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 The Cape Flats is a God-forsaken stretch of land where people hope for tomorrow. Just one more night! But, as Smith says, many wake up dead 

Book Title: Wake Up Dead

Author: Roger Smith

Publisher: Serpent's Tail

Reviewer: Don Makatile

Roger Smith writes about this possibility and the people and events that make this spectre of doom a reality.

If there are gang movies, this is a gang novel.

The Cape Flats is not a nice place to raise children and those, like Barbara Adams, who have to watch their daughters like hawks in a bid to try and stop them from the lure of drugs and the clutches of gang bosses with salacious intent.

In the end, they die with their children.

Life expectancy here is short, very short.

Young boys prefer guns for toys; not for the same reasons their peers in the normal world would childishly do. In the Cape Flats, these boys hope to graduate to the real thing.

A girl of 14 dies brutally as she picks up the gun to fight her father's drug battles.

Many of her age skip school to shoot drugs; mere cannon fodder for the local peddler who uses their nubile bodies as reward in kind for the poison he feeds them.

A family man, like Clay Adams, is killed in the open; in front of his wife, children and the whole community.

And no one dares lift a finger to the crime lords!

A straight cop not on the take, Adams was a rarity.

The man who kills him is Piper, a walking kaleidoscope of tattoos, who rules Pollsmoor, the local prison, with the iron fist of a jailbird supremo.

Each time he's due for parole, Piper kills another inmate. If this doesn't give him enough time inside, he kills a prison guard.

The outside world scares him; he's at home in prison.

And when he ventures outside in a dramatic escape, it is with the sole intention of bringing his young "wife" Disco home.

This is a sordid tale of a deranged career criminal whose 19 teardrops tattooed below his eyes represent cold-blooded murders, in and out of prison.

But you mix Pollsmoor and the Cape Flats and the result is an explosive concoction of drugs, sex and murder.

I checked to see if the writer could have taken liberties with the truth, but recalled from my 1998 trip to the area that he could not have embellished a lot, if he did at all.

The Cape Flats is a God-forsaken stretch of land where people hope for tomorrow.

Just one more night!

But, as Smith says, many wake up dead.

Comments

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Wed May 22 21:12:33 SAST 2013 ::

Jun 20, 2011

tpaz

Kuli Roberts was right.
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Jun 20, 2011

mbondozi

There's nothing as disgusting as Cape Flats on this planet. It's a hell hole itself.
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Jun 20, 2011

Foken

tpaz, mbondozi, clearly u guys dont have a clue regarding the life of coloured folk on the cape flats. both you'll comments are so narrow minded that it boggles my mind with tour reasoning...
tpaz, kuli R married a white botjie and her kids looks like coloureds.
mbondozi, life on the flats for the coloured folk was and still is a constant struggle because during apartheid we were to black to be white and post apartheid we are too white to be black....
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Jun 20, 2011

TDK

English eish! Waking up dead. Ha! Ha! Ha!
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Jun 20, 2011

sechaba30

They all vote for DA after injecting themselves with these deadly drugs. Kuli Roberts was right after all.
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Jun 20, 2011

KhosanXX

@sechaba30
They all vote for DA after injecting themselves with these deadly drugs.

I fully agree with you except for the Kuli Roberts liner. Kuli Roberts insulted an ethnic group irrespective to which party they supported. By the ways, Blacks who support the ANC never refer to themselves as 'Coloureds' although the ANC continues to humiliate us with this reference. Further, the story of one man controlling the Cape Flats and all the prisons is a lot of bullsh8*t. This is a man looking to make a quick buck at the expense of the victims of crime. The Cape Flats and prisons are controlled by Gangs and not individuals. The Gangs are multi-cultural in nature (as Gangs have no colour boundaries) and they use the same lingo throughout all the South African prisons. Read the book 'Numbers" it will give you a better understanding of South African Gangs and Prisons and not books that want to sensationalize everything to make a quite buck.

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Jun 23, 2011

Mjekwane

Guys Cape Flats include Black Townships such as Langa, Gugz, Khayelitsha & Philipi were majority of people staying there is Black (Xhosa). Which means the Author does nt only make reference to Coloureds only but to Blacks as well becoz were also experience drug like Tik/Gangs like Arabs, Palestina's amaVura etc... So lets be realistic and dont mix Politics with social ills in the communities. People have a democratic right to choose their own politcal party.
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