Journey to the End of the World
Over the next week or so, I'll be putting up a collection of these shots, taken at Rooikrantz and other areas of Cape Point over the weekend. It's an extraordinarily beautiful place, but it's one I won't be visiting for some time to come.
My car, and much that was of great value to me, was swiped opposite Kalk Bay Reef this afternoon. The insurance value won't amount to a row of beans and certainly won't provide down payment on a new vehicle so, like most South Africans, I find myself footloose and fancy free — in a manner antithetical to that which the term implies.
It was to be the end to a perfect day. I'd picked Sean and Margie up from the airport and they took us out to lunch to celebrate their return from Thailand and Margie's birthday. Thailand's a hole, from what they tell me, and they're immensely pleased to be home.
One thing, though. The Thais regard anger as barbaric and have great respect for others' property. So, unfortunately, their return from the Third to the Second World was met by typically South African behaviour.
Their gifts, bought for the girls, did not even make it from the airport to our home. They, with the car, probably ended up in some chop shop in Mitchell's Plain, from where they'll be moved to the house of a low rent-gangster.
The guys who stole the car not fifty meters from where we were seated, probably scored around R2,000 for it which, no doubt, went to feeding insatiable tik (meta-amphetamine) habits.
Palaeolithic tire tracks?
Such is the way of the world and South Africa.
Wendy and Cathryn were angry and Sarah was upset. Surprisingly, I wasn't very much of anything until we got home. And then I realised I felt immensely depressed and, yeah, greatly saddened.
The indifferent callousness with which we regard others and their necessary possessions (the car's seventeen years old, for God's sake) grows fat feeding on our continued denial of a poverty born of obscene wealth.
Like a rising tide, the gangsterism of the Cape Flats is swamping Cape Town and only those with property on the Atlantic seaboard have sufficient guns and money to buy a blinkered security.
Down on the Flats, people are more than desperate — they're at war to survive.
Me? While I've not been directly affected by crime — in a physical sense, I've been indirectly stripped by it.
And the funny thing is, I continue to see this descent into anarchy as the rich robbing the poor rather than the poor robbing the rich. Like it or not, deny it, decry it or don't, the rich continue to be white and right while the poor seem always to be coloured and left behind.
There is a solution to crime, but it will take a generation and changed attitudes and practices to see it effected. We have the generation, but we do not — sadly, seem to have the rest.
Country living...
The snaps I've been able to catalogue over the past eight months have, frequently, felt like my documenting of the end of something. I'm not sure what; but that's the way it's felt to me. The end of a city's innocence, the end of the democratic dream, the end of 'sharing'?
I guess the latter says it best. The forced redistribution of wealth, where those 'without' are as much victims as those who 'have' in abundance, is not sharing. Theft is brutal, violent, and barbaric. And it reflects an abysmally ugly side to our society.
The ruthless, cunning, and mercilessly vicious way in which those who 'have' cling to obscene wealth reflects this horror as clearly.
It was my father's car and it had great sentimental value. I do hope his spirit drives the bastards who pinched it into a tree, but I hope so in a detached way — having no knowledge who these assholes are. Were they to return it, I'd probably thank them and carry on as normal.
For now and the foreseeable future though, I'll be relying on our remarkable taxi and train services (sic). And learning to appreciate nature's beauty and raw power through pictures already taken.
It's a fucking rip, but c'est la vie for now, I guess...
Kurtz lives.
