A Tale of Two Cities.

weblog
Jozi
22 february 2009

Three mornings ago I was channel surfing in the small hours and I chanced upon the news that the American government has issued a travel advisory, warning its citizens to beware when visiting one of their favourite destinations. They were enjoined against rampant muggings at airports, rampant muggings in tourist venues and most disturbing the spiking of drinks in pubs and rape or other molestation in freelance taxi cabs. I thought they were referring to my hometown of Jozi [aka Johannesburg].

The problem must be bad when a travel advisory is issued.

And then gave a sharp cry of surprise. It must be most embarrassing when you know that the place concerned is London.

The programme was the BBC’s ‘Fast Track’ travel weekly for those who, like me, prefer to travel in virtual reality.

I was stunned.

I was even more stunned when the presenter went on to draw a comparison between my home city of Jozi [aka Johannesburg] explaining how we, the residents, have learned how to avoid being the primary subject of an anti-social citizen’s attentions. This means that there are only a few neighbourhoods where kids can ride their bikes without them being hijacked.[ ironically in those few places kids are at risk from mobile traffic that is unfamiliar with the fact that kids ride their bikes on city streets.]

It also means that it is only poor neighbourhoods where the homes are not heavily walled of from their neighbours and the passing parade, and are topped off with barbed wire and /or electric fencing. Many neighbourhoods are cordoned off into private suburbs accessible only to residents and approved visitors [naturally criminals do rent homes therein to gain the necessary access: but that would be a digression.]

I remembered living in London in the late 60’s. I stayed with a travel companion on a boat belonging to his brother who was away in Canada for a few months. The houseboat was moored off a place called Cheyne Walk near the famous Battersea Bridge. We would routinely walk up a few blocks to the Kings Road search out a pub that sold drinkable beer, and toddle off to the famous Carnaby Street, always so disappointing in its shabby media-hyped pretentiousness.

Sometimes when walking home late at night or early in the morning from some or other night of fun we would be routinely harassed by policemen in little motorcars who would pull up, and shout inarticulate questions at us in the native dialects of London, and which we could not understand. When asked if they could please speak English they would ask, suspiciously where we were from and we would tell them that we were tourists from Africa and we were going home to bed in our place on Cheyne Walk.

They would immediately become polite, and on the odd occasion would offer us a ride home, which occasionally we would accept. Coming as we did from a mean and savage police state where the police were invariably the enemy we found them and London itself polite, congenial and even convivial. It was a shock to know that it is so bad a criminal environment that advisories must be issued by friends..

From what I gathered now from the travel advisory chat to which I listened after recovering from my surprise, one surmises that perhaps we [SA] have been exporting our surplus criminals to London on the fake passports recently declared null without a visa by the British/ Pomeranian government.

This is of course feasible and understandably the Poms are unhappy. What the presenter left unsaid was that our crime rate is diminishing on a downward curve while that of the Poms is on a fast escalating curve. A friend who works in a large London hospital told me two Christmases ago that he felt at times that he was back in one of Jozi’s public hospitals back in the bad post- revolution days, he was having to deal with so many bullet wounds.

Since then we have had horror reports of knifings and stabbings and kids killed by the disturbing phenomenon of binge drinking female street gangs all happening in London, and in many other Pomeranian cities and urban wastelands in the United Kingdom generally. You know when a trend is well established, when such a scene of folk violence is represented on a programme such as ‘Skins’: the new entertainment series from BBC Entertainment. Truly the old axiom that when you outlaw guns only the outlaws will have them seems to apply to Pomerania today… another of Mr Blair’s legacy issues.– hopefully they [the outlaws] are only killing each other.

A city in which the common citizen has been disarmed is now awash with guns, crime, daggers and rapists… not on our scale of course but the trend is up. When I told my medical friend, who once lived in my neighbourhood and is now a migrant worker in a London hospital, that I only occasionally hear gunfire these days from my veranda … in fact less than once or twice a month… where once in the receding past it was continuous all day, he remarked that if I were nostalgic, I should visit the neighbourhood in London where he shares “digs” with other migrant workers from the Philippines, South Asia and West Africa. There the gunfire is routine, he said.

Now we know that what he shared that day two years ago is at last formally true…the spin days are over; The Americans have apparently issued a travel advisory warning their less sophisticated travellers that London is officially a bad place to visit for innocents abroad programmed to believe in the sanctity of life under a British star.

Much safer, I would suggest, to be visiting Jozi, a place in which you are programmed to be careful and we’ve learned to fuss over the safety of travellers.

Cheers

Blogroid