Tuesday, October 23, 2007

"Lucky" Dube

South African Reggae star Lucky Dube turned out to be not so lucky when he was fatally shot in a suspected car-jacking in Johannesburg last week. In the past year, historian David Rattray, singer Taliep Peterrsen and opera singer Deon van der Walt have been killed in what have been called "similar attacks". Gratefully, I was unaware of this before/during my recent visit to South Africa but there were 19,000 murders there last year. I was aware that it was not safe to walk the streets - and certainly not to go into Cape Town's city centre after lunchtime on Saturday. When I jokingly asking a colleague where he kept his gun (following our use of an "air lock", one at a time, to enter the bank) he told me that he had handed it in a couple of years ago when new laws had been introduced. It would have made it too difficult to keep it, he told me. But it seems that no everyone reacted the same way. According to the Emergency Response doctor I sat next to on the plane on the way back to Australia, there are over 2,000 gun shot wounds in emergency departments in Johannesburg each year - and if you are preparing for a medical tour of duty in Iraq, you'll be sent either to Johannesburg or Washington DC because of the gun-trauma injuries you'll witness there. Washington DC? Yes, apparently there is a quite active gang scene there.

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