And I was mugged. I felt like a proper idiot afterwards. Humiliated, in fact. But then looking back on it, I’m not sure there is much I could have done differently. It went something like this.
Being this long in Africa and not having any trouble I had begun to get complacent. More importantly, being in Soweto and encountering only nice people who couldn’t wish me any harm at all had meant I lowered my guard. I stopped suspecting people, and didn’t think that anyone would want to harm me or steal from me. Seems I was wrong.
I was on my way home from work (I’ve been volunteering at a community project for families affected by HIV/AIDS for the last two weeks) in a taxi (they call local minibuses taxis here for some reason) when it pulled over to pick someone up. I was sitting in the front, next to the driver, eating my bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk Whole Nut that I had bought as a treat – having surrendered my no snack policy for the time being. I was so absorbed in my world of milk chocolate delight that I failed to notice the group of five black twenty-somethings dashing towards the taxi.
I thought nothing of it, I regularly have people come up to me and wanting to shake my hand. These guys seemingly wanted some of my chocolate bar. And were so determined to get it that they opened the door of the taxi and literally started grabbing it. I went on the defensive, guarding the last few chunks of this former bastion of English (now American, unfortunately) confectionary against everything they could throw at it.
However, it seems that the Dairy Milk was not their main goal. Whilst four of them went for the chocolate bar, mugger #5 darted his hand into my pocket and grabbed my wallet. He then dashed of at the speed of light with a big smirk on his face (a smile I will remember for a long time) whilst the four others crowded the door so I could make no move to follow him.
Not that I would have, of course. Firstly, I was wearing flip flops, which are impossible to run in. Secondly despite how angry I was, I could not hope to overpower five guys with my bare hands, against whatever they had on them – knives at the minimum. Thirdly I was paralysed by shock. I couldn’t have done anything even if I had wanted to. Very much like when some drunk guy punches you out of the blue – it takes a few seconds to comprehend what exactly has gone on.
So I sat there whilst he ran away with my wallet. The other guys stayed until he was an uncatchable distance away before they too made their exit, and I was left sitting there like a lemon. ‘Not ideal,’ I said aloud, finally. The other people in the taxi, it must be said, were expecting a more invigorated response.
The taxi driver told me that if I went to the police they would shoot the guys for me. I didn’t really want that, nor the hassle that it would entail. One of my favourite sayings in the world is, ‘You can’t polish a turd,’ and that is what I applied to this situation.
So what did I lose? Not much, really – apart from my dignity. My wallet contained about R300, which is around ₤25, and one debit card, which was cancelled within an hour. So financially, it was no great loss.
Sentimentally, slightly more so. I had in my wallet a collection of notes I had obtained from all of the countries in there – there was everything from Namibian dollars to Mozambican meticais, which I had been saving to keep at home for a souvenir. One consolation is that the thieves would have glanced in my wallet and seen this huge wad of notes there and thought that they had hit the jackpot. And then they would have delved slightly further to find that 5,000 Zambian Quacha is worth less than $1, and 3000 Tanzanian shillings is worth little more. And no bank would exchange them, anyway.
Losing the wallet itself was a bit sad though. Admittedly it only cost me ₤1 (or 80 Rupees, in the currency in which I bought it), but I have had that fake ‘Genuine Leather Lacoste’ wallet which I spent an hour haggling for on the streets of New Delhi for four years now, and had become quite attached to it. I carried it around with me in Africa because I pretended it had no value – financial, anyway – so I would not mind it going missing. But in truth, I am more sad about its loss than I would be a $500 Louis Vuitton.
Still, what is done is done. I have been mugged, so I can tick that box. I still haven’t been violently assaulted or got any kind of disease so I’m not doing so bad for nearly three months travel through the world’s poorest continent. The really ironic thing about the whole situation is that at eight o’clock the next morning I was giving a presentation at the regional police station, shortly after which I was speaking to the Chief of Police, who asked me how safe I was finding Soweto.
‘Oh it’s fine, I feel perfectly safe here,’ I lied. The last thing I wanted was to start a witch hunt in the black capital of South Africa because a white guy had been stupid enough to have been mugged for ₤25.
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