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central-locking mechanisms only release the driver’s door, thus preventing hijackers from leaping into the back seat the moment they hear the alarm being deactivated.
    And it’s not just the vehicles that are targeted. Many a motorist has felt the cold steel of a gun barrel against their temple along with the demand for a mobile phone, sunglasses or sex.
    Some areas, such as highway on- and off-ramps near townships, are worse than others. Another no-go zone is the central business district. I used to spend a week of every winter school holidays working at my father’s company, which was located in the city centre over three sawdust-scented floors of a warehouse on Commissioner Street. The CBD was a thriving centre of commercial activity where crowds of workers bustled between glittering flagship department stores, lunch counters and office buildings. There was a single lock on the premises’ door, the frontage was washed each day and the pavement was swept every few hours. Casual good-morning nods had in some cases developed into acquaintanceships and my father knew a number of the merchants whose premises bordered his. It was a community of sorts.
    I was advised that going back here on my own would be akin to playing a dyslexic version of Russian roulette in which every chamber bar one contained a bullet. So I secured the services of a guide named Oupa (grandfather) who picked me up in his shiny red Nissan Pulsar. A slight man in his early fifties, with tufts of grey around his temples and eyes which twinkled behind bifocals, Oupa was an avuncular mix of encyclopaedia and softly spoken entertainer. Along with giving out nuggets of information, he took mischievous delight in exposing my naivety and ignorance.
    He and I set out towards a CBD that had long been deserted by companies like my father’s in favour of safer suburbs that were once either exclusively residential or semirural. Even the stock exchange had shifted north and now sits alongside plush hotels and multinational head offices in an enclave where the faces may no longer be white-only but the collars certainly are.
    Approaching the CBD from the north, a series of leafy parks slide down rocky ridges and rim the edges of small streams that are probably best viewed and certainly best smelt from a distance. Known as the Braamfontein Spruit Trail, it meanders fifteen kilometres through a handful of the six hundred green spaces which are under the city’s administration by day and witness destitution, degradation and death when darkness falls.
    In a city where life is cheap, its value has been slashed even further in Hillbrow. When I was a child, this was the entertainment epicentre of the city. On Saturday afternoons my friends and I would catch a (whites-only) bus or even thumb a ride to one of the cinemas in the area. This was followed by waffles that swam in syrup between ice-cream icebergs at one of the nearby eateries with names like the Milky Way and Bimbos Burgers. At night, my older brother and sister would descend on the whites-only area with their mates to jol – the local equivalent of raging – at a relatively new form of entertainment called discotheques. The suburb’s main thoroughfare, Twist Street, was lined with buzzing restaurants, atmospheric oak-panelled pubs and old-fashioned establishments which referred to themselves at “Nitespots” and signalled their presence through a neon martini glass that flashed with the promise of alcohol-fuelled romance.
    Hillbrow had always hosted its fair share of bloody-knuckled bar brawls but this was tempered by its raffish charms and bohemian sprinkling of galleries and theatres. Neither remain. The suburb has become a clutter of concrete apartment blocks that were hideous to begin with but now have the added aesthetic detriments of decay and filth. Poles festooned with laundry protrude from windowless frames, leaking pipes bleed rust for twenty storeys, and hotel lobby