‘Do you really know nothing?’ Dick sped up.
The road crossed ploughed fields. Here and there some buildings flashed past – maybe barns or garages. A few people appeared by the roadside. They were waving their arms, shouting something. One even lay down on the asphalt across the road.
‘Do you see these boys?’ Dick asked, then without waiting for a response, closed all the windows in the car and locked the doors. ‘If I stop, they’ll break the windows, pull us out, rob us and beat us up and then steal the car.’
He swerved sharply, making a risky turn, and drove around the black lad stretched on the asphalt. Luckily for us, no cars were coming the opposite way.
‘After the apartheid system was broken, it all became chaos here,’ Dick hissed through clenched teeth, looking in front of him. ‘Now one third of the population of this country doesn’t have a job. The crime level here is the highest in the world. You’ll be told all about it during your briefing, but for now remember this: never ever leave the business district of the city. Never! And even there try not to go anywhere by yourself. Don’t talk with unknown black people!’
‘How so?’ I allowed myself to smile since Dick himself was black.
‘You can smile in the morgue!’ he snarled. ‘When your liver gets cut out on the street.’
‘What for?’ I blurted out.
‘To eat the liver of a white man means to get his luck.’
‘Are you serious?’ I felt my heart beating much faster than usual.
‘I couldn’t be more serious,’ Dick began to smoke and lowered the window. We were approaching the city. Fences and warehouses stretched along either side of the road. ‘Sorry for talking about the morgue, but newcomers need to get a bit of a cold shower or they don’t believe. Later you will also be shown videos and photos. If you have a weak stomach – I’d advise you not to have a big lunch.’
‘What on earth is going on here?!’ I raised my voice.
Dick threw the cigarette butt out of the window and wound up the window again – it looked like he was doing it all automatically.
‘The South African Republic takes first place in the world by the number of crimes and especially serious crimes per capita,’ he began in the tedious voice of a professional lecturer. ‘And there are fifty murders per day and the same number of attempted murders. Here on the streets, robbery happens like this – first you get hit on the back of your head with an iron pipe or get shot in the temple and only then do they check if you’ve got anything in your wallet or if you’ve got a wallet at all. Here for a woman, born in SAR, the probability of becoming a victim of rape is higher than the probability of learning how to read. We carried out secret research – more than a quarter of the local men admitted they had committed rape, and every second one of those admitted he had raped a few people. Half a million of rapes take place each year here, Joshua.’
‘Does it have something to do with the peculiarities of local food?’ I asked carefully.
‘It has something to do with peculiarities of local heads.’ Dick answered firmly. ‘The majority of locals are Christians of various types, but only on paper. All blacks are really pagans who believe in crazy prejudices and superstitions. I am not saying this for effect – three years ago our attaché for agriculture Mr. Bronk, who was collecting information about local cults, went truly crazy. He put on a white sheet, took a cross and headed for Alexandria. That’s one of the most dangerous districts (in a criminal sense) of the biggest city in the country, Johannesburg. Basically… basically no one has ever seen him since.’
‘Cults, pagans,’ I nodded with a knowledgeable air. ‘Voodoo…’
‘Damn voodoo!’ Dick shouted. ‘Get all that Hollywood stuff out of your head. There’s no voodoo here! Here people believe that if you copulate with a virgin, you’ll get cured from AIDS, and every fifth man here has AIDS. That is why there are so many rapes, especially of children! They rape even eight months old babies, do you understand? The most important thing is that it’s a virgin. And you’re talking about voodoo…’
We carried on for sometime in silence, then he said in a calmer voice:
‘Also people here believe that a woman’s love for another woman is an illness and that she can be cured if she receives the satisfaction of copulating with a man. That is why there is such thing as ‘corrective rape’. Have you ever heard this term?
I shook my head silently. I was beginning to feel sick from South African realities.
‘Usually it’s initiated by the relatives of the poor lesbian – grandfather, father, older brother. They hire a few people, a strong well-equipped man, and after kidnapping the victim, they rape her until she, in their opinion, doesn’t reach an orgasm. Almost always such procedures end up with damage to internal organs and maybe the death of the victim. And don’t think that it’s only relevant to the people from slums! In April, a local celebrity, the captain of the women’s national football team Eudy Simelane, a very popular woman in the country, was killed. She was killed because she was a lesbian, lived with her girlfriend as a family and fought for the rights of sexual minorities. Eudi was caught on the street, beaten up, then raped multiple times, then stabbed in the head, body and legs twenty-five time before her corpse was thrown in a brook in the outskirts of the town. A rape takes place here every twenty-six seconds. After the murder of Eudy Simelane, Dr Sonnet Ehlers has invented a ‘condom against rape’, called a ‘rapecs’. It’s a silicone inset into the vagina covered with barbs, which damage the penis at the moment of the exit…’
‘Enough!’ I begged. ‘Tell me more about why the police, government – all of them – why don’t they sort it out?’
Dick’s surprise was genuine.
‘Why would they?’ he asked. ‘Here the only things that are done are those that bring money. And when did the fight against crime and prejudice ever bring any income? It’s a troublesome and thankless job. Apart from that, the corruption in SAR is as bad as a anywhere in the world. Half of all police forces are completely bought, like in our Chicago in the thirties.’
‘And what kind of future awaits this country?’
‘Why would I care?’ Dick responded with a question again. ‘Probably SAR will become a classic corporate state. There are plenty of natural resources here. The areas of extraction and business centers will be safe zones and the rest of the country will return to its primitive state, but instead of clubs and arrows the local savages will be using pistols and machine guns. Why am I saying ‘will be’? They already use them.’
‘But wasn’t it always like this?’
‘No, the situation was different before apartheid. The black lived in Bantustans and did what their ancestors used to do for hundreds and hundreds of years – they worked the land and raised livestock. There was order in the country. This system was destroyed during Leclerc’s time. And then the chaos began…
I said quietly:
‘I think you approve of the old orders.’
‘Of course!’ Dick smiled. ‘You don’t know many things and we don’t have much time, that’s why I’ll simply say: freedom is like a drug. In small portions it’s a medicine, but in big doses – it’s poison. One should be ready for freedom, otherwise it’ll kill you.’
We stopped by the checkpoint. The policemen checked the documents, noted the car on their computers and we entered the city.
‘Here’s Pretoria,’ Dick said. ‘Do you know what this word means?’
I shrugged my shoulders, although I was happy that he had changed the subject.
‘It’s the Romans’ word for the place in a military camp where you find the tent of a commander, legate, consul or emperor. It later became the name for a concentration of power and the warriors guarding the emperor were called the Praetorian Guard. By the way, Pontius Pilate questioned Christ in the Jerusalem Pretoria. And from there he was taken to execution. But the funniest thing is,’ he chuckled, ‘that originally this city was called Pretoria Philadelphia – in other words ‘The place of the power of the brotherhood of love’. And it was named this after Martinus Wessel Pretorius, the first president of Transvaal. There’s his monument.’