Friends with South African-American couple in the states who go back twice a year and now live in Capetown. When they lived in Joberg in the late 1990s they said that a horror movie could be made about what is was like living there. I know there are lots of South African expats who hold racist views and often talk highly of the apartheid era, however this couple was very involved in the transition locally and hold Nelson Mandela in high esteem, and swear that the country is much better off today even with the issues it has. They told me about a year or so after the transition, the police just stopped patrolling or even being on call. The suburb they lived in (rosenvile I think they said)? all of a sudden had gangs of roaming people walking through at all hours of the day and at night fights would frequently break out. This obviously resulted in residents not leaving their houses and in a total collapse in any outdoor social activities in the neighborhoods/parks. People were apparently getting robbed/assaulted and in some cases raped on what seemed like a weekly basis. Come year 2 and 3 almost every night there were constant sirens from security cars and gunshots heard, combined with alarms and dogs barking made sleep increasingly difficult. The neighbors a couple houses down were straight up executed in their home. Driving around the neighborhood at night there were roaming gangs who would harass and sometimes worse, which made going out at night not a feasible/safe option. They said there was home invasion and multiple assaults/robberies weekly and that people started to fortify their houses. Finally the decided to go forward with leaving the country entirely, and left much of what they had net worth wise behind. As an American, the way they described their experience with really frightening and almost seemed like what I would imagine a complete collapse of the government might look like here in say some hypothetical natural disaster or even a movie like the purge... I was just asking here if this was similar to anyone else's experience being alive at this time?   submitted by   /u/Puzzled-Newspaper156 [link]   [comments]