Schoolkids have a tendency to turn the magazine section of the CNA store in Melville into a library. The other day two black boys of about eight were sprawled on the floor in front of the magazine shelf. Next to them was a stack of different gun magazines from South Africa, the United States and Britain. The kids were admiring the various makes of guns in the dog-eared magazines.
Across the aisle was a well-stocked toy section. And the comic book section. But the kids didn’t bother with that. They were engrossed in the guns and knew all of them by name, make and calibre. None of the adults who came to buy magazines gave these kids a second look.
I shouldn’t have been shocked. When we were kids playing in the streets of Orlando East, and later Dobsonville, our heroes were the likes of Shadrack Matthews of the notorious Msomi gang – which incidentally started as a well-meaning, community-loving vigilante group. Alexandra township, the home of the gangs that we read about in magazines, captured our imaginations and we envied those who had visited their relatives there. It was our Chicago.
As we grew up, thieves and murderers continued to be our heroes. We followed the exploits of Lefty Mthembu in the papers. We talked lovingly of him. There were many other heroes after whom we named ourselves. They went by such names as Pangaman, Axe-killer and Tomahawk. And they lived in the pages of Drum and Zonk magazines, and in police files. When they died we lamented and mourned their deaths.
The outlaw was the man. He challenged the law. The very law that was vicious to us. That raided our homes at night and reduced our mothers and fathers to whimpering bundles of shame. That locked up our fathers for not carrying a dompas. That uprooted families, burying them alive in some barren place far away. That whipped us and mowed us down with bullets.
These outlaws laughed in the face of the law. They spat at the law. They beat the system. They were on our side. The law was our enemy. It was not on our side. We would not have anything to do with anything that had to do with the law. Even if we knew who the outlaws were in our midst and where they were hiding, we would not tell.
Those of us who did not die in gang warfare grew up. Not all of us became practising criminals. We became teachers and nurses. Some even got to be doctors and lawyers. And an odd university professor here and there. The strong ones achieved all this amidst all the temptations of crime, while others were saved by parents who posted them to rural schools. Or by exile.
But still the adventures of those who chose the path of crime continued to capture our imagination. There was the Robin Hood syndrome as well. Big-time criminals paid for neighbourhood kids at universities. Some dentists and social workers owe their professions to them.
Although very few of us benefited directly from crime, we became party to crime by our collective act of condonation. Thus was the beginning of the breakdown in morality in black urban South Africa.
The tradition of protecting the outlaw continues in our communities. We know every chop-shop in our midst. But it is a matter of honour among us never to be impimpis. An impimpi carries a stigma, for he or she ”sold out” to the apartheid regime, or, at a micro- level, to the white employer who was part of the oppressive system.
It was an honourable thing to steal from your employer, to repossess what you believed was originally stolen from you in the form of land and freedom, and to redistribute it through the ”back-door” market to your fellow oppressed. The most respectable members of the community bought ”back-door” items such as clothing, furniture and electronic gadgets from workers who had repossessed them from their employers, or from shoplifters, burglars and their fences.
This tradition continues even though we are now liberated and have the destiny of this country in our own hands. ”Back-door” products are big business in the townships. It is the norm.
That is why the girl behind the counter at London Pies is disgusted with me because I refuse to take more pies than I have paid for, in spite of her persistent invitation that I should do so. She couldn’t give a damn if her employer runs at a loss, jeopardising her own job.
That is also why my creative writing students think either exile or white man’s education has made me stupid when I tell them that somewhere in the streets of Johannesburg I turned down a cheap offer of an expensive video camera. They couldn’t give a damn that someone, perhaps in a hijack, might have died for that camera. There is a survival-of-the- fittest mentality out there.
This high level of tolerance of crime is not only found among blacks. Often I have heard whites boasting of how they were able to buy a Rolex or some such status symbol cheaply through the ”back door”. These are the same people who are reported to be gatvol with crime.
Indeed, they are gatvol, but only with those crimes that affect their communities directly – burglary and car hijacking, which often involve murder. But many have a high level of tolerance of white-collar crime. Insider traders and participants in scams that are endemic in the corrupt private sector are treated with sympathy. They are even lionised on radio talk shows, with the rider that at least they didn’t kill anyone, even though their activities are contributing to the destruction of the economy, exacerbating the very unemployment that results in crime.
