Angella Johnson VIEW FROM A BROAD
There I was, happily driving my white BMW 323i series along a stretch of winding Midrand road on a balmy Tuesday afternoon. The window was down and a cool breeze blew gently on my face as, oblivious to my surroundings, I slowed at a quiet stop street.
Suddenly, out of nowhere jumped a young man wildly waving a firearm in what I think can be described as the new South African greeting. “Get outta the car. Now, out … now!” he screamed hysterically. “Don’t make any funny moves or I’ll shoot.”
So this is what it’s like to be held at gunpoint? I tried frantically to remember the advice given at my anti-hijacking class – keep calm, don’t panic, get out of the car as quickly as you can and offer no resistance.
It wasn’t easy, but with incredible mental alacrity I managed to recall that it was best to use my left hand to remove my safety belt and open the door, while keeping my right hand held up in the “OK, you’ve got me” position.
Then off raced my attacker in the R158 000 car that he would probably flog to his syndicate bosses for a lousy R20 000.
This was when I should have commenced mourning the loss of my high status vehicle (yeah, like I could really afford one on my salary) and vow to purchase some third-hand wreck as my next means of transport.
Just as well then this was only a simulation (my real car is a wreck), and my hijacker happened to be a trusted employee of the BMW Advanced Driving School at Kyalami racetrack, where I was being put through my paces on a R220-a-day anti-hijacking course.
“The first thing we do is to frighten you,” warned manager and training instructor John Meiring, when I telephoned for my appointment. “Then we teach you how to avoid a hijacking and what to do in the unfortunate event you are involved in one.”
It was certainly scary sitting through a somewhat cheesy 10-minute information video, made in the style of a very bad Alfred Hitchcock thriller (dramatic music and all), which he played during my theoretical session.
The voice-over text to several re-enacted hijacking scenarios was liberally sprinkled with words like “rape”, “lust” and “daily horror”, while the narrator emphasised that “you are the key to your survival”.
Like a second-rate spoof thriller it warned: “There’s a third eye watching you … be especially alert when in the comfort zone of familiarity.”
I was already beginning to feel nauseous when on screen came true life victim Cara, a young white nurse from Johannesburg Hospital, whose face was badly mutilated following a hijacking outside her home one night.
Meiring, a fast talking former BMW quality controller, explained that the assailant’s bullet went through Cara’s left temple, ripped her eye from the socket, pierced her palette and exited via her throat.
“I panicked because I was absolutely terrified,” said the nurse, who apparently tried to alert people in her apartment building by hitting all the door buzzers. “What could I have done differently?” she asked plaintively to the unseen camera man.
Meiring argued that she might not have been wounded had she remained calm. “We know from witnesses that these situations usually get out of hand when the victims panic or try to resist. So, remaining passive is probably your best chance for survival.”
He cited figures showing that for every 300 hijackings there is one fatality. I did not quite understand how that stood with his earlier claim that there are about 50 hijackings in Johannesburg every day and at least one death, but then Meiring was spouting statistics at the speed of an AK- 47. So who knows.
This course may appear to give a lot of seemingly common sense tips, like not stopping to help people on the road (what an uncaring society we are creating), but Meiring insists it’s a wake-up call for most people who believe it will never happen to them.
A further aim is to try and dispel what Meiring calls “another popular myth” – that all hijackers are black. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t get a white mother being sentenced to 13 years in jail for hijacking combies in Pretoria East,” he said.
“Syndicates usually get white guys to make the approach or be in the car following you because you are less likely to feel threatened and will therefore be lulled into a false sense of security,” said Meiring.
The video shows an interview with two jailed white hijackers who discuss their modus operandi (they seemed like nice young men too). Apparently they used to take cars out for a test drive and then hold the sales representative at gunpoint.
Another popular myth Meiring and his associate Richard Brussow want to debunk is the view that only luxury cars are targeted. I laughed when he hinted that even a beat-up old Ford Meteor like mine could be hijacking material.
Surely no one would be that stupid? I could probably run after them and catch up.
“This is often an opportunistic crime,” replied Meiring. “Even an old car is worth money as scrap if the picking is easy. So don’t give them the chance.”
He argues that BMW and other luxury car owners feel singled out only because they are usually the kind of people the media report about, so it is their stories that end up in the public eye.
“Look, it depends on the percentage of the car market a manufacturer controls.” He showed a slide that claimed because Toyota had about 30% of the market, then Toyota probably had a similar percentage of the hijacking statistic, compared with BMW’s 6%.
This sounded like defensive logic to me.
But what kind of people sign up for this course? Well, it is not just luxury vehicle owners. Sales representatives and delivery drivers regularly rub shoulders with wives of executives and luxury car owners who are offered it by dealers as part of the package.
Take Beverly Rogerson, who went because it was a gift from her BMW dealer. This smartly dressed executive caterer and I met at the Johannesburg Country Club, where as a member of the Alton wives club she was indulging in a repeat course.
“It was very stressful for me and I suffered from really bad neck spasms afterwards,” she said. “But I learned a lot and it has made me more alert as a driver, which is something everyone needs in order to survive in this country these days.”
These pampered, gold-dripping wives, many of whom proudly declared they were home executives, gasped at the often graphic picture painted by Brussow, a former police detective who struck a slight racist cord as he cautioned against driving past squatter camps and near certain townships.
For good measure he kept lobbing the old rape card – including the claim that several men were raped in Pretoria hijackings last year.
None of this seemed to faze these “ladies who lunch” – some of whom had their own crime stories to tell.
Take the perfectly groomed home executive wearing a stunning square-cut diamond ring who was almost hijacked near Parktown by two men (one black and one white) after she made a wrong turn.
“For the first three terrifying seconds, though it seemed like an eternity, I lost all recollection of what to do. I looked into the barrel of the gun and all I could think of was that I would die,” she gasped.
Square-cut (she said she did not want to be identified because hubby is a high profile public figure, then laughed when I failed to recognise his name) managed to recover in time to drive her Mercedes away from the would-be hijackers. But the experience has convinced her that courses like BMW’s can save lives.
Me, I’ll stick to driving a dirty, beat-up old car. I still think bad taste is a good deterrent.