This is not so much a story about how the eighteenth century trading ships of old were rounding the African Cape coast on their trade routes from the slave ports of East Africa. Sometimes they would stop here for refreshing and sometimes they would get wrecked rounding the south coast, while leaving behind the Indian and entering the Atlantic Ocean.
This is a more modern story about how the most beautiful mountainous hiking regions of the fairest Cape are becoming murdering grounds of foreign European tourists. Cape Town, the host of the 2010 Soccer world cup, and tourist haven of the country, is also the crime-infested bushland of South Africa, a nation with some of the biggest wealth and income gap, highest unemployment one could imagine, at over 30%, and chip on its shoulder or feeling of entitlement, since the scarred history of Apartheid.
I truly love the beauty of the Cape Peninsula which surrounds Cape Town, as I grew up there, roaming its mountains and beaches. So it is with disappointment that I can’t openly and honestly welcome you guys to experience the beautiful treasures that nature has to offer. The reports of tourists being robbed and even murdered while out hiking in nature are continuing to trickle in day after day.
44 year old Ivan Ivanov from Ukraine was stabbed to death this morning on a scenic trail in Hout Bay. Three men armed with knives took his life for his backpack. One was later apprehended with the backpack and is in custody. I myself was invaded in a house by a robber with a knife in the pitch dark of the early morning a few years ago. This is the norm here in South Africa, and has been for years.
Locals at the tourist village of Hout Bay, a few miles from Cape Town city, are just as shocked to hear of these incidents going on as it has made their entire lives fearful. When the new ANC government of Nelson Mandela took over the country, they moved a lot of previously disadvantaged black rural residents to the urban centers and left them there in shacks, with perhaps the introductory municipal facilities like a tap and toilet. So thousands upon thousands of shack dwellers ended up, overnight almost, in the village center and up the hillside of the once picturesque tourist holiday resort of Hout Bay. And it’s been like that for years.
Gradual improvement may arise, but so too do newer and newer arrivals looking for accommodation. I pity the home owners, their house prices must have crashed. And the worst problem is the unemployment and crime that it has brought with it, when you put the poorest next to the richest, within a stone’s throw of each other and leave them there to sort themselves out. I had a relative who lived in the town who subsequently left. Can you imagine residing in a beautiful seaside resort and being too scared to walk around the streets of the place?
Numerous refugees also flood across the borders daily from neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi, even Somalia and Nigeria, in search of work or their fortune. One can’t help but see a worsening situation on so many levels. Societal decay is happening, as crime will invariably impact tourism, one of the last decent income source of the area, other than fishing. And this is not a rare case, as just the day before, yesterday, a man was apprehended after attacking a resident on a walking trail on the other side of the small coastal village so close to where I was born.
I have already left, and live a few hundred miles down the coast in an even smaller town, but the problems are similar, though not as intense as the areas near the big city and the bigger population. Cheap hard drugs still destroy the minds of the poorest, drugs like Meth amphetamine and heroin, the most highly addictive and cheapest drugs of all. These fuel the criminal mind, and intensify the capacity for violence in the crazed addicts.
Such social decay will not go away, although the government have finally acquiesced in another gang and murder-ridden suburb of the Cape, by sending in the army to patrol the streets with assault rifles. The residents are happy, as the police were not able to control the situation which has gone on ever since I was born in those suburbs, half a century ago. Sending the army in to your civilian suburbs has not always ended well though, so that sword is certainly double edged.
All of this goes to suggest that the social and political situation has not improved with time, nor the economic. It has steadily become worse, reinforcing the realization that the material world is no place for a peaceful, tranquil state, at least not here in beautiful Cape of Good Hope, where all we have left is hope in our gilded prison behind electric fences and steel-barred windows.
