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Vice Blog

ATLANTIS IS A BUMMER

The tree-lined avenue that leads to the South African Atlantis is called the Malmesbury Road. In 1931, it was built using poor white labor--a work-for-soup deal designed to counter the worst privations of the Great Depression. That same year, Harvard Business School came over to do a study on this innovative scheme. They took their findings back to America, and one year later, FDR had repackaged the Harvard study as the New Deal. It's a very influential strip of tarmac. These days another attempt at social engineering lies along it, some 40 miles from Cape Town, this one much less successful. When it was developed in 1977, the town of Atlantis was meant to be Apartheid's answer to Milton Keynes. A planned community, exclusively for ethnic Cape Coloureds (as they are called in South Africa). Built from scratch. Its inhabitants bussed in, incentivized to re-settle there from homes in Cape Town with bold promises. The town planners were confident that it would, by 2010, enclose half a million people. It would be a gleaming hub of racially-segregated industry, a testament to the potency, the workability, and the general fairness of the government's policy of Separate Development--cleaving society apart into race-based economic zones. It didn't turn out like that. Now, Atlantis rusts inelegantly seven days a week. In the late 70s its gridded streets were mapped out into two neatly set zones--a residential one, then, a mile away, a prefab industrial zone: vacant streets, plumbed and electrified, just waiting for factories to be dropped on them. The point of Atlantis was to move heavy industry out of the center of Cape Town, while simultaneously moving the Cape Coloured population away from the white playground of the CBD; creating a "home of their own" for the Coloureds, while ensuring that the factories had a ready supply of cheap manual labour.

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To get the place off the ground, the government launched a slew of incentives, luring in factories via an elaborate system of relocation tax credits. But then it all unravelled. The tax credits became unaffordable. Fresh industrial land was zoned in places closer to Cape Town. The gas price jumped, making transport costs untenable. The whole thing fell off a cliff.

These days, Atlantis's population has levelled out around 100,000 and unemployment has maintained a remarkably constant 40 percent. Rates of fetal alcohol syndrome are also consistently amongst the highest in the world. The gangs are so vicious you might as well just kill yourself now rather than waste their time with it. The Saturday I turned up, the town was still chittering about Friday night's two homicides. "They were gangsters," Barbara Ras declares in the living room of her tiny green house on the perimeter of the town. She has her ear to the ground--she used to be a gangster too. "One of them was with the Mongrels. The other with the Rastas. They were both hits. The thing that's changed since my day is that back in my day, this was all about gang fights--quarrels over territory. Now, it's just organized crime. Pure and simple."

Like a lot of reformed characters, Ras' route out was G.O.D. A bunch of happy-clapping types knocked on her door one Sunday morning when she was high. They told her Jesus loved her and she instantly melted. "For me, it was when they gave me a hug. That was the thing. To have another human being show affection for you--it was something I'd never had." And like a lot of reformed characters, she still can't stop babbling about the man above--whatever tangents the conversation takes, always returning to her Jesus-shaped themes. "I would fight. The girls in the gangs--there weren't many--most of them wouldn't fight. Most of them were there to hold the weapons. I was fighting. I had the guts to stab somebody. And I had the guts to keep your gun while it was still hot. I was committed. And I earned my respect through that." She pulls up her t-shirt sleeve to reveal a slender, over-inked tattoo. "This was the last gang I belonged to--the 77s. They had all done murder. My husband was one too. I divorced him, then I married him again, and I divorced him again because I caught him committing adultery." Ras was the daughter of a preacher, and got mixed up with the wrong boys, gradually drifting down the

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-encrusted dark side of Cape Town's ganglands. "You have a different mindset when you're in that sort of situation--it's about surviving, day to day. I was comfortable with the guys--I was the only female in the group." She points back at her tattoo. "My eldest daughter wanted me to remove that tattoo. It's a lot of shame for the kids, you see, because the other kids see it, and they tease them in school." These days, Ras is on the local council and also runs a safe haven for abused women and kids. Despite becoming part of government, she still has a certain healthy disregard for the police. "I don't work with them. I will never work with them. They have double standards. They will pull you down and fight with you, but they will take your money too." They could also give a shit about the safety of many Atlanteans. "The house we're in now was petrol-bombed five years ago. They threw it through the back, because they were unhappy with me: The shelter I'd established on what had been an old shebeen and drug den." So she called up her pals. They came through in massive numbers from her former gang stomping grounds in Bonteheuwel. Soon, there were 20-odd cars filled with grizzled out-of-town gangsters parked outside her home. So, rather than come down and take a look, the cops called her on the phone to ask what was up. "I told them--if you can't protect me, then I need to do what I can… You know, they poisoned my dogs last week. Killed them, two of them." Her old gangland buddies can only do so much, though she stays in touch. "Many of them are dead. The rest are still doing it. They're old now--they'd like to get out, but what else can they do?"

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Barbara brings in the boy who lives next door, who looks no older than 15 but is apparently 20. He has the distinctive pixie ears and shy, vacant demeanor of fetal-alcohol syndrome. "I went to fetch him three weeks ago out of Allandale Prison. He was 17. He was at school. Then he got involved with

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[crystal meth] and he was involved with a murder and went to jail. He was watching what was happening, but he didn't help to commit it. It was just that he didn't squeal--he couldn't, cause his life was in danger. They beat him in prison. He was alone in the holding cells, and they got hold of him. He can show you some of the marks--show him what they did." The boy peels down the rim of his tracksuit pants to reveal a stringy mess of white scars running down the top of his thigh. "A lot of things unimaginable happened to him in jail. But nobody's helping him through all of that. Everybody's drinking. His mother is drinking. His grandmother is drinking. His whole family has fallen into alcohol. There's no one to tell him how special he is just because he's human…" She goes on, matter-of-fact, while the manboy stands morosely in the corner. "He broke in twice at my place. At the very place where he was being helped! Where he could have a cup of tea or a piece of bread anytime! In the end, I withdrew the charge, because we made a deal that he would return the stuff he took." She offers obscure thoughts on what needs to happen to the boy next. "He must be hypnotized. So that they can figure out where it all went wrong for him…" Hypnosis may not be enough to figure out what went wrong with the rest of the town. As the recession has curled its cold grip around the place, even some of the few factories keeping Atlantis ticking over are dying. Now the government is once again looking to see what it can do with the place. Over the upcoming year, they're going to be giving away the vacant industrial plots, with the proviso that companies must either build factories on it within two years or lose their claim.

Of course, it doesn't all have to end with the town's gradual slide into barbarism. It could go out with a bang. A bright yellow pamphlet pinned to Ras's fridge advises what to do in the event of Armageddon. Duck, cover, stop, drop, roll, look both ways, that sort of thing… The town, see, is well within the 16km blast radius of the coastal Koeberg Nuclear Power Station. It's possible that Atlantis sinking could be the best thing to happen to it.

GAVIN HAYNES