By
Douglas Schorr
In 1988 I worked Jo’burg 5-day a week hard.
Weekends I’d escape into the northern Bushveldt.
Real early one Monday I discovered Burglary
Without Violence. While I was away enjoying others were working on taking a
share of my salary.
Neighbour Jack explained no sooner had I pulled
out Friday in my Ford, so a bungle of blacks in an open back Mazda pulled in. They’d
just started selecting the best from the lounge when police sirens scattered
them. My goods were hauled off to Sandton Police Station, CID warehouse.
My knocks were drowned by the rebel West Indians
and our Clive Rice doing battle. I wandered in and stood surprised, glancing
from the cricket to the CID Commander sprawled over a lounge armchair noshing
perfect droopy, dripping slap-chips.
“My TV!”
“Evidence of your robbery. Works well. Take it
so I can sign off the case.”
“You’ve nabbed the thieving black beggars?”
“Beggars?” He
cocked an eyebrow. “Black!” He laughed.
He sketched out a complex and flourishing industry.
Whites planned, organised and controlled teams of superbly trained, disciplined
and loyally paid blacks supervised by blacks. Work started with the boring task
of ‘job seekers’ scanning suburb blocks and then zoning in on selected targets.
Knowing all was critical.
“They knew I’d be in Barberton!”
“Likely waiting on Rivonia Boulevard for you to
leave. They operate with solid information gleaned from watching, from staff and
street chit-chat collected over days, weeks, even patient months. Because they
know their target areas they act lightning fast when opportunities arise, but
never spontaneously. They avoid violence and public ire. And they’re quick - clean,
in and out. By luck your pal Jack saved you.”
Maid Rosy was surprised that I didn’t know that
Master and Madam were moving to Durban. Annoyed my friend hadn’t confided but
nonetheless assured I watched polite black guys in matching overalls haul the stuff
out and with great care load it into a shiny brown removals truck. Rosy bustled
with importance; chivvied and ticked items off her list. Beside her Growl and
Major lay content. They’d drive through the night, Rosie said, so they wouldn’t
be too upset.
She (Team leader it was later adduced) was lying.
Bob and Margret and the animals banged
on my door at nine that night, everything
gone.
My sales work took me into dozens of companies
each week, I heard all the stories but the classic cleanout happened on an
estate north east of Jo’burg. He’d been away for the weekend. They’d come in.
When he arrived home, they’d just left leaving a study of silence and
space in Italian marble. Yes, even the exotic hard-wood door and frame.
The night we were away my friend’s dotty father
invited the Sea Point pro we all loved to greet and tease to spend the night.
She got him drunk, called the team and left, back to her beat, her alibi.
No junk was taken. CID explained the team are appraisers,
experts. Furs, gowns, leather boots, three quarters of a million Rands worth of
diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires, gold chains, bracelets and antique
brooches.
“Everything has left the country. By air.
Yesterday,” said the copper in charge of that caper.
No one was hurt, no one was even at home.
That was 25 years ago.
Last year I stayed in the Jo’burg suburb of
Blairgowerie. The Axe Gang was about too. Their MO is quite different. They
rely on you being home.
When it’s still light enough to see past alarms
and electric fences they sneak in, relax at the bottom of the garden until REM
sleep time when they burst in. It is best you’re quick with pin codes, safe
codes, computer codes … it’s not the 80s anymore. There aren’t many market
savvy controllers preserving future pickings: take and destroy for tomorrow
will care for itself.
In Newlands, Cape Town, my grandson’s neighbours
were curled around the fire on a chilly winter’s eve when the front door was
busted in with a battering ram. The place was ransacked.
As horrific farm murders attest the pillage
process is marked by an insane requirement to do extreme violence. The message
of the Golden Goose Aesop found important enough to record isn’t understood. With
the ever widening gap between the gainfully employed and poor in South Africa,
mixed with our quite particular and peculiar history fueled by our inability to
move on and our governments’ inability to tackle poverty, robbery is
inevitable.
But can’t we take a leaf from those 80s Jo’burg master-minds
and have it without violence?
BWV - Burglary Without Violence
Imagine a system of legalised
burglary, country-wide, that ensured that no one got hurt in a robbery
situation ever again.
The unemployed graduates and drop outs and the unofficially
unemployed Africans [black, white or black-white] make up the personnel needed to
run BWV. They’d form themselves into AIR (Atrocious Inequity Reorganisation)
teams.
