Graskop not quite the Wild West

To Graskop, the pretty town on the edge of the escarpment where, if you believe everything you read, the residents have been shaken and stirred in recent nights by armed gangs robbing bottle stores and supermarkets and blowing up ATMs.

Never mind that a local resident tells the FM that the incident has, like a few ATMs, been overblown, and that the townspeople are for the most part amused that the gang got scant cash for their considerable troubles and stole only smokes and the town’s entire supply of single-malt whisky that few there could afford anyway.

It’s not the first time gangs have come to this Mpumalanga town. Back in January, armed thugs blew up a safe at a filling station before doing the same at a nearby tourist attraction.

Last week frustrated residents marched to the local cop shop, whereupon the allegedly incompetent sheriff left town along with his deputies, I mean constables. The residents padlocked the gate, there being little difference to local policing whether the cops are at work or not.

Any similarities with the American West after the end of the Civil War are purely fortuitous.

The myth of the lawless Wild West was largely manufactured in Hollywood. The reality was numbingly prosaic: bad guys, usually saddled with rotten gambling luck, a booze problem and anger management issues, occasionally terrorising the inhabitants of cowpoke towns. 

Sometimes, gunshots rang out in dusty streets. And sometimes the local lawmen were up to their necks in local skulduggery.

Cue ink-stained reporter (also editor, printing press operator, apothecary, portrait photographer, saddlemaker and keeper of the general store) churning out a hyperbolic account of the night’s terrors.

That said, when people start locking cops out of their workplace, vigilantism is just one stray bullet away.