Although it isn’t a secret just how bad life in the Cape Flats is, the reality is far from understood by those who don’t have anything to do with the area.

Sure, we hear stories of gangs, drugs, and warfare, we see bullet-strewn road signs along the M5 and N2, and sometimes, just sometimes, we feel the emotional impact of a violent crime when a mother falls to her knees.

But the media and the City of Cape Town has done a good job of playing it all down, for the problems are much deeper than addiction and gangs and an easy fix like jail is not going to help the situation at all.

Just the other day it was reported that 69% of children in the Cape Flats don’t attend school because of safety – but this has been going on for years.

In 2012, a four-minute documentary was shot by Nadine Cloete as part of the Why Poverty project. Initiated and produced by Steps International, the short film called ‘Miseducation’ explains just what a child growing up in the flats feels when having to go to school.

IOL reports on the matter and why it’s still relevant:.

Filmmaker Don Edkins, for Steps, points out that film is a good way to give people a better understanding of the newspaper stories that continually report how innocent people are caught up in violence on the Cape Flats.

He is specifically referencing the story of 6-year-old Sadiqah Lippert who was killed by a stray bullet in Athlone last week.

When Cloete shot the film, she interviewed a few children, but stuck with Kelina’s story as she was poetic in her descriptions.

Kelina surprised me with what she said. She was 11 years old at the time and the whole film was a lesson.

How can an 11-year-old child be knowing things like these?

Children shouldn’t know the names of gangs and where they hang out and yet we accept it.

That was highly problematic. What happened to childhood? What struck me, interviewing Kelina and the other children, for them this was the norm.

These days we read and hear that not even schools are safe anymore and some of them close down because of violence. I think the film was successful because it is told from the mouth of a child and sometimes we forget those voices.

Yes, children can exaggerate, but this is what they’re exaggerating about, violence, not fairytale stories.

As the crime in the Flat’s gets worse, it’s pretty obvious that it’s trickling up into the suburbs and there’s nothing anyone is really doing to help.

[source: iol]