AIR teams would be licensed to, on notice, enter
and rob only the houses they can professionally deal with according to the team
skill range. The better qualified the team to appreciate what they are hauling
away the more valuable the licence. “Doing” a working class suburban home is very
different to sorting goods hauled from a middle class pad and so very different
to the appraisal expertise needed for a standard palace in Houghton or Bishop’s
Court, or an Anglo-American farm.
The AIR team leader would knock on the door,
declare to (home owner) Christo Weise (has he moved?) or Ayanda Ncube that their
place has been selected for a two hour smash and grab (without the smash) in two
hours, or for a total (2-day clean out) in three
weeks.
There’d be the usual private enterprise acknowledgements
to sign, agreement to post curb-side a sign declaring the home is “burglary
pending” booked, information sheets for procedure for home owners and
instructions to gang PR and contact business cards to hand over. Business
basics done the gang registers the project with the police and both,
independently, call Oursurance.
Policy coverage checked, the Homer (that’s you) and
AIR team leader are now in a position to agree on temporary accommodation for
your loved ones for your bi-yearly ‘inconvenience’. Pet care would be carefully
considered, kids’ examination schedules factored in, peculiarities of pool and systems
shown … so much to do to get it right, civilised. Extras (leaving granny) charged
according to the national suburb class ranking.
Off you’d go to the Spur deli, or two days at an
AirB&B (take leave, make it a super weekend), all part of the final, ‘Save
lives, abolish trauma, with Oursurance’ insurance.
The AIR team would do their job expertly,
handing over an audited removed-assets-schedule and a validated, ready to
WhatsApp, insurance claim. For once in the history of the country the items
stolen shall be the items stolen, in the condition stolen.
It isn’t all one-way. Required is feedback – did
AIR do its job professionally with care and consideration the standard or you
might criticise them for paying more attention to her/his previously your cell
phone than the job.
Of course you’d be allowed to keep items of true
personal and sentimental value. In Khayelitsha it may be the real tin bucket
gran left, in Rivonia an uncut (found in the bush near Bloemfontein) diamond. List
your heirlooms under Sentimental on the form, estimate a value, there’ll be a
surcharge.
Of the general items you’d like to buy back, register
your intention on the insurance claim. All
appropriated articles will be resold at an accessible open market. The more
general the goods the more local the market. Specials would go to a centralised
South African Sotheby – “Trust Jooste of Sandton”?
The horror usually felt would be confined to the
road trip to the auction.
You and AIR would shake hands over the deal,
knowing that your family’s safety only cost you a 100% raise in insurance premiums.
The team would be getting what all qualified and capable folk crave,
recognition and the chance to go home and say, “I earned my wage today”. South Africa would be getting what she
desperately needs; a
meaningful and fair distribution of wealth between the haves and the have nots.
And more!
A sustainable economic sector that
constantly produces Rand making opportunities unsullied by lack of rain,
political interference, corruption.
For muggings and hijackings, how about:
“Good morning, Sir! You’ve been randomly selected
for a mugging this fine autumn morning.”
“A-ha!” you reply glancing at Samson’s licence
tag and his assistant, thumb raised ready over her iPad. “I’m done this month.
My pink slip.”
Pink’s for June, and it is signed. Samson doffs
his balaclava, bids you goodbye with a smile and turns, eyeing the next
passerby. The assistant flicks from the dual purpose insurance – police report
form to the statistics record and ticks column 2, item (i).
The Pipe Dream
“But” grumbled a friend as I related the joys of
BWV, “the more I earn, the more tax I pay. The government should sort all of
that out!”
Too true. But the government is, err, busy. Tax
isn’t always used effectively. Poverty is not receding. As long as the
middle class and up prosper resentment will fester and violence erupts. Fortunately
not everything in the country has soured … there is a new economic power in
place.
As the white Middle Class fades the black Middle
Class grows. To a healthy 6 million (said the ANC Congress’ 2018 January 8th
statement)[i]
and that gives BWV a 5-star business sustainability tag.
It is about deciding how much your family is worth.
For the privilege of living in an awesome country, how much are you prepared to
pay?
Burglary Without Violence sounds as crazy as
legalising drugs. Portugal did that and they’re smiling[ii].
Crazy is what we need and I need you to “Like” and share my page.
I hope you’ve been stirred, ready to bonk the banks
… that’s next.
[ii] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/portugal-decriminalised-drugs-14-years-ago-and-now-hardly-anyone-dies-from-overdosing
