We live in a relatively integrated area of South Africa, Hout Bay. It’s a melting pot of rich Europeans, who summer, hippies who make stuff and add a vibrancy to the place, families like mine who enjoy the community feel and the fact that you get a lot of house for your money, and as is the way in South Africa today, there is a coloured and a black township. However as is different to the norm, in Hout Bay there is mixing of the various populations and a healthy amount of support for the less fortunate. It’s almost ‘integrated’.

So having lived in ‘The Republic’ for 2 years we’ve got to know the Congolese guys that guard the cars, the Zimbabweans that wait tables in the restaurants and a whole host of other excellent folk, mainly from the black township, IY.

It’s no secret that life in the townships is tough and sometimes violent. You read about it in the local newspaper and we get the download from our domestic helper and the gardener, who happens to be her boyfriend. It’s tough they tell us, but they’re smiling, because is vibrant too. Do they want to leave? Could we rent a place for them to stay in town? No thanks. IY is their community and it’s where they’re established. It took us awhile to get this, coming from very middle class backgrounds where you throw money at problems to smooth your life. But I digress…

A couple of Friday’s ago my wife was chatting to the young black South African barista at the local coffee shop. He was scared he said. He came to work late because he didn’t want to walk through IY in the pre-dawn darkness. His manager didn’t understand; was angry. They spoke about his plans and his dreams. What did he want to do? and my wife gave him her best advice on how to get there; on how to make the things he wanted for himself to happen. They spent a pleasant half hour together and that night he was stabbed to death by a teenager in his one room shack…just because.

The shoving of the IY reality into the broader community jarred. It caused fear and sorrow in equal measure. ‘We’ knew about the violence but now it had jumped the rails. It touched and removed someone that we’d all known, liked and had the slightest of a relationship with. We had to do something before it spread…

Everyone pulled together. Money was raised. Community meetings were held, and the police badgered into agreeing that there was a problem and hopefully action will be taken. It feels wrong that  to get the reaction and the action that it took a person known outside of IY to be killed…what about all the others that we ‘knew’ about and read about? Did they not matter, or did it still feel like it was happening in another land and we would be OK? Who knows.