During December I returned to my land of birth, South Africa for a month long holiday. Oh the joys of being unemployed! I had a wonderful time with my family and friends and spent some time in Johannesburg, the city I grew up in, and some time at my parent's holiday house which is on a dam about an hour's drive from Johannesburg.
Johannesburg is the biggest city in South Africa and is economically the most important city in all of sub-Saharan Africa. It is also the largest man-made forest and has in my opinion the best climate on earth. The days are warm and the air is perpetually dry. This is because it is one of the few cities in the world at such a high altitude. The altitude together with the almost perpetual daytime sunlight combine to create a sparkly, somewhat dusty atmosphere.
Despite the climate and the many other advantages that Johannesburg offers over other cities, the reason my husband and I decided to emigrate is because of the crime. A drive around Joburg would not betray the fact that the city has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Most of the city is composed of sprawling, tree-lined suburbs which I once heard have more swimming pools per kilometre than anywhere else on earth. The people are incredibly friendly and warm no matter what their demographic and it appears to be a wonderful place. However, if you stay a while and chat to people you may notice the electric fences and high gates surrounding almost every house except for in the shanty towns crammed with people to poor to live in real brick and mortar structures - of which there are millions. The crime stories are quite horrific and are told by everyone from the richest to the poorest of Jozi's inhabitants.
My parents-in-law's cleaner who lives in a township on the city outskirts has a son who was stabbed while walking home one night. The criminals demanded his cellphone and when they found out he didn't have one they stabbed him and stole his shoes. Richer people in the affluent suburbs all have a hundred crime stories to tell. So many that as a former resident it almost bores me to think about it. I was held up at gun point in my own home when I was 17 but because I was the lucky owner of a panic button our private security company arrived promptly and saved me from the thugs. Just the other day one of my parent's friends had a gun fired at his temple at point blank range but the gun didn't go off and so he lived to add his tale to the thousands of others.
There is an Oscar winning film about crime in South Africa called Tsotsi and I would recommend it to anyone interested in getting a glimpse into life in my former homeland. Tsotsi is a word that means a black, urban criminal - almost always a young man - and the word is believed to come from Sesotho which is an African language and one of South Africa's many official languages.
And so I find myself back in London after the holidays with a feeling of homesickness, yet glad to be able to live somewhere where I don't worry about being killed everytime I leave the house or inside my own house, which they say is the most dangerous place to be in Johannesburg. On that uplifting note, I plan on spending today exploring Belsize Park in the North of London as part of my quest to find the best place in London for us to settle in.
