My Take

All my life I grew up under the shadow of violence. The first girl I ever kissed was, twelve years old, burnt to death by the so called ‘comrades’ through cruel means then called necklace—a tyre filled with petrol and newspapers. Her sin? Being born into a family whose head, her father, decided to run for mayourship, in disregard of the call to make ‘South Africa ungovernable.’

A friend I grew up with turned up dead at a sewer after eight days, bitten into a state of pulped tomato. He was last seen being picked by the South African police Special Branch. His mother could not even recognize him, and lost her will to live afterwards, looking at us with accusing eyes, as if it was our fault we didn’t instead of her son. She died seven years later of a heart related problem. Until 1997 when houses in the area were demolished for RDP houses, her house remained empty and unclaimed. No one wanted to be associated with the house termed ‘death house’.

There was in our township something close to a celebration of death; a weekend without one was strange, even unbelievable. Modes of dying included being robbed, or even dying at the hands of those you loved, what today is termed domestic violence. There was a general anarchical break of law and moral accountability. The Afrikaner poetess and author of the grim book titled Country of my Skull, Antjie Krog, gave our township, Mlungisi in Queenstown, an invidious honour of being the first place where the necklace was used. My memory of what happened in our streets then concurs with this conclusion.

Of course we blamed the apartheid government, more for institutionalized and state violence. The more we struggled against violence the more we seemed vulnerable from the criminal element, state propagated and otherwise. We tried our best to let the immediate and outside world to hear our cry, but none cared enough to come to our rescue. Then a strange thing happened. The country gained its political independence in 1994. State violence subsided while social crime gained confidence to attack suburbs and business area. We started seeing stories of criminal element in public spaces like media, a novel and belated praecipe indeed.

This did not mean criminals gave the township a break; they still harassed us like before and more. But we all agreed then that criminals were enemies of us all, and the development of the country at large. We started seeing more police visibility in our townships that was not only concerned with political activists. It was not enough of course, but it demonstrated a political will to tackle the scourge. It made us feel our lives mattered too, and make us feel we were not treated like schlock. But the scourge continued to rise unabated. Up to this day township denizens are the worse affected by crime, but less vocal, call it fatalism or adjustment to occupational hazard, or whatever you like.

Then another strange thing happened. Nelson Mandela put down the reigns as the president, handing them to Thabo Mbeki. Within no time the criminal element was no longer just an enemy of us all, but a fault of government. Arguments were made that the government was not treating the matter as an emergency. People, white folks mostly, started asking if the solution was not in declaring national state of emergency. Naturally, those of who grew up on the conditions of abuse that comes with state emergency are opposed to this solution.

By Thabo Mbeki’s second tenure crime was no longer just a government’s fault but that of the president. The president was termed a denialist. Again we tried to follow the argument. In the end the real crime of the president was what was called a defiant non-sympathetic mood against the citizenry that was suffering consequences of crime—the hidden one being the fact that he has become the boogey man of imperialist hegemony, and scapegoat of everything that goes wrong in the country.

In no time it became clear the country didn’t have the best police force in the world; but there is evidence also that most policemen are of average courage and integrity, under appreciated and poorly paid. But the evidence of corruption against some of them prevails and feeds the pessimistic mood against the police force in general. This prompted the president to call us, with some justification, “. . . spokespersons of doom or cheerleaders of bad news.”

The truth of the matter is that the scourge of crime affects us all. It has been a rude wakening for those who spent their lives in this country in comfortable cocoons into the realization that this country was founded, and still subsists, on abnormality. It also gives those made impotent by their prejudices and political dispossession, together with the rest of opportunist doomsayer footlickers, to spew invective in attempt to catch the coattails of liberal specious enlightenment, a handle to beat the government by. Crime has been used, especially by white South Africans, as means to discredit the present South African, and cry wolf for a failing state in the offing.