I got robbed last night.
Calm down mom, dad, I’m alright, everyone is alright, I lost my Blackberry, some cash and the cheap local phone I bought for staying in contact with people here. Wallet is safe, they didn’t get my cards or even the $50
Again, I’m fine, perfectly safe, they never even pointed a gun directly at me, it’s OK. I lost a few pictures, some of which I can take again, and other than that I think I got away clean except for about $60 worth of the phone and currency. My Blackberry is insured and the face was so scratched it was gonna need to be replaced when I got back to the states anyways.
You want the story? OK, here it goes:
I’m in the tiny little bar section of this Thai restaurant, hanging out for the last time with this one friend I’ve met here before I head north in a few days. We’re talking, laughing, planning to go out to a real bar in a few minutes when two black guys come in, no big deal, one is carrying an AK-47 and the other has a handgun, but I don’t see it at first, so I figure the one guy is just the restaurant’s security guard. Around here you see automatic weapons many times a day, so the simple fact of a guy carrying one is no cause for alarm.
It’s not until they start shouting, pushing people around and reaching in peoples’ pockets that you realize what’s going on. Soon people are on the ground or sitting in chairs against the walls with their hands up.
They don’t speak English well at all, but they tell us to put our phones on the floor and they keep shouting at each other to hurry, hurry, and something about a taxi. I pull out my cheap phone and make sure they see me put it down, then they demand cash, I pull out my wallet, thumb the Meticais out of it and fling them at him. For a moment he gestures at me like he’s gonna demand that I open the wallet and show him that it’s empty, but he gets distracted by something else in the room and I tuck the wallet behind me between the two chairs I’m sitting on and the wall. When he looks back at me he notices the square shape in my pocket and reaches for it. Disappointed—I’d almost saved the Blackberry from them—I pull it out and chuck it at him.
After that, I’m basically a spectator. The one with the handgun, at some point before this, had pointed it over peoples’ heads at the wall and fired it. I was looking right at him, I saw where the gun was pointed. There was no impact, no ricochet, the sound was too quiet. It was clearly a replica. Still, the other guy has a real enough looking AK-47, although he holds it very inexpertly. For a moment I tell myself how easy it would be to get ahold of the barrel and keep him from leveling it at anyone. But I tell myself not to be a hero and I just sit there with my heart pounding. I don’t feel helpless: like I said, it would be easy to disarm these guys, seeing as they’ve only got one gun. I’m not helpless, I’m just restraining myself. They’re not worth resisting over a few hundred Meticais.
Good thing, too, because the unintended consequences are impossible to predict. Soon a third guy comes in, with another hand gun that looks just like the first, but I can’t know for sure. And later, it turns out there was a fourth one on the patio which, from the description of the Chinese men out there, sounds like he was carrying a shotgun.
Now the owner, who’s quite drunk, is shouting at them, advancing on them, “So what!” he says in his thick South African accent, “I’m old! Kill me! Go ahead, just kill me!”
They level the AK at his chest and I think to myself, I’m gonna see someone killed tonight. In my mind’s eye I can literally see the blood blossoming on his chest and I can’t look away.
Finally, after an interminable instant, the owner’s friends pull him away and soon the guys have left and we’re all standing around trying to figure out if that really just happened. The bar around us is in chaos, the owner is pissed at everyone and everything, he runs outside, comes back in demanding his keys, saying that the guys’ taxi has “fucked them.” Someone reaches into the fuse box and turns out the lights, which seems like a bad idea, but apparently it prevents the owner from finding the keys. He fumes around, yelling at everyone, talking about how his dignity has been taken from him, which I understand, but he also points at two or three of us younger American guys, calling us ‘Marines’ and saying we’re cowards. Whatever, he was drunk, and he had a right to be pissed. I don’t take it personally.
Meanwhile there’s an older Swedish lady FREAKING. Screaming, crying, slapping her husband. Turns out they took her wedding ring, a tennis bracelet and her purse, which she was sitting on and seems to feel they would not have noticed if her husband hadn’t volunteered it. I feel for both of them. I did the same thing she did with my wallet, didn’t I? But I know he was just trying to keep his wife safe, and there’s not really time to think in that situation. Sucks.
All is said and done and we leave. Our local numbers are put on a list at the bar, but none of us really expect to get anything back. It all still seems surreal, and the only difference I feel is I’m a little bit more nervous walking on the street at night, but otherwise, it really almost feels like nothing’s changed. Some of the people who were there don’t want to post this stuff on their blog. Think it reinforces a prejudiced view of Africa. But this is where it happened. You can’t ignore it and think it will go away once people stop being racist. The only way to make it stop is to take it on, and the best way to do that is to make people talk about it and about how to stop it from happening in the first place. It’s all a very weird and mixed-up set of feelings that I doubt will ever get sorted out.
18/7/10
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