A funny experience of using trains in Cape Town...

I am writing in order to raise awareness on some Metrorail (PRASA) agents doings making me fear them more than any robber or killer on my way home. And I would like to point out some people behaviors when they witness someone getting mistreated.

Hopefully, this will help, as well, someone else who would be complaining about the same thing and would have got a response meaning that he/she was the only one to complain: now we would be two.

Some times ago, around 6pm, while going back home (I stay in Cape Town - SA), I was stopped at the Ndabeni station by train ticket controllers or people looking like them (which is unusual at that time of the day). I was traveling in a first class wagon with a third class ticket. I was driven out of the coach. The fine is R40 for that kind of issues. I followed the agents hoping that we could negotiate a settlement (something like paying a normal fair). They asked me to pay the full fine amount and I answered that I hadn't enough money to do so. They were four: three men and one woman. They were acting like having all rights. They were not having identification badges with them. There would be no way to recognize them (I thought). One of them was visibly under the power of alcohol.

We were four: A colored mature man and three black men. The colored man paid quickly and was released. We were then conducted to the offices up the stairs. When we arrived upstairs, I was ordered to get into a sort of cage (I am still amazed that they do have cages in train station to retain people). I refused to do so.

They pushed me, pulled me, beat, choked and handcuffed me. I started fearing that it could get funny and I could get uselessly injured or killed, or I could loose my valuables in my backpack with all my work inside. I decided to pay the money. I gave them the money and I was relaxed.

I was amazed: it was just unbelievable. What did I do to deserve so much violence? I didn't insult them. I was assaulted for an affordable train ticket. Was it the money the problem? Was it that I resisted? Do they have the right to put people in cages? Are they law enforcement agents ?

People were just watching. None of them said or did or expressed any concern about what was happening to me. Every one was minding his/her own business. Anything could have happened to me and nobody would have intervened. I suppose that it might be the police job or I could have just paid earlier or I could have avoided to be in the wrong wagon with my ticket. Just after I was relaxed, a young colored man approached me and expressed his discontent of what he witnessed. He said: "they should treat people properly!"

I just wonder if there was a team allocated to search customers on that line at that moment of the day or I was just robbed by people dressed like Metrorail agents or Metrorail agents turned into robbers.

At the end of the day, I felt violated. I was wrong to be on that coach with the wrong ticket. But their behavior was just unacceptable. And because I was wrong in the first place, nobody listened to my story, estimating that I somehow excited them (Sounds like what happens to girls who got raped).

Further more, I am embarrassed that in Africa, you would die in front of people an nobody would have raised a finger to help, because they are minding their own business. What is that culture of loneliness? That's sound very new to me; and that presage dark times for all of us.