More ugliness in a beautiful country

A lot of things about my guest house make me uncomfortable: They wash my towels every day. They put little stickers on my toilet paper before I come home. They offer to have the black maids bring things to my room, as if my arms and legs are broken. They constantly ask me if I'm "doing ok," while old women hunch over next to me scrubbing the floors.

There is a new Afrikaans girl working here. She is majoring in tourism, so she is doing a sort of intership. She grew up on a small farm outside Pretoria. She has never traveled outside the country.

I asked her where I should visit in my last two weeks here. "I heard Durban is nice," I said.

"Ya, well, I don't know. Are you a racist?" she asked me, in the same manner in which someone might ask, "are you a vegetarian?"

"Because a lot of black people go there, and they can't swim. They get really excited when they see the waves, too. It's really irritating."

The guy whom I'm renting a car from also runs a car recovery service, meaning that he goes to recover stolen cars. I dropped my car with him before leaving for Cape Town, and as he drove me back to my office, he started telling me about the business.

"You can think I'm a racist after I tell you this. You can take your business away from me. I don't care. But I have recovered thousands upon thousands of cars in the past 10 years. Not one of them has been from a white person."

"Don't tell me it's because they're poor. They do it because they want to get rich. I see these guys every day. None of them are on their last meal."

I didn't ask (because I was too busy listening) but as he was talking I wondered whether he thinks it's something genetic in black men that makes them steal cars. Like an extra chromosome or something. Because from his perspective, I can see how he could conclude that all black people are greedy criminals. That is what he knows. Twenty-five percent of his VW Citi Golfs get stolen. He has been shot at numerous times. One of his friends was recently killed.

Last week and yesterday there were shootings in my neighborhood. One was a carjacking down the street from me. A young woman was killed. Her car locks and house gates may have brought down her insurance costs, but they did not save her life. Someone wanted to kill her, and he did it. Simple as that.

What I wonder is why he wanted to kill her in the first place.