From Scherrit Knoesen
I was disappointed to find such a muddle-minded snipe at South Africans in Feedback (14 September). The assertion that apartheid’s spirit may live on as a minority viewpoint is hardly news – some of the people who made those laws and voted those white-only governments into power are still alive. Only some of them have changed their views.
But the fact that Johannesburg is a high-crime city and that people of any colour living in formerly white-only neighbourhoods have bars on their windows and electric fences does not prove a link to latter-day apartheid. Nor does the fact that security companies offer a response to alarms, whether these guards are armed or not. To call these “private armies” is just wilful overstatement.
Fearing for one’s safety may be a foreign concept to a person brought up in Britain, but in Johannesburg, ordinary people take what seem to be reasonable precautions to safeguard their possessions and their safety. What has not changed, in fact, is the extremely high crime rate.
Halstead, Kent
