Unseen by Reggie Yates

Author:Reggie Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2017-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

While talking on camera to a small group of teenagers, I had no idea I was about to be given a first-hand experience in the effects of substance abuse.

A car roared its way towards us and a small group of children playing in the road. Wild and clearly out of it, the drunk driver was pulled from his car by the quickly forming mob. Local men and women surrounded his car pulling and dragging the man in different directions. The keys from his car were confiscated and what was about to happen to the inebriated driver looked like it was going to be anything but positive.

An angry man screamed, ‘He’s gonna kill our children,’ as things became suddenly more menacing. I feared the mob might take matters into their own hands, exerting what was commonly known as Community Justice.

In an environment where an underfunded police force struggles to get to corners of the sprawling townships across the country, over the years the communities themselves have increasingly become police, judge and jury. Lukanio explained that had the man hit a child or injured someone, the mob might decide to punish him there and then using the most extreme version of force imaginable.

That level of extreme punishment would be the case for his attacker, causing Lukanio to keep his stabbing quiet and manage it without any help from the police or community. One such punishment used in community violence was known as necklacing. The guilty party would be trapped in a stack of tyres, have petrol poured over them and then set alight.

In the twelve months leading up to my arrival in Khayelitsha, there were nine incidents of necklacing. Thankfully community justice doesn’t always lead to death. Back at the hospital, the night shift had seen four men turn up accompanied by the police. Stripped naked and beaten, their punishment was humiliation, hammering home the fact that the township was home to so many, but also a world operating within its own brutal rules.

On the night shift, I joined paramedics Ata and Ricardo. The minute a call came in, we dashed for the ambulance and I was made to sit up front with Ata. I did a terrible job of hiding my excitement, as a flashback to a fire station school trip caused immediate regression. The day I wore that fireman’s hat and got lifted into the driver’s seat of the shiny red truck was happening all over again, only this time it was probably for the best I didn’t press all the buttons or pull at every switch.

En route to a call, the sirens wailed as Ata ripped through the streets. Ricardo sat on the patient bed flipping through a battered book of maps trying to figure out where we were going. There was a new sat nav that hadn’t yet been completely installed, leaving Ricardo and Ata no option but to go old school.

Scooping patients from every corner of Khayelitsha, each shift saw the two men inundated with young victims of knife crime.

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