CAPE TOWN – When most Americans think of Cape Town, South Africa, they probably think of it as a mecca for tourists – the beaches, Table Mountain, and the winelands.
But there’s a side to the city that is becoming more of a frightening reality – murder, much of it gang-related.
“Going to a shop is life-threatening, traveling in a taxi is life-threatening,” Elsies River Community Policing Forum Chair Imraahn Mukaddam told Fox News. “We are living in a war zone. A lot of violence here is orchestrated by a third force – the street gangs, who want to make the Western Cape almost ungovernable.”
The violence is not in Cape Town’s tourist areas. But in the neighborhoods of crowded apartment blocks and low-income housing near the Cape Town International Airport, known as the Cape Flats.
There have been some 1,600 murders in this area since the beginning of the year, 900 of them believed to be gang-related. These include 55 unnatural deaths just this past weekend, including 6 young women shot dead, allegedly execution-style, in one house last Friday night in Philippi East. 5 young men shot dead nearby the next day.
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Violence is not new to SA. Well over a decade ago a friend of mine used to make yearly visits to a good friend of his who lived (in a gated community) in the largest city in SA, Johannesburg. My friend related to me more than once the ‘house rules’. He was told that when he went to bed to lock the bedroom door. If the intruder alarm goes off during the night DO NOT COME OUT! His friend said that he would be coming out of his bedroom armed with the pistol he kept under his pillow and anybody found inside the darkened house would be shot on the spot. No hands up warning. Not a single word. Just bang bang bang… the end. Helluva way to have to live.