The police [in South Africa] would check in on you randomly. And they would come into the house, and they would look through that registry and look at all the names of all the people who were registered to be living in the house. And they would, you know, cross-reference that with the actual inhabitants of the dwelling.I was never on that piece of paper. I was always hidden. My grandmother would hide me somewhere if the police did show up. And it was a constant game of hide and seek.
People were encouraged to snitch. [South Africa] was a police state, so there were police everywhere. There were undercover police. There were uniformed police. The state was being surveilled the entire time.
A lot of black people worked with the police as snitches. We used to call them bimpees where I grew up. And, you know, they were afforded special privileges. They may have been paid by the police. But you never knew who was informing on you. We lived either next door to or - two doors away from us was a known informant in Soweto.
The police didn't afford you a phone call. You just disappeared for a while. And what was scary was we lived in a state where some people disappeared forever.
If the police believed that they were planning any form of resistance against the state, then you were just gone. Nobody knew where you were, and you just hoped to see that family member again.
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