It’s 5.15pm on a weekday, and I’m in a minibus taxi travelling along Louis Botha Avenue through Orange Grove, Johannesburg, when a group of policemen pulls us over.
I ask the woman sitting alongside me what’s going on. ”They are looking for illegals,” she whispers conspiratorially. ”Foreigners,” she adds, as though I might have misunderstood her to mean a general breaking of the law.
”You ladies are lucky today,” the only white policeman laughs sheepishly. ”There are no ladies on duty, so we can’t search you.” He gives the impression he’d rather risk missing any dagga that might be in my bag than have to confront a tampon.
Yet in the world of men, things are different. In searching the male passengers there appears to be an understanding on either side of the badge. They are thorough and uncompromising.
But while South Africa is looking the other way and investing all this time and energy into rooting out foreigners, many South Africans seem to be getting away with murder.
I’ve been mugged twice at knifepoint and both times it was by South Africans. I could tell by my attackers’ speech — the second time, I was told in a perfect Model C accent: ”Just cooperate, and you won’t get hurt.”
I was chatting with a South African teenager, while waiting for a bus in Hillbrow a few months back, and he told me: ”It’s the Nigerians. They offer these young South Africans jobs to steal. Why should they say no?”
With Nigeria’s track record on corruption — second last, at 132 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index — it’s not hard to understand the suspicion about them. Though I notice that South Africa slipped from 36 in 2002, to 48 in 2003.
”Would you do crime?” I asked the boy. ”No,” he told me indignantly. ”Why not?” ”My mother taught me different,” he said. My point exactly.
I checked out the arrest statistics in the free weekly rag for my area, the North Eastern Tribune, over a two-month period. Without exception, the highest number of arrests every week was of ”illegal immigrants”. About half of all arrests every week.
The only deviation from this pattern was the two-week period when there was obviously a sweep on prostitution.
Do the police really mean to tell me I’m more at risk from a sex worker than an armed robber or a rapist? Or maybe prostitutes are just easier to catch.
But South Africans shouldn’t think they’re protected by this clampdown on foreigners.
In fact, sometimes they end up being victims, wrongfully arrested because of it.
Take the case of Sylvia Manda, the teacher from Hillbrow who was arrested and allegedly assaulted because of ”her complexion, facial appearance, accent and her style of dressing”.
”It almost happened to me,” my colleague Sibongile, also a Hillbrow resident, told me. ”Luckily I had my passport with me. I really started wondering what would have happened if I had forgotten to put the passport in my handbag. You know they make you count in Afrikaans to prove you’re South African?”
As in the bad old days of the dompas, ironically, as a white South African I’m in the group once again protected from this kind of harassment. White foreigners are regarded as tourists.
I asked Mannie Cableira, the owner of the Radium Beer Hall in Louis Botha Avenue, what he thinks of all of this: ”Look, I don’t think they’re targeting foreigners. They’re just doing their job.
”I have cops from the Norwood police station, black and white, come and drink at my place. And these guys are tired, man. Me myself, I don’t have a problem with foreigners. Hell, I’ve got the whole Tower of Babel working at my place!
”They’ve got papers of course,” he assured me, in case I might think he’s employing ”illegals”.
It’s beginning to get cold on the pavement, and it’s now 5.25pm. I’m growing impatient hanging around, so I consult with my confidante alongside me again for an update. ”What’s taking so long?”
”They are checking his papers,” she nods in the direction of a big, good-looking black man, of indeterminate nationality, who is creating the illusion of privacy by turning his back to us because he has a gun, while the police check his documentation.
Finally, it seems everything is in order, and we’re on the road again.
I don’t know if I’m more relieved to know there are no illegals among us, or to have a fellow South African now sitting next to me with a loaded gun in the front of his pants.