Everyday terror in South Africa drives film success

Rain hammers down on a Johannesburg night as a woman pulls up outside a suburban house, steps from her car, the engine running, and rings the bell. A man runs across the street, jumps into the vehicle and begins to reverse. The woman turns around and screams - her baby is in the back seat. She lunges for the driver's door. The thief points his revolver and fires. A bullet enters the mother's belly and she collapses on to the ground. Her car and baby vanish into the night. This is a scene from Tsotsi - a South African film that last Sunday won the Oscar for best foreign film - and a rendering of the quintessential South African crime, the carjack.

The film's success has brought international attention to a form of armed robbery that evokes particular dread. Thousands of motorists are ambushed at gunpoint each year in South Africa. The lucky ones are left by the roadside, shaken and without their cars. The unlucky ones are abducted, raped and murdered. Last week staff from the British High Commission attended the National Hijack Prevention Academy, a private course run by former police officers, which advises diplomats and other clients on how to respond if ambushed. ‘Business is fantastic, sad to say, because it means there is a need for this sort of course,’ according to one of the instructors.

Tsotsi is the story of a young thug from the Johannesburg township of Soweto who finds redemption after kidnapping his carjack victim's baby. It is the latest in a new wave of South African films that explore crime and other contemporary issues rather than apartheid, said Guy Willoughby, a cultural commentator and writer. ‘Car hijacking is an especially rich subject. It is the meeting point between the affluent and poor worlds, the exact moment when you are vulnerable and the third world strikes.’

Carjackings peaked at more than 16,000 cases in 1998, prompting one entrepreneur to market a car with a flame-thrower. The annual rate has subsided, with 12,434 reported last year, and commentators say it shows South Africa is maturing and adapting to post-apartheid realities. The middle class was badly shaken by a surge in violent crime that accompanied democracy and the end of apartheid in 1994. ‘In the late 1990s, there was so much hysteria, almost a national panic. Hijacking was seen as an existential threat to the middle class,’ said Antony Altbeker, a carjacking specialist. ‘But now people have come to terms with it more.’

South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, was once the crime capital of the country but it has experienced a dramatic drop of 35% in the past two years. But for a few days last week hysteria returned when a gunman shot a pregnant woman twice in the stomach while she was sitting in a car, killing her unborn child. It was then alleged that the incident was faked as a carjacking to cover up what was a murder. The woman's husband was charged with murder for organizing the attack. There is evidence that many carjackings are fronts for other crimes such as murder or insurance fraud. In the latter, owners sell their cars to criminals and then claim they were robbed. When BMW introduced a lie-detector test with its own insurance scheme, the number of claims fell, said Mr Altbeker.

Yet no one disputes that Tsotsi shows a real problem. Last Saturday three armed men ambushed the film's director of photography, Lance Gewer, outside his Johannesburg home and made off with his car. The vehicle and Mr Gewer's plane ticket to LA for last Sunday's Academy Awards were recovered hours later. It is thought that 40% of the vehicles stolen are bound for ‘chop shops’, clandestine sites where parts are dismantled and sold, said Mr Altbeker. Another 30% are re-registered, often with the help of corrupt police or transport ministry officials, and sold in South Africa. The rest, particularly luxury 4x4s, are exported and often end up in eastern Europe.

Carjackings tend to peak on Fridays, when motorists are more relaxed. Some carjackers work alone, others are foot soldiers used by a network of syndicates headed by senior gangsters. A syndicate broken up last year had 22 members, including three junior police officers, who specialized in targeting women drivers for their jewellery. About a fifth of carjacking cases involve physical harm, including rape.

The film's writer and director, Gavin Hood, said that being the first South African film to win an Oscar ‘tells me and all of us at home that we can do it’. ‘What we want, like everybody else, is just to tell our stories,’ said the white South African, insisting that his aim had been not only to depict post-apartheid despair and violence but to tell a universal morality tale. ‘This hopefully encourages more South African filmmakers to just keep telling their stories.’