A secret history of Cape Town

Shadowrunner History of Cape Town, 2040-2075
Haai, chummers. I know most of you don't care about the history of the biz in the AZ, but I'm writing this... partly for myself, partly for absent friends and partly because AntyL0p3 won't stop crowing in my ear until I do. So here it is, all 35 years since I started running. - KrugerBait"Nice, finally. I've been looking forward to this. -AntyL0p3"


 * "I'm sure it's not as fun as you imagined it to be. -KrugerBait"

2040 - Birth of Azania
Ah, the 2040s. A weird time. Half the country submerged in crime and poverty, the other half slowly dying of thirst and too much sun, and yet everything was getting better. I was a young buck back then, making a name for myself as a ranger in the Trans-Swazi. I was working at Kruger park, which is where I got the name, but after the fire of 2041, they cut down the size of the ranger forces and... well, I packed up and headed out to the only place where you could find work - Cape Town.

Took me about half a year of slumming it in bars and coffin hotels before I got work for one of the warlords, the so-called "Son of Shaka". He was a total nutter, but hey, money's money, right? Through him, I got to know of a fellow named "The Raj", a Brit who fancied hisself a "fixer", of sorts... and that's how it began. He bought me off Shaka, along with a bunch of other expats, lowlifes, ex-security people. First he was hiring us out as mercs to this warlord or that... we overthrew so many thrones it started to become a joke, like, "how many warlords we overthrew this week?". In the slums of Cape Town, we felt like kings, AKs and rusty machetes in hand.

It went on for almost a year, then the first one of us got killed. We used to call him "Kingston", since he was from Jamaica, but we got led into an ambush and he got shot. We got too smart, too cocky for our own good. The slums were changing around us and we were too blind to see it, a lot of us were. Soon enough, there was only about a dozen of us left, and even "The Raj" got his box ticked by some guy with a hold out.

Around '44, we seperated and started building up our own little groups. That's when crime started increasing sharply, too many people were out of work, too many were getting paid less than they needed to survive, so they turned to piracy, crime gangs, whatever they could to get just a few rands... but there was an upside to this, since we had a bit of a name, people were coming to us with wild schemes and ideas, pretty much anything you could think of and wanted to buy us to do their runs for them. Naturally, being poor as dirt, we accepted.

That's how it all began, just a bunch of poor vets, mercs, deckers and me in the middle, a former ranger drunk on youth.

As Cape Town began to take shape as a tourist hotspot, and the military started appearing more and more, we started to branch out. Shadowrunning was maturing, though nobody called it "shadowrunning" back then. Soon enough, we were doing ghoul culls, wetwork, bounty hunting, corporate espionage and sabotage... point is, a lot of diverse work. There was more of us, too. From about a dozen, we became... fuck me, I don't know how much, a lot. Most of the them were green and thought they were hot shit on the grill, but with time, a lot of them became the shadowrunners we know and love today.

With the influx of new faces from all over the world, Azania soon turned into a melting pot of every type of scum and villain, from brits, to dutchmen and germans... a lot of people who couldn't live in their own lands and wanted to see what the "gateway into Africa" had to offer. I've even met one or two native americans. Fixers and smugglers, pirates and warlords started popping up everywhere. Even syndicates reared their ugly head.

2050s - Shadowrunners
Then it hit us, around... '49-'50. The "Shadowrunner" name blew up around the world and soon enough we were labelled that as well. With Azania being one of the primary source for bioware and biotech research in the world at the time, we were running hotter than ever. At the time, I worked for every big name their was - Renraku, when they were trying to outpace Fuchi; Ares; Yamatetsu; Wuxing when they were expanding holdings in Azania; even did a few things for the S&K.

Some of us investigated the Universal Brotherhood when we started hearing all sorts of nasty things from our contacts out in the UCAS and Europe. I remember a few even went pro-bono to investigate what the hell was going on, but most of them we never saw again and some of them joined up... sufficed to say, the Azanian forces got a lot of help from us when the UB broke open and all the horrible insects spilled out. Honestly, I saw Azanians more united then than I've seen them since... or before. For once, there was someone truly vile we could focus our efforts on. Mind you, it was only us what got to face them, most other people didn't even hear of it until all of us broke it in '56, when we mass-posted everything we could find on them to all matrix sites in the AZ.

