Criminal Records

A few weeks ago, a terrifying story made the rounds in the affluent suburbs outside of Cape Town. Six masked men brandishing knives, clubs, and guns had broken into the home of a divorcee in the verdant Kenilworth neighborhood just below Table Mountain. Disabling the alarm, the gang ransacked the house, threatened to rape her two teenaged daughters, and plunged knives into a lump in the bed that they mistook for her sleeping husband. (It turned out to be a pile of pillows.) Just before fleeing in a pickup truck, the gang demanded that the woman surrender a gold ring. She tugged at it but couldn't wrench it loose. One of the thieves, according to the story, then did the unthinkable. He chopped off her finger.The report sent a collective shudder across this majestic city at the bottom of the world, where whites still live--or try to live--the same sheltered existence that they enjoyed during the days of apartheid. Sequestered behind high walls and electric gates in neighborhoods hidden from Cape Town's dreary townships and squatter camps, protected by armed "rapid response" teams and elaborate security systems, most whites still dwell in a cocoon of privilege. But the veneer of invulnerability is falling away. Cape Town, despite its beauty, has always been a high-crime city: Cape Flats, home to hundreds of thousands of Afrikaans-speaking "coloreds," has been plagued by vicious, drug- related gang warfare for years, and the city's murder rate is among the highest in the world. (Although the number of homicides declined by almost 6 percent in the year ending last March, the body count was still staggering at 2,680.) One wag I talked to says that the city combines the coastline of Rio de Janeiro, the epicurean spirit of Provence, and the crime rate of inner-city Detroit. Bantry Bay, a once-pristine beach community that rises along the Atlantic Ocean bluffs just southwest of central Cape Town, has become a no-go area at night; jogging there at sunset one weekday a couple of months ago, I nearly stumbled over a fresh corpse lying face up in the street. (I later found out that the man had been drinking, fell, and broke his neck.) Rape and drug crimes are on the rise. Cape Town's main symbol, Table Mountain, has become a danger zone: Attacks on the isolated trails that wind up its steep slopes have grown so frequent that hikers are warned never to walk alone. Locals even refer to the Cape Times as the "Cape Crimes" because of the number of stories about murders, assaults, and rapes on its front page. When apartheid ended and the legal barriers to internal migration came down in 1994, hundreds of thousands of impoverished people flooded into Western Cape province in search of work. The newcomers included not only Xhosa tribespeople who had been sequestered in the nearby "independent homelands" of Transkei and Ciskei, but also illegal immigrants from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Congo, and other neighboring countries. Many of these destitute newcomers poured into squatter camps located on the margins of affluent white neighborhoods. With the new proximity has come rampant criminality. After arriving in Cape Town for Newsweek in August, my family and I rented a house for a month in Hout Bay, where well-off whites live in large, gated villas reminiscent of Marin County, California. Just down the road, thousands of Xhosa are jammed into a cluster of corrugated tin and cardboard shacks called the Mandela squatter camp. Tensions have grown sharply in recent months. Two weeks ago, the Hout Bay Neighborhood Watch group fanned out across our street, warning that break-ins and armed robberies carried out by residents of the Mandela camp had reached epidemic levels. "The Cape Town City Council is not controlling the [squatter] settlement," a pamphlet they distributed declared. That same day, the whites took matters into their own hands: They welded shut an iron gate leading out of the Mandela camp that they claimed had been used by robbers to enter their wealthy neighborhood. Problem was, the gate had also provided easy access to that neighborhood for hundreds of noncriminal domestics and other laborers, who were now forced to slog a circuitous mile through steep hills to get to work. After midnight, 400 angry residents descended on the gate, chased away guards, and ripped it down. "They penned us up like it was apartheid all over again," one squatter told me. "How did they expect we would react?" In the current atmosphere of fear and anxiety, it's often hard to tell what's real and what's exaggeration. A few days after the finger-amputation story broke, a modified version trickled out: The digit wasn't chopped off, merely bitten through to the bone. Then came another adaptation: The thief had scraped the woman's knuckle and perhaps torn a ligament, but hadn't even drawn blood. The horror stories circulating in the suburbs may reflect white paranoia as much as the breakdown of law and order. Even so, we're not taking any chances. Last month we left Hout Bay and took a long-term lease on a house in Tokai, a lovely neighborhood perched in the hills above some of Cape Town's oldest vineyards. Before moving in, we hired a security firm to assess our "security needs." Fernando Louw, our consultant, grimly pointed out the flimsy fences that surrounded our property, the thick woods above the house, and the 300 yards of pasture that separated us from our neighbors. "You're highly vulnerable," he told us. His solution: magnetic contacts on all of our doors and windows, infrared motion detectors, six outdoor laser beams, six stationary "panic buttons" distributed through the house, two panic buttons that we're supposed to wear around our necks, plus sirens and radio alarms that alert our rapid-response team that we're in trouble. Total price tag? Nearly $6,000. We settled for a scaled-down version, at half the price, which Louw said would "probably" keep us safe. But I've noticed that my wife has taken to slipping her wedding ring off her finger and placing it on the night table before bedtime--just in case.

By joshua hammer; Joshua Hammer is the correspondent at large for Newsweek.