JONATHAN JANSEN: How a school library brought hope to a place of great sadness
Extract
On March 10 2017, 13-year-old Rene Roman was sent to the shop to buy chips. Her life was about to end. Renee would be discovered in a wendy house with her body covered in a carpet. Not too long afterwards a 52-year-old man was arrested. He would claim that he put a plastic bag over her head, pulled down her underwear and then used an axe to bash her head three times in order to rape the young girl. Andrew Plaatjies received two life terms.
Lavender Hill is part of the Cape Flats whose appealing name belies a more dangerous reality. Lavender has a delightful scent, a stunning foliage and all kinds of helpful medicinal properties. But this was the hurtful irony of charming names as Grassy Park (there’s hardly any grass) or Pelican Park (try and find just one of these long-beaked water birds). Many of the early residents of Lavender Hill were in fact those families uprooted by the Group Areas Act and dumped in this township of cheap flats where roving gangs were quickly established and crime flourished. I grew up across the main road to the coast separating Retreat from Lavender Hill. Everyone knew that Retreat was a relatively better option for raising children than among the flats people across the road. Over the course of my life I lost friends in Lavender Hill, to the point that one genuinely becomes emotionally immune to the almost daily stories of injury and death. Even so, there was an unusual horror revealed in t...
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