The parking outside Pretoria North’s car licence department is always filled with men who seek to assist you in any dealings you have with the local bureaucracy. Car licences, registration of vehicles, driver’s licences for various size vehicles, road worthy certificates and anything else you may need from that office,
In the features produced by Hollywood organised crime consists largely of illegal liquor shipments in prohibition days, prostitution rings in inner city America, protection rackets aimed at people who cannot protect themselves against the racketeers, and shipments of cocaine, the drug of the upwardly mobile. In South Africa it has
We are all hearing a lot of service delivery complaints lately. There are complaints about our electricity supply, Johannesburg’s water supply, potholes in the roads of various cities, education failures and many others, many of them real, some imaginary. But there is one failure that no one complains about, at
Willie got a lift to less than half a kilometre from his place of work. From the point where he got out of his friend’s car you can see the front gate of the premises. Half an hour later his employer tried to contact him, but there was no answer
I had been looking at the rather sad figures of South Africa’s economic condition when a small Zimbabwean family arrived. Their clothing was dusty and they looked tired. The man introduced himself as Arthur, the woman as Matilda and the small child as Mary. They were looking for a place
Tannie Susanna van Wyk was an unhappy person. When I arrived at their home to collect bags of chicken manure for our garden, she was in the kitchen, her face looking like thunder, to use a colloquialism. Outside, their teenage Zimbabwean gardener seemed to have gone insane. He was as
We have two dogs. One is a middle-aged lady called Chloe. She is black. A little grey around the mouth reveals her age. Tiny grey spots around her head are marks of past battles. Chloe does not always act her age. She is part poodle and part pit bull. The
Willie’s problem is that his plot is up against the Wildsplaas. Now, the Wildsplaas is no longer a place where wild animals are kept, as its name suggests. But it is an excellent place for thieves to hide out and raid the plots bordering it. In a month, Willie lost
We have a big pile of bricks. We had torn down a partly built house in the bushes, on the far side of our plot. Criminals had been using it as a place to overnight while looking for opportunities to raid the properties of other plot dwellers. The incomplete house
The community of Sonskyn is one of those made up of the people who missed the opportunities offered by the old regime and now feel excluded by the new one. The difference is that, while most such communities are black, some others, like this one, are white. Whether segregation among