We must look to South Africa's past to understand the lawlessness and violence of today

Daily Maverick

15-05-2025

I stepped from a plane a few weeks ago and felt an immediate tension and anxiety, a bit like the instant before a shattering. Horripilation!
On the bridge to the terminal of Cape Town International Airport, men were standing around, apparently doing something. Inside the baggage area, men and women were milling about, some of them working, others (men) just standing and apparently doing nothing.
Beyond immigration (highly smooth and efficient) and customs (comforting) men formed a gauntlet of hustlers, fake Uber drivers and silent stares. I was home. Well, kind of – I am from Johannesburg.
Yet, it was all so familiar. Too familiar.
My scoping the lay of the land, so to speak, was not your typical othering. I have been doing it for as long as I can remember.
It was on the streets of Johannesburg townships – Eldorado Park, Western Coloured Township, Diepkloof Zone 5 – where, as a teenager, I learnt the 'skills' of observation.
We learnt early on to look out for or spot 'spies' (the moniker for troublemakers of rival gangs) and ' moegoes ' (tiekieline tsotsis with sharp Okapis) who stood around on street corners, at the shops, bus stops or just anywhere around fires in the fields of Kliptown, Pimville, Western and even Newclare – less so in Bosmont.
Fear, tension, anxiety were always all-around.
In Georgetown, Guyana, just incidentally, I came across a slogan painted on a wall: 'No Liming.' A local explained it to me as a warning to people from hanging around predatorially. I never did ask too many questions.
Anyway, in those days many of us were affiliated, sometimes mildly, sometimes in our imagination, other times for real, with one of the many gangs in the townships; we were the Fast Guns or the Spaldings (of Western), or the Mau Maus of Eldorado Park.
Don Materra eventually shook all of that out of my system when he introduced me to journalism in my late teens, and I left the country for a while.
And anyway, before my 16th birthday one of my friends (aged 17) was stabbed to death in a gang war, three were executed by the state (much later a friend, whom I hadn't seen for years, Camy Adams, was executed) and, well, I escaped quite a few skirmishes with rival gang members and the police… We were the klevas – a derivation from 'clever ones' (see this opinion piece about township 'klevas ', this one on 'township klevas ' and urban/rural relations, and this one about township culture in general).
I guess what I'm saying is that I have known, and I have been drilled, as it were, to recognise threats, real or imagined (I have used the same wits from the Bronx in New York City, to London and in dimly lit alleys in South East Asia), but this time it is different.
We live in a country with quite incredible levels of violent crime, and we have come to live with it. Fear is ever present around us, as an extant threat, and as social memory.
So yes, very many of us have spent our entire lives living in constant fear, brought on by physical and structural violence and threats to our daily lives. That does not mean we have to accept it as normal, although it's really difficult to believe otherwise.
Let me return to my opening paragraph. A few years ago, while approaching a scene of public protest in Kleinmond, I was attacked and suffered serious damage to my face, mouth, jaw and skull. Several months later, while driving into Cape Town on the N2, my car was pelted with rocks.
On another occasion, another five or six months later, three bullets hit my car (and rocks caused other damage) when I drove to Muizenberg on Baden-Powell Drive, the coastal road that branches off from the N2. A family member who had been fishing on the same stretch of coast at Strandfontein has faced so much violence from random passers-by or people who sat around, predatorily, that he has had to stop fishing.
A cousin whose family had been fishing on the same river for decades in Port Alfred was attacked with a machete – a photograph of the gaping wound on his head is too ghastly to share publicly. All of this happened within the past three or four years.
And so, whenever I drive past that spot where I was attacked in Kleinmond, I instinctively cover my face with a raised elbow. Or, when I drive along the N2 into Cape Town, I approach bridges with caution (fear and anxiety).
These same instincts kicked in when I stepped off the plane at Cape Town International, and are at work whenever I drive past places like the city's ' hell run ', or anywhere else.
I look out for vendors who flag down drivers then assault, rob (or kill them) when they stop, or break down, or when they stop at robots … and then there are the dreaded road spikes – about which the state has warned motorists. A close friend capsized his car on the road between Beaufort West and Laingsburg. The ambulance and police arrived swiftly, robbed them of money and valuables and went away…
Here is where I am supposed to say, but that's okay, and that I have no right to complain or feel aggrieved, nobody has that right, because bad things happen to many people.
A part of me recognises the origins of this criminality and lawlessness. It does not make living a full life any easier; imagine spending all your waking hours worrying about being attacked, or your home invaded, and how little time is left to go for a walk in Newlands Forest.
But wait, a nephew and his son were mugged while walking on Table Mountain, and women have been raped in Newlands Forest. (See, also, this).
Memory fights back against reality
There really is nothing that can be done about the violence and lawlessness. Especially not when the police cannot be trusted. We never have trusted the police, not now and not 30 years ago. Remember, the police force was the apartheid state's weapon against its own people…
Tom Lodge, formerly head of the political science department of Wits University, reported that (less than a year into the democratic era) '8,000 police officers in Gauteng alone were reported to have committed crimes of one kind or another… in 1995, 2,000 policemen defrauded their medical aid scheme of R60-million.'
When Lodge wrote about crime and corruption between 1994 and 1997, what he referred to did not start on 27 April 1994. It was an inheritance handed down from the previous era. What is saddening is that we are in a situation today where many of our compatriots refuse to look back, or even in the mirror, when it comes to all the shortcomings and problems in society.
The taproot of much fear, anger and anxiety can be found in earlier repressive or unjust regimes. Evidence gathered from Latin American countries (like Guatemala) to East Asian societies (in Cambodia) shows the way that early trauma helps explain violent outbursts – and even lawlessness.
If 'the law' was always a weapon of oppression and injustice, then successive generations may be forgiven for disrespecting or being sceptical of 'the law'.
When injustice was forced upon native people by supposedly superior 'races', it is extremely difficult to expect people to believe that justice is at all possible.
Let's consider Latin America, especially Guatemala, in the 16th century (and bear in mind more recent violence and lawlessness), where Franciscan Order records tell of mass disorder that followed a local judge's decree to burn down towns when indigenous people refused to comply with official decrees. 'Chaos ensued. Roads and trails were strewn with poor Indian women, tied as prisoners, carrying children on their backs, left to fend for themselves,' the Franciscan records explain.
Five-hundred years later, academic researchers and international human rights groups recount that violations of a similar magnitude remained pervasive in Guatemala. There are, unaspiringly, apologists in elite societies, those legatees of European settlement (in Guatemala) who would insist that the savagery of Europeans and settler colonists did not exist, and if it did, it was not as bad – and that people should 'move on'.
It is in the nature of European settlers and settler colonists who believe they hail from superior societies that 'the suffering that took place was not really suffering because it happened to [indigenous Guatemalans]'.
This elite would also have it that native people, Guatemala's 'Indians', 'cannot really feel, that an Indian woman will not truly suffer if her husband or children are killed because she is not 'the same as us'.'
This was what Margaret Hooks of the Catholic Institute for International Relations recorded in Guatemalan Women Speak in 1993.
None of this helps when I, or any of us – from Khayelitsha and Athlone, to Eldorado Park and Soshanguve – make our way to and from places of work, or from visiting families, or dare to go for a walk in the park.
To paraphrase Walter Benjamin on fear, we have come to believe that the violence in South Africa is normal, and that the violent times in which we live 'is not the exception but the rule'. DM