Some things don’t change, especially in Sea Point’s flatland where a front-page newspaper report last week claimed that “residents continued to live in fear”.
In the late 1970s, nearly 50 years ago, a report on sociological problems in the seaboard suburb said elderly flat-dwellers were “afraid to walk down to the beachfront at night because of layabouts and drunken street revellers”.
This time it’s street kids who are the problem. “These children have become increasingly aggressive and, in some cases, violent,” claimed the local City Improvement District chairman.
I’ve come across one or two myself. They make it clear they prefer notes to coins, and who can blame them, what with the effects of inflation on our currency.
You have to be smart to survive on the streets, and these kids are as smart as any.
When social workers succeed in removing them, they are back within days, or even hours.
They know that’s where the money is.
There are millions more of them in the streets of urban India. What I admired, if also disliked, about them was their persistence.
They followed you for miles and miles, offering to take you to some “emporium” or other, and failing that, to introduce you to their “sister”, who apparently was going cheap.
My second (and still present) wife who accompanied me on my last trip to India was so traumatized by them that she was the one who became aggressive and told them to depart in language unfit to print in a family newspaper.
Instead they transferred all their attention to me, which made Delia even madder.
But back to Sea Point and its street woes.
All those years ago it wasn’t children but idle adults who made residents fearful. Each block of flats had its own set of “servants’ quarters”, usually somewhere in the basement.
Domestic workers and cleaners had nowhere to go outside of working hours except walk the streets. There were no recreational facilities, the beaches, restaurants and parks closed to them.
The Cape Town city council was more sympathetic to their plight than the government, but dragged its feet about doing anything.
Eventually, as a senior reporter, I wrote a leader on behalf of the editor headed DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT.
The council’s executive chairman, Isaac Ospovat, was outraged. A prickly and combative little man, he leapt to his feet at the next day’s full council meeting and spluttered: “The editor of the Cape Times says we must do some-thing dammit. Well, I say dammit to him.”
I was in the council’s press gallery and faithfully recorded his profound response.
A couple who were doing something at the time were Sam and Fanny Gross, who started the first Haven Night Shelter in Green Point for the homeless. Last week Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis officiated at the opening of another 120 beds in Retreat adding to the hundreds more all over the city.
Maybe something similar should be done for street kids, dammit.
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