I Just Broke Down Crying For South Africa

(Most of) my family is finally safe. This week marks the end of a two and half year nightmare trying to come home to Israel, most of which was spent trapped in South Africa during the pandemic. I’ve got so much to write about, so many crazy stories to tell, and I thought I’d start punching out the story of how it took everything we had (and then some) to overcome the Canadian and Israeli and South African bureaucracies… but I just broke down and sobbed uncontrollably while watching the protests after Uyinene’s murder that I was reviewing for a link to explain the trigger for us needing to, as my wife loves to say, “get the hell out of Dodge”.

Origins

I’m a South African born and raised in Cape Town. I was a teenager in the 90’s, during the transition from apartheid, and my optimistic and patriotic family chose to stay when the ANC took over. In principle, the transition was peaceful, but in practice South Africa quickly became a hotbed for lawlessness and violent crime.

In Cape Town the violence was mostly gang-related, although robberies and muggings were fairly common. In Johannesburg hijackings and armed robberies and shootings and stabbings quickly became regular occurrences that the population either fled or got used to.

In 1996, sixteen year old me began to frequent nightclubs and the shadier side of the Mother City, which led to me essentially failing the eleventh grade on account of me being distinctly uninterested in school. These being pre-cellphone times, my mother used to worry about me not being able to call her at all hours and I used to tell her that if anything did happen to me, it would be too late for her to do anything anyway. My aunt and her family who owned a nightclub had been “harassed” by Yuri “The Russian” Ulianitski, one of my rollerblading buddies turned out to be an assassin for the Hard Livings Gang*, and I would often find myself nervously and politely avoiding situations with Hussein the Moroccan and his boys.

* I had no other association with them, but it always amused me that my friend introduced me to Rashied Staggie by asking him to lend me R10 for a pack of cigarettes (or something) and I never saw him again.

In 1997, I was provisionally allowed to enter grade 12 in a school in Johannesburg, where I would be living with my much-older brother, playing catch-up and effectively completing two years in one. For a year I lived in a city where everyone had to…