A gentle old man I knew was murdered in his Cape Town house by a poor man because he had been kind to him.
This is but one of the incidents (although an extreme one) of incidents around poverty I see every day, which make me angry, fearful and guilty. I’m scared of the poor, I sympathise with the poor, I sometimes hate the poor, and I feel guilty about the poor. If I were to buy a house in a new area, I’d want it to be as far away from the poor (meaning black townships and squatter camps) as possible. This makes me ashamed of myself. I get annoyed with the bin pickers who search through my rubbish bins and with the parking attendants who get in my way when I’m trying to park. I ask myself what I should do if I were as poor as they.
If I had no job and no income, and were living in a shack in a dangerous slum, and my daughter was on the edge of starvation, what should I be prepared to do to get money to buy her food? Would I beg? Would I sell baubles at the traffic lights? Would I wave my hands around in a parking lot? Would I steal? Would I kill a rich person to keep my poor daughter from starving?
If I were a domestic servant who had worked happily for ten years for a trusting, kindly householder, and if one night three big men with guns had come to my little house in the township and pointed a gun at my little son, and asked me details of my householder so that they could steal all of her life’s possessions, would I resist them or give in to them? But sometimes the morality of crime and circumstance is more complicated than in these instances.
A close friend had elderly parents, aged 78 and 74, both very frail, living in Cape Town between Constantia and Bergvliet. A vagrant knocked on the door of their house asking for help. They gave him a sandwich and some money. He came back again. They obliged again, and again. He asked for money to go to the Transkei for a funeral. They obliged again. Finally they told him that he must stop coming and look after himself. Soon after, he broke into their house, accosted them, locked the old lady in the bathroom and murdered the old man. If the old man had not been kind, he would not have been killed.
Some desperate people might beg for food and relief, and then pick up their lives after it had been given. Others might decide that begging was an easier option than trying to earn an income. Some people, given relief by a kind person, might think they were entitled to perpetual relief from that kind person, and be dangerously enraged if that person stopped giving – much more enraged than they would be by a racist householder who swore at them and never gave them any relief. What lessons do we learn from this? I don’t know.
Some years ago I bought a scrap 1984 Suzuki jeep to get the spare parts to keep my own Suzuki on the road. I spent hundreds of hours dismantling and cutting it up to get all the parts I needed, especially the transfer box and the steering gearbox. Finally I put these precious parts in black plastic boxes and hid them under trees next to my fence. I now felt confident that I could keep my Suzuki going for the rest of my life.
One morning I noticed that the lids of the boxes were off. I discovered robbers had jumped over my fence and taken the most valuable parts. I suppose they’ll sell them to some scrap metal merchant for a few rand. Were these robbers just bad men, who preferred thieving to earning an honest living? Or were they desperate good men who had tried for years to get a job but could not because of our wretched labour laws, and had robbed me just to get some food to eat?
The poor make me a racist. If I’m walking alone in remote countryside and I see a black man approaching me, I feel frightened and tense up. This is because I associate poverty with violent crime (by no means a good correlation; most poor people are not criminals, and the worst criminals are rich) and, since a black person is more likely to be poor than a white, I’m scared of blacks in lonely places. Sure enough, white people have been assaulted and murdered in country paths close to me by black people. In my own experience, though, every single black I’ve met in these circumstances has been gentle and friendly – and probably frightened of me.
What adds to my anger is that the prime cause of our destitution and lawlessness is our government.
The ANC is entirely to blame for our 46% unemployment, mass poverty, stagnant economy and disintegrating infrastructure. If in 1994 the ANC Government had adopted my liberal policies – a free market, limited government, equal rights for everyone, no racial discrimination of any kind (no BEE, no affirmative action, and no demographic representivity, employers and employees free to make any voluntary contract of employment they both agreed upon, appointments on merit only) – we should now have a prosperous economy, low unemployment, low poverty and low crime.
So when I am robbed or assaulted by black criminals, as has happened to me often (although less often and less badly than to other people I know), I feel a hatred towards the criminals, which quickly turns into guilt and confusion, and then a sort of impotent rage against our useless, hopeless, heartless ANC Government.
[Photo: Kimberly Mutandiro]
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- The headline of this article has been altered at the writer’s request.