only ask in the most private of places, but it is being frequently asked. Government makes endless promises, but their credibility is close to zero. I don’t envy Sepp Blatter that decision. Although I think the government will try to fake their way through it, by spending huge amounts of money and deploying thousands of troops, I am not convinced that the rest of the world will be quite as tolerant of rampant bureaucracy and ineptitude as are most South Africans.
On the positive side, we don’t have George Bush or Robert Mugabe for president, English weather, Australian drought, New Zealand earthquakes, Iraqi militia, or Chinese work ethic. The coast is still rather nice, and the economy just won’t stop, no matter how hard Cosatu tries.
But, in the immortal words of W C Fields, All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.
For the future, I think South Africa will inexorably follow the same pattern as has prevailed in Africa over the last 2 centuries. The whites will retreat southwards from their former colonial possessions as the blacks take over and then rubbish their newly acquired lands. Whites have retreated from Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Polokwane, mostly heading for Gauteng or the Cape or overseas. I believe that a majority of whites in South Africa will move down to the Western Cape in the course of the next 10 years, perhaps exceeding the number of blacks in that province. The Democratic Alliance will govern the province and major cities, and the economy will thrive, at the expense of the economy in the rest of South Africa. The province will soon resent the excessive tax burden which will be used to try to sustain the northerly provinces, and will refuse to pay. I suspect this may trigger the long delayed racial war in South Africa, but perhaps cooler heads will prevail. The Western Cape may secede from the Republic, and the whole Zimbabwe / South Africa scenario may play out yet again. We will all be dead by then.
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