Curtis was a child of the new dispensation�though, strangely, people still called it that, despite apartheid having officially ended more than thirty years ago. In the years that followed, most streets named during the apartheid era had been rechristened in honor of struggle heroes, martyrs who had given their lives for freedom. But a few streets remained defiantly untouched by this wave of renaming: Claim Street was one of them.
It still bore the same name it had in the bad old days, as if immune to the tide of political reform. Claim Street cut a jagged line through Johannesburg, beginning in the gritty heart of Hillbrow and stretching all the way into the concrete sprawl of the Central Business District��the CBD,� as everyone called it.
There, in the belly of the city, it crossed what used to be Bree Street�now officially renamed Lillian Ngoyi Street. But many locals still called it Bree out of habit or defiance. Bree was long, loud, and dangerous�once the economic artery of Joburg, now one of its most crime-ridden veins.
If Hillbrow was the capital of organized crime, Lillian Ngoyi was the capital of chaos. Petty theft and Opportunistic violence were its trade mark - an open-air market of desperation. The street had been unofficially divided into crime zones�each intersection with its own specialty, like a macabre catalogue of street-level tactics.
At one corner, you�d find the smash-and-grab crews. They used spark plugs�yanked from old car engines�to shatter windows with surgical precision, lunging for handbags, phones, anything of value. Some carried knives, others screwdrivers. A few weren�t afraid to pull a gun.
Two blocks down, it was the phone snatchers�nimble-fingered ghosts who targeted drivers glued to their devices, car windows foolishly open. A second�s distraction was all they needed. No violence. No confrontation. Just a blur of motion and a vanishing act.
But the most notorious hot spot of all�the intersection that made even hardened locals tighten their grips and check their mirrors�was where Claim met Lillian Ngoyi.
Everyone knew it. The cops knew it. The residents knew it. Hell, even out-of-towners who�d learned the hard way whispered about it. The intersection was a predator, lying in wait for anyone foolish enough to let their guard down. For the uninitiated, it looked like any other city crossing�traffic lights, honking taxis, street vendors hawking fake sneakers and roasted corn.