Come 2008, Liela Groenewald, who was tough enough to square up to Winnie Mandela and the anonymous death threats that followed, left her lovely flat in Yeoville.
Continued from Democracy is sacrosanct (4)
Most of the artists, mucisians and lefties did so too. So what went wrong with Utopia?
Anthony Altbeker again:
"I still loved Yeoville, but by the late 1990s it was obvious that it had not fulfilled the utopian promise its residents had once seen in it. Now there were whole buildings that had gone bad Windowless, lightless and peeling, these were home to a growing underclass of really poor people, among them prostitutes and pimps and drug dealers and thieves. One night, a man was beaten to within an inch of his life in my driveway by a gang of brick-wielding robbers.
We residents consoled ourselves with jokes that celebrated the decay - how could you tell whether the bang you heard was a car backfiring or a gunshot? It's a car if you hear no return fire - but eventually I moved.
After about a decade in the neighborhood, the tipping point came when a man stopped on the road beneath my window late one night and emptied a full clip of ammunition into the air, but I might equally have said in my general direction. Apparently he enjoyed the experience because he quickly reloaded and did it again. Sixteen shots seemed more like a potential massacre than a legitimate way to celebrate a long weekend, and I decided that it was time to get out."
Crime is the reason areas like Yeoville and Hillbrow is lost to the likes of Altbeker, Simpson and Riekert. And Liela, Thulani, Akashni and the ANC MP's. And for that that matter me.
But does it really matter if neighborhoods that sheltered bohemian libetarian culture become dystopian hellholes? Sphere: Related Content
No comments:
Post a Comment