OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Sunday 5.00pm.
THE widow of Alan Paton, the champion of black rule and renowned author of Cry, the Beloved Country, said on Sunday that she is leaving South Africa because she is too terrified to live in such a crime-ridden environment.
Anne Paton, 71, said in an article published in Britain’s Sunday Times that she had been “hijacked, mugged and terrorised” and feared she could be killed like her friends as crime was “rampaging through the land”. “Among my friends, and the friends of my friends, I know of nine people who have been murdered in the past four years,” she wrote.
“While some people say I have been unlucky, others say ‘You are lucky not to have been raped or murdered.’ What kind of society is this where one is considered ‘lucky’ not to have been raped or murdered – yet?” She said she had decided to return to England, where she was born.
Her husband’s book, Cry, the Beloved Country, has been the seminal work on the repression of black South Africans for 50 years. “He worked all his life for black majority rule,” she said. “I am glad he is not alive now. He would have been so distressed to see what has happened to his beloved country.”
Paton’s widow said she had first been hijacked at gunpoint, then suffered an armed break-in at her house near Durban six months ago in which the intruders trussed her up and ransacked the house. A few weeks later, thieves attacked the property again and the “last straw” came a few weeks ago, shortly before her 71st birthday, when two men tried to batter their way into the house, one using a hammer.
“I love this country with a passion; but I cannot live here anymore. There is now more racial tension in this country than I have ever known. But it is not just about black-on-white crime. It is about general lawlessness,” she said.