When Pam Mokoena heard the sound of gunfire, she didn’t bat an eyelid. Hours later she was cradling the body of the second brother to have been gunned down in South Africa’s murder capital.
Pointing to her sibling’s dried blood on the streets of Cape Town’s Nyanga township, Mokoena shakes her head and mumbles: ”Only God knows what is happening here.”
Her 20-year-old brother, Simphiwe Mokhahiu, is one of 12 Nyanga residents to have been killed in as many days since the start of the month.
Mokoena says she was watching television when she heard the three shots that killed her brother in a crime for which no one has been brought to justice.
”We heard shots outside but we didn’t pay any attention,” she said.
Later, while chatting to friends in the street, she noticed a body lying in a pool of blood. When she went to investigate, she discovered it was her brother.
Another brother was shot dead in the dirt yard of the same house two years earlier. He was only 23.
”What is going on?” she asks. ”In only this house, two have brothers have been lost.”
Police figures show that a total of 303 murders were committed in Nyanga in the year ending March. And it is not only the residents who pay the price: among the dead are the three police officers shot and killed so far this year.
”People here live by the sword,” said one police officer on condition of anonymity. ”What do you expect if you look at the circumstances they live in?
”You find a 3m by 3m shack with a father, a mother and three children living in it. There is violence everywhere. What does a child from such a household grow up to be?”
The sprawling township, home to about half a million people in the shadow of Cape Town’s international airport, is policed by just 178 officers — and they have only 59 vehicles between them.
Quite apart from having to cope with nearly a murder a day, the police have to contend with sky-high rates of rape and robbery.
”A lot of people are being killed for nothing,” says Nyanga’s acting police station Commissioner Manyano Noqayi.
General disrespect
The main perpetrators are criminal gangs made up of teenagers with few other options out of poverty, said the police chief.
”Unemployment is a big problem,” he said. ”People try to earn a living, and they commit offences doing that. There is general disrespect for the law.”
Nyanga is a typical township. It has mostly squatter residences, a dearth of public amenities such as sewerage and electricity, and few formal roads. That means that even when alerted, it can be difficult for police to locate the scene of a crime.
Much of the business being carried on in the street outside the police station is illegal, with rickety stalls selling anything from cellphone cards to food. Many of the numerous minibus taxis being driven around are unlicensed.
Buses and taxis do not drop people outside their homes, which at night, in particular, puts locals at risk of robbers and rapists.
”This place is cruel. Very, very cruel,” laments Nyanga resident and volunteer victim counsellor Freda Miller, who has herself been robbed at gunpoint and had her house burgled in recent months.
”We are scared of our own children,” she says.
The interview with Miller was interrupted when she was called away to attend to a woman robbed twice while walking home at night from a church meeting.
Unathi Tshokotsha (24) was first relieved of her handbag at gunpoint and then of her cellphone by a different man wielding a knife as she was phoning for help.
”People live in fear here,” she told Agence France-Presse. ”We cannot walk in the street.”
As for reporting criminals in their midst, community members are either intimidated or simply swayed by a sense of charity into staying silent.
”To impressionable youths in particular, the criminal gangs hiding in their settlements may … even serve as role models,” said the most recent annual police crime report. It pinpointed poverty as the root cause of the problem.
Noqayi believes Nyanga’s massive crime problem cannot be felled without education and social improvements.
A detective agrees: ”Nyanga is not a sprint, it is a marathon”. — AFP
