John Matshikiza
With the Lid Off
Response to the saga of my looted home has been huge. Many people have recounted similar misfortunes; most have been amused and appalled at the same time (it is like being in the middle of a horror movie, where the extremity of the situation makes you burst out into a multi- levelled peal of body-wetting laughter). Many people have had worse happen to them – hijacking, rape and attempted rape, further assault by the police when reporting the violent crime – and the feeling that as the victim you are somehow responsible for your own violation is never far from the surface.
As I write this, a colleague at a neighbouring desk, leafing through the classifieds for a second-hand car, tells me he is in this situation because his car was removed from the long-term car park at Johannesburg airport two weeks before and never seen again. It had been gaily towed out by someone who had legitimate credentials, under the noses of airport security.
Everyone has had it done to them, so why complain?
As I continue to write this, I call the builder who is restoring the security to my home to find out what the delay is. He tells me he was mugged by five guys in the middle of town in the middle of the day before and lost all his money and his cellphone and other items. He’s only just been able to get back on stream to talk to me, and get on with the job.
Why complain? No one’s going to do anything.
The sociological origins of South African crime have been endlessly sifted. Racial oppression, disempowerment, land deprivation, job reservation -they have all played a part, but is that all there is to it?
The creation of an endemic class of men with a prison mentality became an Anti- Apartheid Movement campaign in its own right – “South Africa, the imprisoned society” we called it, with confidence that this was a phenomenon we understood and would be ready to address. Disingenuous, then, of Pallo Jordan, on the eve of the election, to explain away the government’s inability to come to grips with crime in terms of “underestimating the extent of the problem”. We always knew the problem was going to be massive.
Also from the old struggle days, the warning from concerned psychologists in the mid-1980s that the ongoing war between state authority and young people in the townships was sowing the seeds of a warped society, where war trauma would become an almost universal experience, and distinctions between right and wrong would become hopelessly blurred. This is part of what we are reaping, but what are we doing about it? Where is the medical plan that puts war therapy at the top of the list, along with HIV, primary health care and smoking?
Is this a society in perpetual revolt? Is this a society that remains ungovernable? What other seeds have we sown?
A certain Professor Leonard Doob of Yale University used to exhort his postgraduate students to “explain a situation as if you are explaining it to someone who comes from Mars”.
How would you explain South Africa to someone from Mars? On the one hand, you have a population that defies expectations and breaks world records by the orderliness and high turnout of its poll at the second general election. Where other post-liberation elections (Nicaragua and Zimbabwe, for example) have demonstrated apathy among the newly liberated, South Africans demonstrated maturity and optimism.
On the other hand, a certain kind of national anarchy continues unabated, a subtext to everyone’s life. Individualism is a priority, respect for other people is not. Intellectual property is violated as easily as physical property. It is not as if the people who rip you off don’t know right from wrong. Confront them and they will run.
The man in whose shop my doors showed up was red-faced and evasive, and tried to change the subject when I asked if he thought about the consequences of his kind of trade. “I don’t do doors as a rule,” he said. “I do floorboards.” And where do the floorboards come from? He doesn’t care to think much about it. He sends the floorboards to his factory and turns them into elegant furniture at an astonishing profit. He keeps people employed. He is doing his bit to keep the economy going.
It seems that the origins of the crime disease are now too distant to be worked out or even effectively attacked. Sure, jobs must be created, education must eventually raise people’s standards. But it is not only poverty and joblessness that cause crime. And poverty and joblessness do not explain sadistic torture, murder and the rape of infants, along with all the other things. There is a something deeper and nastier out there that needs to be addressed.
A social programme? What form will it take? The “Christian family values” route has limited appeal, according to election results. The socialist reconstruction route, which was the alternative bible of the liberation movement for so many years, is quietly forgotten like an embarrassing cousin from the country.
And yet we have an undeniable social problem of national scale that is not being addressed. What is to be done? Apart from the physical discomfort, I am tired of the mental strain of being told to stop complaining.