The ruling party is out there on the hustings on a platform of ‘fighting poverty and creating jobs.” Apparently this is the catch-all answer to South Africa’s ills — get the people working, and crime, the country’s highest-profile scourge (along with Aids), will disappear.
Tell that to Gito Baloi’s family — and the thousands who appreciated his music — deprived of his warm, loving, eminently creative presence by a random hijacking in the centre of Johannesburg on a Sunday morning.
Baloi was shot dead in his car as he was returning home from a gig in Pretoria. The hijackers left his dying body in the street. They might or might not have tried to get the car to move. In the event, they left it where it was, with his body alongside it, melting into the night with no greater prize than his wallet. As far as they were concerned, three bullets in his neck and the resounding, never-ending echo of another life wasted in a few seconds was worth the slim pickings.
Baloi had been driving the old Mazda he’d been using for years — not worth much for a calculating hijacker, in any case. So why? What was the point?
I, for one, am not convinced that joblessness is the only explanation for crime. Doing crime has become a job in itself. I can’t stop being haunted by the image of one of the Sizzlers killers in Cape Town. One of them had been charming patrons of a Waterfront restaurant where he worked as a waitron (as they call it), after taking part in the throat-slitting and shooting of several young men in the gay massage parlour.
Why? What was the point?
I know a number of people who have been hijacked in their cars or in their homes, or in the street. Some have survived — physically, that is. You never survive the ongoing trauma. It stalks you like an unwelcome shadow, day and night, for the rest of your life.
Others, like Baloi and Jackie Semela, have not survived. Their killers left them dead and walked away, chatting gaily on their stolen cellphones, planning another attack — if you can call such incidents attacks.
In each case it was more like a night out — with no premeditated outcome of a political or criminal nature, and no remorse. Just one of those things you do if you’re hip and streetwise, and have nothing better to do on a Sunday night.
And that’s the rub. Crime is not just about poverty and jobs. It’s about a psychosis that has become a way of life for thousands of youth in this country.
Its origins certainly lie in the skewed racial structures of South Africa. But its outcomes have now outstripped rational explanation. Violence and violation have transformed themselves into a beast of their own making, operating, like Frankenstein’s monster, independently of the mad scientists who brought them into being. Violence and violation have become ends in themselves.
Or is that too simplistic?
Check it out. A friend of mine tells me that I should be extolling the successes of a ‘black republic”, comparing South Africa’s rainbow transition to Haiti’s failure — the ‘good” story outstripping the ‘bad” story.
I look at him and beg to differ.
First of all, South Africa is not a ‘black republic.” It is a republic with a black majority, but the benefits of its transition still lie mostly in the hands of what one commentator has labelled its ‘white aristocracy”.
And you can be a poor white but still be an ‘aristocrat”. That is the way the place is structured.
The endemic violence of Haiti (and Nigeria and Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, for that matter) can all be traced back to an undermining colonial purpose — make the ‘monkeys” feel like monkeys and let them respect the white ‘aristocracy” as just that — the epitome of ‘civilisation” — whatever that means.
Hardly surprising, then, that black people should be born with what their white counterparts disdainfully call ‘a chip on their shoulder”.
Even less surprising in the context of the now generally accepted environment of the South African township — an environment which, far from shrinking in the post-apartheid atmosphere, is, in fact, growing apace.
I am out of order. I am chastised by my elders and betters, who point out that Soweto, for example, is a wonderful, homogeneous, thriving community of happy people. Prominent articles appear in Sunday papers telling me that Soweto is safer than Sandton.
The South African township, direct product of apartheid, was designed to keep black people out of the eye and the mind of white South Africa — and, indeed, the world. Combined with Bantu Education, the South African township kept, and continues to keep, black aspiration, and black empowerment, in check.
So it’s a checkmate situation.
Black people kill black people for sport. Gito Baloi was shot dead in the former CBD of Johannesburg, the powerhouse of the African economy, for no better reason than to take his wallet from him. A creative powerhouse is destroyed by its own constituency.
Every political party contesting this election steps cautiously around these bones. Fingers are pointed, but none really goes anywhere that is really pertinent. The killers are bred in the townships and then they are ignored — which makes them even more lethal, ignorant, free of the bounds that the election is supposedly about. Which means they will always be there.
And are we, the voters, really prepared to take responsibility for this?