>>While I may have misremembered some parts, the tale she told was very vivid and stuck in my mind.

It was a very consistent theme from ex-pats at that time.

IMHO:if a neighbour's car is hijacked at gunpoint at traffic lights and his wife raped and shot and the Police just shrug and say it's just one of many incidents that day, I wouldn't be arguing about relative safety, I'd be looking for somewhere else to live. It may not be an every day occurrence, but if it happens to you it's a 100% incidence and if you knew the victim, it's not something you can just shrug off.

Jos is right that it's probably safer now and SA is far better off than its neighbour Zimbabwe that was called the Breadbasket of Africa in the 1980s and now needs aid to feed its starving millions after Ayn Rand's Looters did exactly what she described.