Winning a fight against a crook not as satisfying as you would think

Winning a fight against an optimistic crook wasn’t as satisfying as you would think.

Last week, on my way from Johannesburg to Pretoria, I found myself fighting for my cellphone and what felt like my life when an opportunist robber tried to rob me, again. During the 2010 Fifa World Cup, I had my first experience of being a victim of crime.

My mother and I travelled to a fashion event when we were robbed at a traffic intersection less than a kilometre from our house. At the traffic intersection, my mother asked me what the time was and as I touched my cellphone screen to check the time, the window suddenly burst in my face. There were shattered pieces of glass everywhere – and blood.

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When I threw the cellphone towards the foot pedals, the robber grabbed my handbag and ran off. Sadly, this was when I realised I go into fight mode when in distress, because I ran after the robber into a dark field before I realised what was going on.

For months, I struggled to deal with the smash-and-grab incident and it felt like I would never forget the sound of a window breaking in my face. When night fell, I locked myself in my room and refused to go out for months afterwards.

Eventually, we moved to another suburb because we felt unsafe in our community. I never thought I would be in a similar position nearly 12 years later.

On Thursday afternoon when I travelled through Marabastad in Pretoria, an opportunistic robber approached me at a traffic light to ask for food but, instead, aimed to grab the cellphone resting on the speedometer I used to navigate to my destination.

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I tried to block his hand with my right hand and used my left hand to roll up the window as fast as possible. His arm got stuck in the window while I tried to get my phone back.

The robber gave up after a short struggle and managed to free his hand when the cellphone fell inside the car. He ran away and disappeared into the crowd. Ironically, I felt good and bad after surviving the attempted theft incident.

For the first few hours, I wondered why I was lucky enough to keep my cellphone. It is just a cellphone but it also has valuable information that I wasn’t sure if it was backed up or not. Did I somehow manage to cheat the crime curse of the country?

There was also another feeling of complete disbelief that I couldn’t shake. It was as if because the robber didn’t succeed to take the cellphone from me, the incident didn’t happen.

If it was not for the blood on my wrist from the hand scuffle and the fingerprints on my window from the robber trying to free his arm from my window’s grip, it would seem that it never happened to me.

All and all, it was just another brick in the wall and another rude awakening of the dangerous country we lived in.

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