42. GOOD MEN DO NOTHING

Local ladies selling their wears at the Haga Haga beach

About a month (or less) ago, I told you about the brake in at Nicole and Fabian’s place, after that Zanele spoke to a Sangoma and Nicole and Fabian consulted a clairvoyant and now the clairvoyant says the Sangoma knows more than she is saying or something like that, the fact is we have no idea who or whom the guilty parties are. We have no proof. I am also very confused here because I understood that Zanile is an Sangoma?

This is no joke, this weekend a rather pricey Apple Max disappeared out of the office in the main house.  The main house has always been seen as a safe place to leave stuff, obviously not anymore. It is also the laptop with all our good movies!  I will not be able to replace my laptop if it disappears right now! So you end up being paranoid about your stuff.  

What to do, what to do? One does feel very powerless. The really very bad part about the whole thing is that it is creates suspicion amongst people. I can really be anybody and then there is the pedestrian traffic that crosses the farm and Meduna’s family all over the place, this “openness” makes it far too easy for anybody to watch everybody’s every move.

It has now become a case of evil prevailing because good men do nothing. The sangoma and the clairvoyant agreed on the following - it is a group of people and they are “working” for an older man with a white Bakkie (small truck).  Not much to go on and we are still waiting for the police to come back to us regarding the fingerprints they took at Fabian and Nicole’s house.

We are basically forced to take measures and control the traffic on and over the farm; we are even talking alarm systems and security cameras.

Why do people steel? Are they bad people or desperate people?

We live is a beautiful but desperately poor (apart from a few stinking rich farmers) area. Unemployment is very high, just across the Kei River (20 km away) is the area in the country with the highest murder rate, mostly young men in gangs taking each other out. It sounds savage, but it is a product of a sick and twisted society where you have masses of people with no feature and nothing to lose.

Everything in our world resolves around money and lack of it creates need.  Would we have thieves if we had no monetary system?  We can install all the alarms we want and hire all the security we can afford, but the real problem here is the fact that our every need (even basic needs) are not satisfied unless you can afford to through money at it. There is something very wrong here, capitalism obviously only works for the few and ironically enough, those few feel quite save, because they can afford the best in security, so you end up having the poor steeling from the poor in an attempt to survive and this create a further divide amongst normal people.

I can philosophy until I am blue in the face, right here right now we have a problem that will not just go away all by itself, we cannot play Ostrich any longer (stick our heads in that sand and pretend it is not happening). We will probably start by turning the office into some sort of “save house” where people can leave their stuff, like computers, phones and cameras. I do not consider myself as rich, well not rich in the sense of having lots of money anyway. I do however realize that the little I have might look like a lot to somebody who have even less.

I do also realize that some people just carry a lot of hate and anger and they want to damage and hurt, but I also believe that there are far too many people on this planet with nothing left to lose and they have to survive another day.

One of the thousands of villages scattered around the Eastern Cape.

There is an irony in the whole thing, we have high unemployment and therefore high crime, yet the whole crime “industry” is a very big job creator, in the form of security companies, the alarm systems business, electric fencing erectors etc. 

As long as our survival depends on having money, we will have crime. Think about this, we are the only species that actually have to pay to have a shelter/roof over our head/house, this should be a damn basic right and it probably is, but for a lot of people that human right means nothing because they live on the street or in a shack so my little car and my laptop looks like great wealth to them.

I am not justifying crime, I am simply trying to get to the route course of the problem and the route course of the problem is our current Capitalistic system, where almost everything, from where you sleep tonight to what you eat, if you eat, depends on how much money you have. I think we will always have people with different needs and drives and some will want more than others, which is fine, but if we have minister and the super wealthy splashing millions on parties and on the other end we have people starving, there is a BIG problem and we will have even bigger problems in the future.