Shopper goes through Gateway to humiliation

A visit to the new Gateway Shopping Centre in the north of Durban became a lesson in humiliation for Lamontville resident Dolly Ntini, when she was treated like a criminal.

A nurse at St Augustine's hospital, Ntini decided to visit the new shopping centre last Friday with her sister and her brother-in-law.

"We walked around in the centre, then decided to go into the Hub. As I was walking around in the shop, I felt someone continuously watching me," she said.

Ntini told her sister to carry on shopping and went to wait outside as she couldn't cope with the feeling of being under surveillance.

As she left the shop she was stopped by the shop's security guards. "A lady security guard said 'please ma, let me check your bag', so I handed it to her."

"I thought that she would just look through it, but she started digging deeper and deeper into the bag as if she was looking for something.

"I felt highly embarrassed; people were walking in and out of the shop and looking at me as if I were a criminal," Ntini said.

The nurse was told it was a random search and that the control room was watching the guards at the door and telling them who to search. The guards wore earpieces and tiny microphones strapped to the collars of their shirts.

After an embarrassing wait she was finally handed back her bag and allowed to leave. Ntini said she decided to watch for a while and see who else was being searched. She waited 10 minutes, but did not see anyone else undergoing the same humiliation she'd endured.

"I went back to the guards and asked them why they had searched only me. One of them said: 'Ma, you don't know how sick we are of this. We are told that we have to search Africans.''

Ntini was angry and marched into the store to speak to the manager. The security manager told her that it was company policy to do random checks and that they reserved the right to search anyone. When the manager denied that the store's guards only searched Africans, Ntini said the security guard confronted him, saying: "You told us we must watch how people are dressed, and that if they are shabbily dressed or are Africans, we must search them."

The Hub assistant store manager Andesha Naidoo said it was procedure to conduct random searches. "We cannot comment further on this issue," she said.