SOUTH AFRICA has had less of a violent vibe since it adopted democracy in 1994. The country’s murder rate—the best indicator of violent crime—has more than halved, from 69 deaths per 100,000 people in 1994/95 to 30 per 100,000 people 17 years later. That decline meant that the country went from being the world’s third most murderous to the 13th. Yet the national murder rate has been increasingly lately, and is now up 20% on it’s 2011/12 low, making it the world’s seventh most murderous.

The increase in violence is particularly striking in arguably South Africa’s most beautiful city, Cape Town. Anine Kriegler, a criminologist at the University of Cape Town, calculates that the city’s murder rate has risen 60% from 43 to 69 per 100,000 population in the eight years to 2017/18. Worryingly, last year’s rise was the biggest since comparable data became available in 2005/06. Today its rate is more than twice that of Johannesburg and higher than in any large city outside of the Americas.

That may surprise those who associate Cape Town with beaches and Table Mountain. But a short drive from some of the priciest property in Africa are the Cape Flats, a patchwork of townships. Many were dumping grounds when the apartheid regime removed “Coloureds” (people of mixed race) from the inner city in the 1960s. Unemployment and poverty are endemic. Most children grow up fatherless. In one precinct, Philippi East, 93% of households were victims of crime in 2016.

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