Forlorn, Dilapidated and Dangerous

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Gang violence in the townships of Cape Town is now so serious that the South African army has been sent in to try to curb it. But the causes of violence are complex. Will the state really be able to stamp its authority? Lindsay Johns reports.

Lizzie Porter finds sunflowers in bloom on the outskirts of Sinjar, the town in northern Iraq, where, five years ago so-called Islamic State kidnapped thousands of Yazidis. But the town itself is still largely empty, the streets deserted, the buildings smashed and most of the original population absent, too scared to return home.

There's a growing number of people from Africa and Asia in Central America, whose hope one day is to make it to the United States. Katy Long dusts down her rusty French to speak to a man from Congo in the middle of a rainstorm in Costa Rica.

While the Taliban talks peace with the US in Qatar, there's scepticism and concern on the streets of Kabul. Secunder Kermani talks to a group of young cricketers near the Ghazi Stadium, the place where the Taliban once carried out public executions.

And, while cricket fans in England had plenty of means at their disposal to watch Ben Stokes' demolition of the Australian bowling attack in last Sunday's Ashes victory, Jonah Fisher, in Kiev, was finding it less easy to follow proceedings. Being a cricket-loving foreign correspondent, he says, hasn't always been easy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.7	Hello, today, five years since Islamic State took the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq.
0:12.1	And today, after the demise of ISIS most of the
0:15.1	thousands of Yazidis kidnapped and ill-treated are still too frightened to
0:19.5	return home. In Costa Rica we meet an African man far from home. In Costa Rica, we meet an African man far from home. He hails from Kinshasa, and he's
0:27.3	short of money, but not of ambition. We encounter tension in Kabul with the thought of the Taliban returning to power in
0:35.0	Afghanistan and how our man in Kyiv keeps in touch with home. Cricket of course.
0:41.0	When Cyril Ramaposa took over a Cricket, of course.
0:48.0	When Cyril Ramaposa took over as President of South Africa 18 months ago, it was hoped that the ANC would finally tackle the crushing poverty of the townships, in particular in those on the outskirts of Cape Town, the Cape Flats.
0:58.0	Many of the residents are coloured's an apartheid era term that's still applied to brown-skinned black South Africans
1:05.6	whose ancestry can be traced variously to the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Cape,
1:11.2	to Dutch settlers, Malay laborers, West African slaves and
1:15.2	Caribbean sailors. These townships are currently in the grip of a vicious
1:20.0	epidemic of gang murders with 47 deaths alone in one weekend last month.
1:25.9	Lindsay Johns who has family on the Cape Flats was there recently.
1:30.6	Yes you heard correctly, 47 murders in one weekend.
1:37.0	In fact, more than 900 people have been killed in gang-related violence since the start of the year. The motor rate has reached such heights that now,
1:45.9	under a directive from President Ramaposa, the army has been deployed to ten townships
1:51.1	in an attempt to quell the carnage.
1:54.2	Of course, this isn't happening in the beautiful Cape Town you know and love,
1:58.0	perennial favorite of Sunday travel supplements,
2:00.6	that of sundowners in Camps Bay, hikes up Table Mountain, or the ferry across to Robin Island.
	...

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