Poor wives in Gun City

Richard West

Johannesburg When pictures appeared in the papers last year of 'Gun City' and such establishments in Johannesburg where ladies and other civilians were taught to fire pistols, it was not hard to predict an increase in wanton deaths by shooting. And so it has proved. At five minutes past midnight on I January 1977, a Randfontein couple entered the bedroom of their eight-year-old daughter to find her dead from a bullet that had been fired through the metal roof. The police thought at first that the shot must have come from an aircraft, so they questioned some men who had been celebrating the New Year by parachuting over a nearby dam. Later they raided a housing estate, impounded a number of weapons and made an arrest. 'I think quite a few people fired guns on New Year's Day because of the ban on the sale of fire crackers,' said Colonel Coetzee, the local police chief.

During the next few weeks: the wife of a Dominee, or Dutch Reformed Church minister, shot herself after the Sunday service having apparently been upset by psychiatric treatment; a twenty-year-old mother and her two children were shot dead in their flat in Johannesburg; in Cape Town a Warrant Officer swept a burst of fire through exhibits at the Maritime Museum before blowing off most of his own head. 'This is pretty un-Catholic,' said his suicide note, 'but a military way to go. The alternative would be to shoot the well-meaning but totally ignorant officers of the Directorate of Boere museums.' These were just a few of the fatal shootings last month.

There are estimated to be some 1.3 million guns in the possession of white civilian South Africans and those non-whites, largely the Indians, who are eligible for a licence. The figure has greatly increased since the black riots started last June, but ownership of a weapon is an old tradition here, as it is in the United States, Canada and above all in France where the right of all citizens to hold arms—a right once reserved to the nobility—was one of the main demands of the Estates-General when they met in 1789.

The novelty in South Africa is that guns are now being bought by people with no experience of their use and abuse. Householders leave their guns where children can find and play with them. In the Greek café in Johannesburg where I sometimes go in the morning, the manager keeps a gun on the cash-desk by the door on to the street—and often leaves it there while he potters off to the kitchen. Idiot fans of the cop movie have bought the magnum, whose kick and automatic action make it unusable for an amateur. Even people who practise at 'Gun City' or similar ranges are unlikely to hit a target at more than two or three paces. When an African went berserk last year in central Johannesburg and chopped down some passers-by with an axe, no less than four civilians fired at him and missed before he was killed by a policeman, The policeman is not only a trained shot but carries his gun on the belt, to be drawn at an instant. The civilian who carries his gun under the shoulder has no time to extract it, with the result that when he is mugged he loses his gun with his wallet. Above all, the use of guns by civilians against a crowd of Africans would be illegal, likely to rouse rather than quell violence, and therefore on both grounds objectionable to the authorities.

The sort of white people who buy guns are not, anyway, arming themselves for a racial war. It is rather that, since Soweto, they fear the blacks they see in the streets and once regarded as docile. 'I park my car down in those streets towards the station,' a friend told me, 'in that part with the Black and Coloured shops. It's cheaper there than near where I work. But I must say that recently I've been pretty nervous going there and I'm very glad to get out each time.' Many whites have been mugged by nonwhites even in broad daylight. In spite of the pass laws, there are many blacks in the white districts at night, staying with friends like servants or watchmen who have a permit to be there.

That is not to suggest that criminal violence is the exclusiv,e preserve of the black. Far from it. The sub-bohemian district of Hillbrow, a Notting Hill-cum-Soho just north of the railway tracks, has more than its fair share of psychopaths. An Irish girl living in Hillbrow told me: 'I never walk there at night. I always take a taxi home and if a friend gives me a lift, I also ask him to see me up to my door, as there've been lots of women raped in the lift by men who jump in at the last moment. The landlady's daughter was stabbed outside the building a few days ago, and a neighbouring couple were stabbed to death in their bed The wife had been raped.'

Is the apartheid system to blame for all this? Such was the suggestion made in a speech early this year by Andrew Young, the new American Ambassador to the United Nations, who stated: 'I think the fears of the white community in South Africa really are leading them to destroy themselves.' He went on to say that 'the mass possession of firearms and the growing number of incidents between whites involving guns stemmed from the paranoia and anxiety of being in a minority situation.'

Or could they not stem from something else ? From the United States, for example? This idea returned to me when I was listening to the account of an experience of a foreign journalist `He was overtaken verY dangerously by a South African driver and gave him the two-finger sign. The South African swerved in front of him, forcing him to stop, then got out of the car holding a bloody great gun. He said "Say your prayers because you're going to die." But he didn't shoot. He pistol-whipped him.' • The odious verb `to pistol-whip' and the practice from which it derives were born in the slums of New York and Chicago. Indeed all those forms of violence which are now so evident in Johannesburg have for a long time been evident, and to a greater degree, in the United States. I can remember reading some ten years ago that the number of murders by gunshot in Dallas in one year exceeded by far the number of murders bY all means in the United Kingdom. And yet the Whites in America enjoy what Mr young would call a 'majority situation.' Although in a majority, American whites are nervous of the blacks. It may be that their fears are groundless, or rooted in racial prejudice but white New Yorkers, for instance, certainly claim to fear black muggers and rapists, whether in lonely streets, Central Park, the subway or inside their apartment blocks. The riots at Sovveto may have been lent extra bitterness by the cruelty and injustice of the apartheid laws but in the eyes of the whites they were not much different from riots in Watts and other black slums in the United States about ten years ago. At the time of those riots there were photographs in the papers of white American women practising on the pistol range. One picture that appeared in a Saigon newspaper and much amused the Vietnamese showed a white family grouP from Chicago—Papa, Mama and the kids, all armed to the teeth. The 'white backlash,' as it was called at the time, was inspired by fear—whether reasonable or groundless does not matter. The fear of the whites for the blacks was greatly inflamed by the pronouncements ot 'Black power militants,' Panthers,' colm X' and the rest. Even in Englan°' where blacks are only a small minority, there are signs that some whites have a similar fear based on incidents such as the Notting Hill carnival riots and, still more, on the high proportion of black

