The house looked beautiful and the garden was leafy. It met most of our requirements — but still it was not as nice as our home in Johannesburg.
It felt strange walking through this upmarket suburb of Athlone, Pietermartitzburg, looking for a house to buy.
I grew up 10km across town, in Northdale, in what was back then an ”Indians only” suburb. Northdale was crammed with people and had no play facilities — we used the road as a makeshift tennis court. I longed for the day I could live in a big house like the whites did, with a swimming pool.
Now, 10 years after leaving Pietermaritzburg, my family and I were thinking of moving back and previously off-limits Athlone had been recommended as relatively safe.
Our house hunt was an attempt to escape our misery in Johannesburg, where we survived an armed robbery at home on October 6 last year. Our dream house in the northern suburbs had become sullied, associated with our nightmare, and I didn’t want to live there any more. Our friends gave us the same advice: ”It’ll do your souls good to move away. Get out and start afresh.”
Of the 10 houses we looked at in and around Athlone, two were vacant, with one owner having fled to New Zealand and three others about to pack for Australia and Indonesia. Were the owners robbed in their homes or did they see the light and decide to escape Eskom’s power outages? Why would people abandon their houses for estate agents to sell? Signs of a hasty departure from a crime-ridden country?
If they are all leaving, why the hell are we coming back here? I asked my husband, David.
”We’ll give this city a chance. Things might be different here. The crime is not so bad. Life should be quieter. It’s better than leaving the country,” he said.
The next day the headline of the front page of the local newspaper, The Witness, screamed: ”Athlone under siege: 11 robberies in one month.” My heart sank.
”Don’t leave the country,” said some of my relatives. ”Jacob Zuma will become president and will bring back the death sentence and crime will be under control. If he does this, it won’t matter any more if he is immoral or shady,” they said, to my uncomfortable laughter.
So here’s the paradox. I now have the physical freedom to live in any suburb I choose, but the ruling party I voted in has allowed robbers the power to run riot, thereby limiting my freedom to live where I want.
The actions of robbers even inform the characteristics of the house I will buy: it should not be in a panhandle as it is difficult for the homeowner to escape in the event of a hijacking; it has to be away from vacant land where criminals could hang out; and away from houses that have been vacant for a while since smart criminals can use them as a half-way house. The residents’ association has to be proactive and the police — er — swift and smart.
I left Pietermaritzburg in 1998 to seek my fortune in Johannesburg. The city was generous, throwing up job opportunities I grabbed and exploited. Johannesburg was the city that allowed me to dream, gave me the freedom to be whatever the hell I wanted to be.
It was the city where I met David, a cricket-loving biochemist, who was not only white, but nice. ”How can you be white and nice?” I asked him a few days after meeting him. ”And what do you want from me? My family won’t like you and it would be a disgrace if I ran around with a white man.”
But in the end my family didn’t object. ”We knew you would do something like this. You were always different, so it does not come as a shock,” said my mother.
We got married and bought a beautiful house. The day after we moved in I stood in the garden, delighting in the fact that I now had the spacious home I’d dreamed of. I thought about how lucky our unborn baby was going to be, with space to play in a pretty garden. I returned from Sandton Clinic that same evening, having miscarried. Fifteen months later we brought home twin girls. Two years thereafter, little Nicholas arrived. This house would be their haven.
It was not to be. On the rainy night of October 6 last year our lives were changed forever. Two young thugs waltzed into our house, tied us up and helped themselves to our possessions.
They had beaten up David outside, as he returned from the gym. At gunpoint he was forced to bring them inside the house. My mother and the three children sat on the bed as David and I lay tied up with shoelaces and skipping ropes, face down on the floor, while they raided the house.
It was the first time we had stared death in the face and the fear of being raped was overpowering. Who would they shoot first? I wondered as I said goodbye to David. They could rape my five-year-old twins or my mother or me. They kept stamping on David’s back, demanding firearms, hatred seething in their eyes. They clearly detested white people.
One kept chatting on his cellphone to his friend in Soweto about their gains and they drove off in our cars, which they subsequently dumped, leaving us filled with fear and horror with no desire to continue living in our house.
Six months have passed and our fear has not subsided. We are terrified we are going to be robbed again. ”Stop being so negative. This won’t happen to you again. Be grateful you weren’t raped or murdered,” I get told by people who don’t know what else to say to me.
But most South Africans, except our lovely politicians with body guards, could experience what we did and might not be fortunate enough to survive. And being robbed once doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. Frankly it’s a sick society where people say things like: ”Be grateful you didn’t get raped or murdered.”
To say we’re not the people we were prior to the robbery is an understatement.
I fail to see the humour in my children collecting snails, arranging them into ”mummy rows” and ”baby rows” and holding races for each category. No, I am too busy clutching the silent panic button, working out how many seconds it would take to grab the children and sprint into the house.
While I used to play happily on the street in the Eighties, my own children lack the freedom to play in their own garden. Instead of sleeping in the early hours of the morning, I imagine myself and David lying in a pool of blood. I keep fantasising about what I would like to do to the robbers if I had access to them. Unashamedly, I cheer when criminals are shot dead.
I have nothing to celebrate this Freedom Day. With other crime victims who mourn the loss of loved ones, I have lost the freedom to live in my house and in Johannesburg, the city that gave me so much. I long for the happiness I once had and pine for my friends who have fled this country.
Soon I will move back to Pietermaritzburg. Like many South Africans I hope I will survive April 2009, un-raped and unshot, so that I may exercise my right to vote in the general election, very carefully.