Running gun battles on Cape Flats have become the norm
“I AM at Hanover Park Day Hospital, gunshots, please pray for me… huh what’s up? I am putting my cell away just in case.”
This to us living in central Athlone is abnormal. We have the Red Cross Hospital and Rondebosch Medical centre opposite it and then in Rylands Estate, Gatesville Melomed. What is going on, you may wonder.
A couple I know well, innocently visited the dental department at Hanover Park Clinic.
To their surprise the resident security guards welcomed them with open arms and were very vocal about it. “Come in quickly, bend down, keep low and run inside, they are shooting.” Huh, what’s up? “Just do as we say.”
Is this a movie being shot or is someone being shot?
Meanwhile the patients waiting to be attended to are as relaxed as the hospital staff efficiently going about their business without batting an eyelid. Surely this is all just a live show?
The local folk are used to these early morning wake-up calls because running gun battles in this crime-infested area on the sandy Cape Flats have become the norm. It is abnormal to have a gunshot-free weekend. That is only in a dream world.
As in most state medical facilities, patients are allocated a number in an attempt to be fair to all, a kind of first in, first out system. But then the doors are flung open and in comes an emergency case, the guy that was just shot. He is followed by a trail of blood and a sobbing, distraught mother.
The possible death of a youngster with a lucrative gang life ahead of him in the townships was never part of the script. After all, only the good die young.
Okay, he jumped the pecking order to be attended to, but first they had to get his folder from wherever. Was this his first emergency and could this be his last? Who knows and does anyone really care, other than his mother?
The folks sitting on the benches know the victim as he is well-liked, respected and admired. It is so and so and that is his mother who lives at the flats in that court near to Antie dinges and them.
Talk then become somewhat personal as each one relates to how and when they were either shot themselves or witnessed a shooting. “Yes it is amazing how bullets travel through one’s body,” a young lady relates what it felt like, proudly lifting her knitted top to display her “trophy”. It was just over a year ago that she was shot.
Everyone gets a turn and when it happens you must just bite the bullet. This is the normal response. Just another day in the Park, sorry to say.
But there is life outside the clinic as well. A construction company has to halt work to avoid the bullets.
.Yes, when guns are in an untrained hand one never knows where the bullets will land up. It could be in a heap of concrete or in your head. Many times its target is an innocent person.
Just another day in Hanover Park. A baby is born at the clinic while a victim is buried in the church opposite and then another shot is heard.
Could this be more work for the clinic’s medical team or is this one for the undertakers?
Meanwhile, Hanover Street in District Six is silent. No more singing and dancing and hopscotch games or a roll of the dice by the naughty boys, while the haves are jolling lekka to the tune of Mannenberg in the plastic Hanover Street at Grand West.
Do they care? Hanover Park is described by some as “apartheid’s dumping ground”. The flats have since then been home to much of the population of greater Cape Town. Kenneth M Alexander Athlone