davidw

The leaders of UK and Australia do not condone (and indeed applaud) genocide, mass murder and starvation, as Mbeki continually does, in Zimbabwe, because he dearly wishes to do the same (and will, sooner than one thinks......There is no conceivable explanation or excuse for this...and the chickens will come home to roost......

melaniee

It's already starting...

davidw

I hope so, the sooner South Africa pays for its appalling support of genoicde and starvation in Zimbabwe the better..

Stuart James

What the f**K, melaniee

I too love SA with a passion - i started a thread moving to capetown a bit back and you would think world war 3 had commenced. (needless to say some of the same people moaning about SA on this thread.

I cannot beleive i have found someone who is positive about this place. Come back, visit and spread the gospel. It is not another Zim.

Also i cannot beleive the shit poeple beleive in the media - anyone from the UK should no how reliable papers like the Sun are and how documentaries are revved up for shock value.

Great to hear your coments - Karma on the way

Stuart James

Absolute bullshit - where do you get your facts from some comic strip

Just Jenney

I agree -- crime is everywhere. But it is also relative.

I am originally from the northern Virginia of Washington, DC. For several years during my childhood, DC was repeatedly ranked the murder capital of the United States. Crime rampant, all over the place, and spilling into the suburbs where I lived. However, not once was I, or anyone else I knew, the victim of a violent crime.

Fast forward to 1995. A month after college graduation I moved to Santiago, Chile, and lived there for two years. I was off-put to see that every single property was surrounded by a gate, and every single residence had bars on the windows. Not exactly a good sign. However, the only time I was victimized by a crime -- in Chile or anywhere else -- was when our dog Andie was stolen by a taxi driver in Dec 1996. Even so, this wasn't a "violent" crime -- we eventually found her 11 days later, shaken but otherwise ok, and she's still around today (sleeping in the corner at the moment, as it were).

Before leaving Chile in 1997, my then-husband, Ian, and I considered relocating to South Africa. His sister emigrated there in 1992 and always gushed whenever she spoke of SA. Whenever we talked to her, all we heard about was how wonderful SA was, how beautiful and friendly the people were. But our circumstances changed so we returned to the US instead.

Then in 2000 Ian's sister was getting married and we went to SA for the wedding and a vacation. Everything his sister had said about SA was true -- it was stunning. The people we met were warm and gracious. We got to go on a mini-safari and enjoy seeing wildlife that we'd never dreamt we'd see in person.

But there also was a dark side to South Africa that we were so disappointed about. Not only did homes have gates around them, they had electric fences and barbed wire. Every other house seemed to have a guard dog. Even the gated communities with security guards weren't safe. There was a general sense of unease everywhere you went -- you always had to be on guard, even in the "nice" areas.

Once we went by car to my sis-in-law's business for just a few minutes, in a really ritzy part of Cape Town. I'd brought a magazine with me and left it on the back seat. She saw it as we were leaving the car and said, "You can't leave that there -- we have to put it in the trunk." I said, "Why? It's just a magazine." And she told me that if there's ANYTHING left in the car, someone will break in and steal it, no matter how frivolous. That was an eye-opener.

But an even bigger eye-opener was meeting all of their South African friends and hearing the various ways they had ALL been victims of violent crime. (Including my sis-in-law, by the way -- her apartment was broken into three times and her car stolen once.) We met people who had been held up at gunpoint and robbed for just a few bucks. We met people who had installed anti-carjacking devices, the likes of which I didn't even know were in existence. And we met someone whose father and mother had been tied up and gagged after walking in burglars in their home, then the father was shot in the head before they fled, for no reason.

What was almost as scary as hearing that EVERYONE had a story to tell, was the fact that they all talked about it the same way you'd talk about losing money in the stock market. It was just a fact of life.

Like I said, I've lived and/or visited places that were not known for being the safest around. But nothing like that. It's a real shame, because South Africa IS a beautiful country.

~ Jenney

TouristTrap

That's the sad thing about it. It is a gorgeous country, but not safe to live in at the moment. There isn't a single person over there who has not been touched by crime at some time or another, be it through personal experience/friends/relatives/acquaintances/work colleagues..etc...anyone who denies it is fibbing.

I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, been here close to a decade, and have yet to meet anyone who has ever been touched by crime, apart from one case of identity theft recently.