Crime city? I've just moved to a real one

Sheila Killian's home city has a bad image. But whatever life's like in Limerick, it's got nothing on life in Johannesburg

'So have you been initiated yet?" smiled the Durban professor, who, seeing my blank look, explained: "You've been in Johannesburg for three months now. Surely you've been the victim of some sort of attack?"

We laughed lightly, talked about crime and cities; then I sought an exit. It's true that Johannesburg has a serious problem with crime and violence, but I'd been here just long enough to get defensive about it. Maybe it comes from living in Limerick for so long - you get touchy about "crime city" labels, and I like Johannesburg.

Certainly we live a little differently here. Our house has steel trellises outside the doors and bars on the windows. Double electric gates lead onto the street, which is closed off at one end and has a security man at the other. Our alarm system calls an armed-response unit within 30 seconds of being activated.

Every house on the street has a dog, mostly unsentimental

German shepherds and pit bulls. There's always a police car outside the children's school in the morning.

None of that was of our choosing, in this rented house, but there are also things we've learned to do without thinking: scanning the street before opening the gates, locking the car doors before driving, keeping the windows wound up at traffic lights. The locals call it careful, not paranoid, and you have to work on keeping a balance.

All of this came as a shock at first, but lately we don't notice the police sirens, and the burglar bars are just for drying swimsuits. Still, the security issues refuse to disappear. At the weekend we visited South African friends and found they chain their cars to the house, like horses. At work everything is chained down: computers, desks, overhead projectors.

This morning I went for coffee with a colleague, and in the 10 minutes we were out thieves broke through the ceiling in her office and stole her laptop.

Every day the Citizen, a conservative newspaper of Afrikaner origin, lists the highlights in a grisly crime column. They range from terrifying rapes and carjackings to merely quirky thefts: last week an armed security guard in upmarket Houghton, sitting in his patrol car near Nelson Mandela's house, had his mobile phone stolen at gunpoint. So you begin to understand why people don't sit in parked cars or go for walks on the street and why the white middle classes spend their lives driving on designated routes, safely locked in their bubbles, hardly touching the city except at their secure workplaces and the sterile shopping malls of the northern suburbs.

You can pick up the underlying causes by browsing through the Sowetan, another local paper. Johannesburg is Egoli, the City of Gold, a magnet for the dispossessed of southern Africa, swollen by nightly busloads of hopefuls seeking a life. But for the poor it's a city without a safety net. There is no social welfare to speak of, no second chances. Jobs are scarce. Minimum wage, when you can get it, is about half a euro an hour, and employers complain about even that. On minimum wage you would have to work for a year and a half to buy the laptop stolen this morning.

It's a city without a safety net for the middle classes too. You can't walk safely down most streets, there's little public transport and only one or two safe taxi firms. Without a car you can't function safely. With one you're a target.

Still, it's all relative. My security concerns centre on theft, carjacking, property damage. Prisca lives in Alexandra, a township to the north. Her worries are the gunshots outside her house every evening and the safety of her girls when she's at work. The problem is growing, as far as anyone can tell from the limited statistics released by the police, and detection rates are abysmal, as low as 6 per cent for property crime.

Sometimes it becomes surreal, as when the South African Ministry of Intelligence advertises its work on television. A corporate logo flashes on screen and a silky voice asks if you've noticed any terrorism lately, smugly claiming credit for the fact that you probably haven't.

We've found some nice streets where you can walk, some wonderful restaurants and chaotic marketplaces. We've grown fond of the place and made good friends. It's vibrant, diverse, full of energy, and for now it's home. But it may have been inevitable that just after my conversation with the Durban professor, while stopped in traffic, a man approached the car and smashed the window beside my face. It held, we drove and he walked away. No real damage done, but yes, I've been initiated.

Sheila Killian is working at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, on sabbatical from the University of Limerick