The same kind of selective morality is found in urban black communities. In the townships and informal settlements, they are also gatvol of crime. But they are gatvol only of those crimes that are perpetrated directly against the community, such as rape and child abuse. They have shown their gatvolness by actually attacking such criminals, smearing their bodies with paint, beating them up and frogmarching them naked in the street. Or even killing them.
But they never squeal against those criminals among them who go out to phanda in town and in the suburbs, where black and white ngamlas live. Not only do they not squeal, in a number of recorded instances they protect such criminals. That is why organisations like the South African National Civics Organisations and the Congress of South African Trade Unions launched ”Operation Mpimpi”, where members of the community were encouraged to rat on those neighbours and family members who were involved in crime. This operation was doomed to failure for two reasons: it was never followed up, and the use of the word impimpi was ill-advised. It conjured up memories of those people who sold out to the oppressor, and it equated honest citizens doing their civic duty with the much hated spies and informers of the past.
No one wants to be an impimpi, even though if you were to go to any township now, everybody there knows who the foot-soldier hijackers are, and at whose shebeen the crime syndicate bosses hang out. Everybody knows who has made his or her fortune by selling mandrax, and who is involved in bank robberies and cash heists. They also know those cops who are on the take, those who can steal your file from the police station so that your charge comes to naught. Yet all these criminals live comfortable lives as respectable members of the community, engaged in charitable activities and running soccer teams nogal. When by some chance they get arrested and escape from jail, they are able to hide among us in the community. Those of us who know where they are will not utter a word to the cops. When escaped convicts die in gunfights with the cops, as was the case with ”Josie” Rabotapi, the black elite – pillars of the community such as doctors, lawyers, teachers and priests – grace their funerals, eulogising their great deeds and charitable works, and blaming the cops for brutality.
I believe that we have avoided examining the real sources of crime because they impact on our values as black people in the urban areas. Instead we have blamed poverty. It did not occur to us to ask the question: if poverty is the cause of crime why does the poorest province in South Africa (Northern Province) have the least crime, and the richest (Gauteng) the most?
The same question can be asked about countries like Zimbabwe whose cities are not only cleaner than South Africa’s, but whose law enforcement agencies there command respect. Yet Zimbabwe is poorer than South Africa. Yes, there is some crime in South Africa that is due to poverty and hunger. But the bulk of the crime is a result of our greed and the race to accumulate material possessions. Cash heist gangsters and drug syndicate bosses are not hungry people. They are multimillionaires.
The police believe (and rightly so) if communities did not have such high tolerance levels towards the criminals in their midst, crime levels could have gone down by 50%. The solution therefore lies with a mass mobilisation campaign against crime. The government must take crime more seriously this time.
Pallo Jordan is a bad politician because he is too honest. He told us in one television interview just before the elections that the government underestimated the problem of crime. This time the government must wage a national campaign that aims to rebuild South Africa’s moral fibre. We must mobilise the people and campaign against crime as we did against apartheid.
People must be mobilised to clean up their communities, and to make the lives of criminals unbearable in the communities.
I am not advocating vigilante action here. Vigilante groups invariably become criminal themselves. We have seen this with the Alexandra township gangs of the 1950s. We saw it again with self-defence units. We are seeing it now with People against Gangsterism and Drug Abuse and Mapogo a Mathamaga. Such groups lead to lynch mobs and mob rule. They become a law unto themselves and end up committing serious crimes against the communities they purport to protect, and against the state.
I am talking here of a campaign that will change the mindset of the people, and cultivate in them a high level of intolerance for crime and criminal behaviour. In this way they will expose the outlaws in their communities, and root out owners of buildings that harbour criminals and criminal activities. If we were able to overthrow the apartheid state, why would we be defeated by the small minority of criminals among us?
And finally, the criminal justice system must be overhauled. We must be brave enough to experiment with new systems, even if they have never been tried anywhere else in the world before. We need to move more to a restorative justice system than the current retributive one.
Jails must be turned into productive centres where prisoners work to produce goods for the domestic and export market. Such centres are rehabilitative since the prisoners acquire skills. The remuneration they get from their labour goes towards their upkeep in the prison, but the bulk of it goes towards compensating the victims of their crimes. At the level of sentencing, the judges take into account the period it will take to compensate such victims and the prisoner must spend that long in prison. For more serious crimes such as murder and rape, a life sentence must mean the natural life of the criminal, during which the same pay-back happen.