Last Friday night, at about 3:30am, I called the police after what felt like endless hours of intolerable noise from a vehicle that was parked near my partner’s apartment block.
This car had its doors wide open and was blasting mbaqanga tunes — yet it took me a while to muster the effort to get up and dial 10111 because I assumed that someone on the lower floors would do it.
The call to the police didn’t last long and, after the shock of realising that it is not a free call (in this country?), I sat up to await the blue-light reflections and sirens that would signal the end of this nocturnal misery.
While I sat huffing and puffing, I felt like a pompous white person in the 1990s calling the police because the blacks next door were making too much noise, or slaughtering animals in their back yard. To personify the feeling, I felt the way Jenny Crwys-Williams sounds.
Alas, the police didn’t arrive but they did call me back asking if I had reported a rape case. I said no. And by that time the car had left and I fell asleep feeling that I had been haughty and pedantic, calling the police for something as trivial as noise.
But I also felt crushed by my own naivety because, in my heart of hearts, I knew I was wasting my time. Police response to crime in South Africa is regarded as slack — generally, we feel helpless in the face of crime and abuse.
In an effort to understand the reasons for our cowardly mentality, I have come to the conclusion that there is a link between this helplessness and the legacy of apartheid. During apartheid the majority of South Africans did not fight the criminal system that governed them.
They accepted it and continued with their lives while the situation worsened. It was only a minority of activists, with the help of others elsewhere in the world, who changed this country’s destiny.
Again — during the transition — the majority allowed their fate to be decided by a small group of individuals. As a nation, we seem to leave it to others to fight our battles for us.
What’s the difference now? We still don’t have faith in the police and we are at the mercy of a different set of criminals. We forget and become desensitised about crimes that would shock other nations.
The schoolgirl rapes that have us gasping for justice today will be forgotten next week — we will look for something beyond the government-corruption scandals that tend to plague the front pages of our newspapers.
Solutions seem few and far between, but how are we going to find them if we don’t take responsibility for our well-being? How dare I expect someone else to take care of a problem affecting me? I wonder how many times this question has been asked over the backyard braai during the grumbles we all love to have.