The paramedics of Cape Town, at the southern tip of Africa, have just hired when the call fell shortly after 7 pm: a man was injured in the head with a shard of bottle and bleeds abundantly.
The rescuers are only a few minutes away but you have to wait for the police escort. The Flats capes, these underprivileged districts partly built on swamps in the suburbs of the tourist and port city, are not frankly frequentable.
And the area of Philippi, where the injured man awaits them in a corrugated sheet metal hut, is among the most dangerous in this vast expanse where the rate of homicides and the activity of the gangs break all records, in this country overwhelmed by one of the strongest criminalities in the world.
This is one of the nine red areas of the CAP where emergency services refuse that their medical teams move without security reinforcements.
“If that was only due to me, I would go directly there,” blows the ambulancer Mawethu Ntntini, 52, who walks the sidewalk in front of the Philippi police station in his green uniform. “But we have to wait for the police.”
Already positioned in the ambulance, his colleague Ntombikayisi Joko says his fear. This 42 -year -old mother was robbed a few years ago by armed men while she was waiting for instructions for an intervention.
“Each time I go out, I pray,” she explains to AFP.
They wait another 30 minutes and leave for ten minutes, preceded by the police patrol.
The panic family of the injured manifests its relief when the ambulance arrived. “Sometimes we have to wait until the early morning, because we don’t live in the right place,” sighs a loved one.
The rescuers are busy in the blue light of the beacons. His wounds, a deep cut on the arm and a bump on the head, are less serious than anticipated.
Transported to the hospital, the wounded is taken care of less than two hours after his call. Not so bad.
The ambulacer often thinks of this pregnant woman who had just lost the waters.
That day, the police were overwhelmed. They had to wait for more than an hour. On arrival, it was too late.
“He was a little boy, cute like everything. The umbilical cord was rolled around his neck,” says Ntombikayisi Joko. “I cried. I knew that if I had been able to arrive earlier, I would have helped this baby.”
Four of the five areas at the highest rate of murders are in the Flats Cape, in a country where 75 people are killed every day.
The paramedics demanded police escorts in 2015, when they were attacked at least once a week.
The attacks culminated in 2017, with nearly 90 assaults identified, compared to 44 in 2023, the last figure available.
Association are obvious targets for attackers who steal them phones, cash or medical equipment, notes Pastor Craven Engel, at the head of a gang prevention organization.
For him this violence is inherited from apartheid, which has “uprooted” and forced non-banish populations to settle in these inhospitable areas, without access to services or jobs.
Between high unemployment and endemic poverty, “the resources are so exhausted that people are now attacking the +Gentile +”, he explains in his offices to Hanover Park, another red zone.
Caregivers who are working to save lives sometimes know criminals who threaten them, underlines the inathi ambulacer Jacob, 32.
“It rages us,” she said, especially since these attackers could also, one day, need their help. “But we do not let them reach us in the depths. There are too many people who really need our interventions.”
Second urgent call of the evening, an elderly man, recently recovered from a stroke, is unconscious. He only lives in five minutes. But there are still 40 so that the police escort can start in a rush, howling sirens, to ahead of the ambulance in a maze of dark alleys.
