Smash and Grab

In early August, my friend Erin Branigan (I know her from Greater Birmingham Returned Peace Corps Volunteers; she's now in Seattle) stopped in Jo'burg en route from Maputo, Mozambique back to the U.S. I picked her up at the airport, we had a nice dinner, and as we were driving back to the airport, we witnessed a smash and grab right next to us.

One bad thing about the new car I'm driving is that the doors do not automatically lock, and I hadn't yet developed the habit of locking them the moment I get into the car. We were at a traffic light, waiting for the green, and we were talking -- about crime, ironically enough! -- when I saw (in the rearview mirror) a black guy running up behind us. I quickly reached over to lock the doors. Erin, who had by this time seen the guy, said, "Quick thinking." He approached the car next to us, which held a single woman. Then I saw his hands up, and I said, "Oh, he's just begging."

But suddenly her passenger window was smashed, the guy was running away, and the young woman in the vehicle was screaming. Erin said, "Go, go!" I did, and fortunately the light had just turned green. I didn't think about the other driver until we were through the light. As she passed us I said, "Damn, I should have gotten her license plate number so I could contact the police and offer to be a witness." Then she pulled into a Quik Shop, so I just followed her in.

She was quite shaken, as you might expect, sobbing and unable to speak for a few minutes. The guy had thrown a big rock to smash her window and stole her handbag, which was (foolishly) on the passenger seat. (When I first moved here, several folks advised me to leave nothing on the front seat; everything should go in the boot.) Her cell phone was in the bag, so I let her use my cell phone to call her brother, and then we called the police. There were 3 young black guys there, too (I think they were students at Wits University, which is just a few blocks away), and they said the same guy had approached their car, seen it was 3 guys, and left them alone. As we were standing there, a white guy pulled up in a small pick-up, and his rear window was smashed too. It turns out that the rock bounced off the girl's car and hit this guy's window. The white guy was so pissed off that he had actually turned around and tried to find the perpetrator!

That thief was having a busy night.

We needed to get Erin to the airport and so had to leave, but the store was well-lit and safe, and the guys all seemed nice, so we felt fine leaving her there. Poor thing. She's an Indian girl from KwaZulu-Natal, and has no family in Gauteng.

The next day, we had a petrol crisis here. There was petrol, but the truck drivers were on strike, and so stations dried up. Everyone joked (just barely) about SA turning into another Zimbabwe.

One of Lisa Glenn's fellow Rotary Scholars is studying political science at University of Cape Town. He read a book by a guy who analyzes countries that have seen a revolutionary change in government. He studies political, social, economic and other factors, and then tries to estimate how long before another revolution or chaos will occur. For SA, he speculates that it will occur 17 years after the free elections in 1994. If his estimate is correct, we have three to four more years to go.

I’m considering applying for a job at Gettysburg College, and when I told my sister about the above events, she wrote, “I bet the crime rate in Gettysburg is pretty low.”

Indeed.