Culture of Fear

Even though my latest passport adventure in Kenya ended up eliminating the Cape Town part of the my trip to South Africa I still had a great time. Everyone I met was wonderful - very friendly and out-going, and they reminded me, I suppose naturally enough, of Australians (although the South Africans would cringe at that comparison). I ended up spending my time in Pretoria, presenting at a conference on African curricular development and visiting the Universitity of Pretoria and the University of South Africa. I'll have more to say about this all later on, but what really struck me was how fear has taken hold in so much of the white community of Pretoria. When I first arrived in Pretoria I spent a few days at a bed & breakfast out in a very nice suburb of Pretoria, but you'd think it was an outright war zone for all the barb wire and electric fences that surrounded every single house. Home security has been an absolute boom industry in South Africa for some time now. The nice folks who ran the bed & breakfast were really intent on me never walking anyplace by myself - and, again, this was essentially a series of gated communities with not a poor person in sight. On a Sunday I didn't have anything to do and didn't want to sit around in my room so I asked the owners over breakfast if there was public transportation that I could take to downtown Pretoria for a walk and the woman who ran things had an absolutely stricken look on her face at the thought that I would do something so reckless. A nice young couple who were visiting from Cape Town volunteered to drop me off downtown at the zoo as they left for the day. The owner said that was OK, but that I had to call, from the zoo, as soon as I was finished and that they would come pick me up - and to not leave the zoo under any circumstances. Well, of course, I paid no attention to that directive. After a lovely couple hours in the zoo I went for a walk around downtown Pretoria and had a perfectly safe time. I ended up in the main square and just sat there, had some ice cream, and watched the world go by. I called her when I was finished and her husband drove out to get me. On another night I went for a walk to a local Chinese restaurant to grab dinner and suddenly a car pulled over - it was the owner who was out for a drive with her son. She insisted that I get in the car and she took me to the restaurant and volunteered to sit there while I picked up my food to go - and seemed a little startled that I intended to eat at the restaurant and then walk home. It reminded me of my first visit to Kenya when the woman who ran the conference center picked me up on the side of the road when I went for a walk, but I could at least process that event because I was walking towards a sort of ramshackle area - but this was a very posh area of Pretoria. I talked to several folks, including my driver (who I'll have more to say later) and the young couple from Cape Town, who felt that the folks in the suburbs of Pretoria were completely overreacting and that while there was a fair amount of crime in Johannesburg (or Joburg - pronounced jawburg - as everyone in South Africa called it) there wasn't enough in a nice area of Pretoria to justify that level of hysteria. It has inspired me to try and do some research on crime levels in South Africa. It reminded me of that book, Culture of Fear, that is discussed in Bowling for Columbine. In that spotless neighborhood in Pretoria there were even eight-foot high fences, topped with razor wire, around the local funeral home.