Clive Levin was having a hard day. In the early morning, he dropped his two kids off at school, then rushed to a business meeting before donning his wet suit and plunging into the cold waters off one of Cape Town’s finest surfing beaches.
By midday, after almost two hours of riding waves, he was back home in Mowbray, an up and coming suburb nestling in the south side of the city’s famed Table Mountain.
“I just love it here, I fell in love with Mowbray the moment I discovered it — it is this eclectic mix between suburbia and the city, I have to have my city fix but here you get space too... It is a great community, very mixed,” he told The Times as he proudly showed off his leafy garden and pool.
Mr Levin, 40, a freelance film cameraman, paints a very different picture of the suburb than fellow South African Brandon Huntley who this week was at the centre of a diplomatic row after he was granted asylum in Canada as a victim of racist violence .
Mr Huntley, 31, an unemployed water-sprinkler salesman, said he had to flee the country after he was attacked in Mowbray seven times — and stabbed in three of those incidents — by blacks who called him a “white dog” and “settler”.
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Canada’s immigration authorities infuriated the governing African National Congress (ANC) by ruling in his favour. William Davis, the board’s chairman, said Mr Huntley was “a victim because of his race rather than a victim of criminality” and would “stick out like a sore thumb” in any part of the country because of his skin colour.
Such “sore thumbs” were very much in evidence in Mowbray yesterday when The Times visited. Appearances can be deceptive, particularly in South Africa where crime can strike with no warning, but few seemed in any danger. A handful of unemployed drunks hung about outside a liquor store. With toothless smiles, one or two tried to beg from passers-by, but there was no menace.
Mowbray is a genteel English suburb with quaint houses on tree-lined streets with names like Cheltenham, Winchester and Richmond. Children, white and black, in smart uniforms attend St George’s grammar school.
Nearby, St Peter’s Church draws a mixed crowd every Sunday.
Like much of South Africa, the area has changed enormously in recent years. Mowbray has been yuppified as young South Africans from the booming middle class have moved in. The main street now boasts Greek and Thai restaurants, art and craft shops, trendy coffee bars and bookshops. With Table Mountain’s Devil’s Peak towering over it on one side, and the ocean on the other it has a Bohemian feel to it, more San Francisco than London.
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It is far from the hell hole painted by Mr Huntley. His former white neighbours don’t believe a word of his tale and — strangely, they say — no one seems to have heard of him, not even the owner of the biggest water irrigation business who claims to know “every salesman in the area”.
Mr Levin and his partner, Hailey, moved to Mowbray eight years ago from crime-ridden Johannesburg so they could bring their children up in a more relaxed atmosphere.
“This guy was feeding off the paranoia people have about crime. He made it up and it fed into people’s perceptions because he wanted to stay there. Crime is an issue, it is everywhere in this country, but whites are not more in danger here from it than blacks or anyone else,” he said.
Nevertheless, the Huntley affair has touched a raw nerve in South Africa. The government, notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to such accusations, responded by calling the Canadian decision “racist” and “preposterous”. It said it reinforced unfair stereotypes that whites were in danger from blacks whereas blacks, particularly the poor, suffer just as much, if not more.
Luke Mills, an Englishman who has lived in Mowbray for seven years, agreed the country was getting a “bad rap”.
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“No one would say there is no crime in Mowbray or that it is not a problem in South Africa, but the real victims of crime here are the weak and the vulnerable — the poor, the disabled,” he told The Times.
“The idea that as a white person in South Africa you have somehow drawn the short straw is ludicrous, when you look at the average white person’s life-style and the opportunities which come their way it is laughable... This guy is a con man,” he added.
Canada has launched an investigation into the Huntley case which has been seized upon by white South Africans, many of whom left the country after the end of apartheid in 1994, to show the new black-run government only pays lip service to its claim to be non-racial.
Mr Huntley has admitted he did not report any of the alleged crimes to the police, saying there was no point because as a white person they would be interested in pursuing the crimes.
Inspector Craig Dell, one of several white policemen at Mowbray Police Station, dismissed the claim as “utter nonsense”.
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“We could not do that here, this suburb is a melting pot, we have all sort of foreigners, and nationalities and different colour and we have to treat them all the same. If not we would be on the front-page all the time,” he said. A quick check on the police computer revealed no incidents reported by a Brandon Huntley.
Inspector Dell, who has been at the station for eight years, described Mowbray as one of the quieter Cape Town suburbs. “Robbery and thefts are our main problems. You get the odd stabbings but they are usually drink driven and happen in or outside bars,” he said.