Two gunmen entered our home tonight. They locked my husband and helper in separate rooms and made off with my husband’s car and his bag containing house keys, store keys and wallet. No one was harmed, and for that no amount of forehead-bruising prostration will ever fully convey my gratitude.

I was delayed at the office; having to work on a last-minute layout, cursing the job and dreading the traffic, not knowing that this irritation may well have been a blessing from the Almighty.
While driving, it was an alarming call from my sister-in-law, “They’re holding Naeem up at home. Don’t go home. Come here,” that brought on a silence within and and cold unlike anything I’d ever felt. Stuck behind a taxi stopping for passengers, I was helpless, my face wet, tasting the salt of my desperation. My voice, a frail drone, a fraught and feeble supplication, “Ya Allah, just let him be ok, Ya Allah just him be ok.”

I reached my sister-in-law’s house and after her reassurance, we drove on to my home. Naeem was outside with police and neighbours, getting things moving; giving statements, canceling credit cards, changing locks, taking inventory of what was in the car, picking up the pieces of himself.

The room in which Naeem was in had to have its door smashed at the lock to get him out. The splintered wood and ugly gashes are a stark reminder that our safety has been breached. We have been violated.

We’re all victims. Even just knowing someone who’s had a crime committed against them, is a stain on you.

I feel a fatigue. I’m tired of feeling helpless, I’m tired of feeling outraged. I’m just fucking tired. This insane crime issue, and now recently the xenophobia madness, this take-what-we-want mentality, this valueless moral breakdown, this quagmire of defecation we’re all floating in.

People are being massacred for seeking refuge in our country. Seeking safety, trying to escape the demons and despots in their lands. Refugees and economic immigrants, all here to chase something better. What foolish, pathetic delusions when this beautiful country is being fucked up by inept leadership, blasé attitudes, lawlessness and mob mentality borne out of ignorance, fear and desperation.

I hope for better things for this South Africa, but I don’t feel anything for her tonight.

—My husband’s car was spotted in the Meadowdale area, south of Johannesburg. A picture of it can be accessed here.
Chances are virtually nil I know, but perhaps just putting the information out there is some sort of positive step.

A nine-year old girl was killed after a hit-and-run incident on Jan Smuts Avenue in Johannesburg this morning.
The child, on her way to school, was waiting for a taxi when the accident occurred.
The only passenger in the minibus said she felt the taxi hit something just before the driver stopped. “He demanded I leave the taxi right then and gave me my R7.50 back. I didn’t understand what was happening. It was only when I got off the taxi and he reversed and then drove off, that I saw,” she said.
The passenger could not recall the license plate number of the taxi. The driver remains unidentified.
–

That’s what the news story would read like, perhaps including other details like the eye-witnesses who were on the street at the time and the name of the passenger if she did not want to remain anonymous. There would even be a quote from the victims distraught father, her schoolteacher, the police, an outraged city official even. Her school would’ve been identified by the embroidery on her uniform. Her name would be on the schoolbooks in her bag.

I don’t know if anyone has written the story about what happened to that nine-year-old schoolgirl this morning. My colleague was the passenger in the taxi. That’s how I know.

And this is all I know.
And now you know.
Please remember her and her family in your prayers.

–update (April 25)– The story was covered by The Times

Commune-living fast deflates the bubble of stoicism.
There lived amongst us one who seemed to consume anything that intersected with her marauding path. Some of it hearsay, most of it confirmed testimony; no consumable was safe.
I too had not escaped unscathed. But for many of the incidents, I did not feel the confrontation worth the effort.
Until I opened the grocery cupboard to find a measly trickle of concentrate pooling at the bottom of the Oros bottle, just enough to give a glass of water a pathetic jaundiced hue.
Still reeling from that discovery, I opened the fridge to find that all the margarine had been used, with nothing but feeble streaks clinging to the sides of the container.
This act of utter inconsideration and disgusting show of bad manners prompted me to action.