2056... was probably the start of the downfall of what I think of as our "golden age". After the Two Spear Clash, we started seeing everyone fragmenting again. Zulu fought Xhosa, Brit fought Indian and the Dutchies and Afrikaners fought them all, because nobody in this damn country wants to stop hating one another. By the end of the decade, we were all slowly being pushed towards breaking point and the war between Corps in 2059 didn't help anything, just made us all start in-fighting for lucrative contracts from corps and half the syndicates in the world and, worse, often we had to go against our own. Wasn't really much left of a united runner community after that. I remember we had to shut down our version of the Shadowlands after everyone just spammed and hacked it to hell.

2060s - Carrion Crows
That comet is, I think, what spoiled this biz for a very, very long time. I even went out of commission for a few years, but more about that later. After the comet appeared, everyone went CRAZY. The Zulu started whispering one thing, the Xhosa another and the Europeans were pulled in the middle between the two sides that were gearting up for war. When they discovered orichalcum deposits... well, that's what started the european in-fighting. Brother killed brother for just a few nuggets of the precious stuff...

'62 was the hardest year I lived through. First one of my partners shoots me in the back for a few beads of orichalcum we were recovering for a buyer, then another one, a Zulu, hacked off my arm and leg just to "teach me a lesson" about "treading on his land". I heard he joined up with the Zulu elves after that, but I haven't seen him since. After that, I spent almost three years sitting behind a desk learning cyberdecks and how to use the Matrix so that I could somehow support people without having to go out with my crap cyberlimbs.... and, I'll admit, the escape of the Matrix helped me a lot with keeping it together.

Around me, everything was slowly burning down. In the Shadows, everyone was tearing the cities apart for a scrap of their own, and the syndicates, the warlords, the smugglers and the pirates all had it out on the streets, followed by every breed of supremacist you could find in Azania at the time, and then there were the policlubs and the metahuman activists, and by 2063, there was so much blood spilled that you couldn't cross a street without wading in it knee-deep.

Then... the Crash. Mercifully, I was spared the worst of it, but when Technos (yes, they do exist) appeared and the industry crashed, everything went up in smoke. I had a safehouse, but most people weren't so lucky. By the time the military cleared out the corpses and made the rest return to their homes... well... there was almost nothing left of Cape Town, except it's central districts. The suburbs and the old neighbourhoods, though? Nothing but ruins, not to mention the rest of the fucking country.

I'll spare you the details of the rest of the 60's, but let's just say that all the groundwork we laid down in the previous two decades was just destroyed. Most of us had to stop shadowrunning and get wageslave or normal jobs just to make ends meet, because the scene and the biz was dead. Us, who were smart enough not to pick a side, were the only ones left and we started rebuilding. Someone had to. Being a shadowrunner wasn't... a profession for us, it was like a brotherhood. We wanted to recapture that.

2070s - Rebirth
Nowadays, well, nowadays... things are better. A lot better. People seem tired of fighting. Yeah, pirates and warlords still find themselves lots of purchase on our craggy little city, and smuggling, gun-running, blood diamonds, magical crimes are rising again, but there's less division. Less supremacism, less politics and more people wanting to become shadowrunners, inspired by our Old Guard and... well, I can't imagine having to grow up in the 50's or 60's. Things were bad back then. I'm amazed some of my friends made it through until the 2070s.

I know that everyone mentions 2073, but that was the biggest year in Azanian history since our foundation. When they passed the Joint Military act after that idiot Meijer fried the grid, the corps got a lot more power, Mujaji was angered and the people got a whole lot poorer. Hell, half the parliament is probably in the corps' pockets now. All that does, though, is make us more angry and it's pushing more people than ever to turn to shadowrunning. We've got some fine up-and-comers like SafariSam and AntyL0p3 out there, and hopefully we'll have more.

The dragons are awake and kicking, Amazonia and Aztlan are at war, toxic shamans are out and about, the corps are still fighting a shadow war... and here, in Azania, we are reeling from our losses and building from the ground up again, and we've done a damn fine job so far. So, younglings who read this? Be happy. You're here at a good time. Welkom en veel geluk!