youths

involved in mugging attacks. This is not.to suggest that racial. conflict in South Africa corresponds to that in America or England, rather that whites in all three countries share similar fears. Indeed, the violence and the racial tension in New York, London and Johannesburg are largely attributable to something th-t all three cities have in common and which In turn has little to do with politics. This is.the process called urban decay, depersonalisation, the death of the city, a process first diagnosed in the United States but now to be

found in Tokyo, Sydney, Sao Paolo, Moscow and Cairo. What the process involves Is all too familiar: the demolition of homes in the old city centre and their replacement by office blocks; the removal of the bour eoisie to verdant suburbs and of the work

ing class to desolate new towns or tower blocks; the running-down of schools and social services in the poor districts; the replacement of public transport by motor cars.

In countries like Great Britain,this i

wrecking of the cities was done at the nstigation of property speculators, the car lobby and venal or simply foolish politicians. in South Africa there has been added damage done in the interest of 'separate development.' More than 100,000 blacks were removed from inner Johannesburg suburbs such as Sophiatown; the Indians have been Pushed out of Durban; perhaps most cruel °, f all the Cape Coloureds have had to leave District Six, one of the few picturesque and cheerful parts of Cape Town, to make a new life in a dismal, distant township. We My such people for the indignity they suffer under apartheid. We should also pity them, and millions of British people, for having been dumped into inhuman new towns. The new problems of urban stress, as sociologists used to call it, bear especially hard on Johannesburg. Less than a century old, it grew with a gold rush and had as its fOunding fathers a raffish collection of diggers, gamblers and crooks. To the Boers, the modern Afrikaners, it is a symbol of English rapacity. The Jews, who number almost 100,000, remain rather aloof from both groups. Enmity between poor whites and rich whites caused the strike of 1922 in Which more than 200 were killed. The _Portuguese, Greeks, Lebanese, Chinese and Indians keep very much to themselves, and 2°thing unites the various black nations `xcePt perhaps dislike of the white man. One is constantly made aware of aggression; a driver shooting the lights and Plunging into a group of pedestrians; the Watch dogs that leap the fence and charge at Dassers-bY. At dinner one night at a restaurant in the Hillbrow district. I sat next ° a table occupied by a woman in her thirties and two girls aged about twelve and t,!ri. The mother, who had been amiably Lipsy, suddenly took offence at something said by her elder daughter, and leaning ,. 'cross the table, cracked the child hard across the cheek, saying 'You're bad, just like Your father.' Although the surrounding diners and the manageress of the restaurant had turned to watch what was happening, across was said till a black waitress came `ii)eeross the room and told the woman not to have like that. 'But I'm their mother,' she ailed, to which the waitress replied this was no excuse. Of course such scenes happen everywhere; but not quite so often. As in Kenya, the altitude of some 6,000 feet Is blamed for almost everything from alliterY to tax evasion. 'It affects me terribly. said a journalist friend on his sixth whisky. '1 keep getting headaches and giddy fits.' A Johannesburg businessman, who makes some of his livelihood from the sale of tranquillisers, told me with satisfaction: 'Here, they gobble them up like sweets. It's partly as hangover cure and partly because of the rat-race, of having to get on well with the boss. That's why the divorce rate is so high—seven marriages out of ten. That's why so many people have dicky tickers at thirty. After all, we weren't born with bad hearts. You seldom see people laugh here. Look at those three— talking shop. People don't laugh and they don't listen to music any more. Did you ever hear any music here?' I had heard only some gloomy fezdo songs at a gloomy Portuguese restaurant; that and 'Eviva Espana' sung by cheerful drunks.

The whites here may be neurotic but I doubt whether, as Mr Young thinks, they are bent on self-destruction out of terror of the blacks. Such fears have been felt before, and overcome, as Mr Young might learn from Louis Cohen's Reminiscences of Johannesburg and London (1924) concerning the year 1895:

The Black Peril curse also wore an ugly aspect, and day after day one heard of the growing audacity of the natives. A lady, Mrs Norman, in Pretoria, taking her courage in both hands, had pluckily, in self-defence, shot a villainous nigger dead, but that meritorious act did not check the evil. Sir Drummond Dunbar formed a ladies' revolver club, so as to teach the young idea how to shoot, but at the first muster of members the obliging Sir Drummond got his little finger accidentally shot off.

'Oh!' whispered a female of fashion to a Boer official's wife, retailing the incident and trying to put on side, 'have you heard the news? Sir Drummond has had his digit shot `Alamachtig!' sighed the Boeress, to whom the strange word signified something more serious than a finger, 'I do feel so sorry for his poor wife.'

The great Louis Cohen, who was once sent to prison for having exposed a shady financier, died a happy man at the age of ninety.