Weekly Mail Reporter
OWNERS of guns of all kinds — licensed or not, toys or real — will give up their weapons at mosques, churches and synagogues countrywide later this year if the Gun Free South Africa Campaign gets its way.
Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, chairman of the campaign, said this week it was aiming for a national “gun-free day” to coincide with a government-decreed amnesty, so that both licensed and unlicensed firearms could be handed in voluntarily.
“A campaign among children will also climax on that day with the handing in of war toys and toy guns,” he said. “The purpose of the campaign will be to persuade owners of handguns and assault weapons to rethink their need for these weapons of death and to show the commitment to a safer, more peaceful future.” Incentives would be offered in exchange for weapons.
The campaign is a strong proponent of the view that fewer guns in circulation, including licensed weapons, means fewer violent deaths. It highlights statistics such as that 8 000 people were gunned down in South Africa last year, 16 000 suffered gunshot wounds and 33 000 were robbed at gunpoint.
Campaign co-ordinator Thomas Cochrane said gun ownership and violence are directly related. South Africa has disproved arguments by various gun lobbies that murder rates decline as more people acquire legal firearms.
“We have one of the most heavily armed populations in the world and one of the highest murder rates in the world. About 50 people per 100 000 were murdered in 1992 — 5,5 times more than in the United States.”
The number of policemen killed by firearms indicates the extreme difficulty of defending oneself with a firearm, Cochrane added. He quoted research showing that the owner, or a family member of the owner, of a firearm was six times more likely to be shot by the firearm than that it would be used to defend the owner.
But John Welch, founder of the South African Gun Owners’ Association, countered that these statistics could be “half-truths” at most, as they do not take into account the “repellent effect” of gun ownership.
Welch said crime rates are extremely high in some countries which do not allow personal possession of guns, such as Nigeria and Japan. Where people do not have weapons to defend themselves, criminals have softer targets, he said.
The Gun Owners’ Association would not dissuade people from handing in their guns if they have no use for them, but Welch advised legal owners not to be pressured by an “emotional campaign”.
IMAGES like this one — a photograph taken in Johannesburg in the 1920s — tell a story as yet untold: that of how black people living in South African cities early this century imagined themselves and how they wanted to be seen.
Ezekiel Tokelo Nkole, seen here seated between two friends, was born in 1896 in the district of Leribe in Lesotho and completed Standard 6 in Ladybrand before coming to Johannesburg to work on the mines. He spent 19 years as a clerk at Johannesburg’s Ferreira mine; after it closed he worked as an induna, or foreman, at the Witbank Colliery mine compound. Resented by other workers because of his position as “boss boy”, he returned to Johannesburg and worked under Alan Paton as a warden at Diepkloof Reformatory. He died in 1940 after collapsing one morning on his way to work, according to his daughter, Emma Mothibe.
Wits University’s Institute for Advanced Social Research is appealing for similar photographs. “We are seeking to research and to retrieve the urban social history of black family life, in their own words and pictures, from 1890 to 1950,” said institute researcher and documentary photographer Santu Mofokeng. “A selection of the work will form the core of an exhibition which will travel throughout the country and we also hope to publish a book.
“When one looks at photographs like these, one is amazed,” he said. “Yet when you look at history, it is as if these people never existed.”
Anyone with old photographs of relatives, friends or acquaintances, or who knows people who have them, should call Mofokeng on (011) 716- 2414 or 714-2496.