/ 5 June 2006

Blood on the tracks

It does seem, as has been said here and elsewhere in the past, that the wheels are falling off this thing. To give it an unfortunate analogy, the train is careering out of control, bodies are flying out of its rocketing carriages, and the train driver is out of touch, or not particularly interested, in the chaos that is multiplying in the rear.

The strike by foot soldiers in the private security industry has been going on for weeks now. It is a wonder that any of us is still alive, given that we have begun to take for granted that they are our last defence against the Barbarians, in the absence of an effective police force that the average citizen takes as his or her constitutional right. Those of us who live in the rarefied world of the privileged, that is.

The rest, the majority who live on the dark side of the moon, continue to take their chances as they always have.

The body count is rising as supposedly striking security guards stride unmolested through suburban trains, seeking out blacklegs who continue to earn their meagre, day-to-day livings against supposed union strike rules.

The slumbering, lumbering bureaucracy of the police, seeking to answer questions about why this state of anarchy can be allowed to continue, suggests obscure reasons for the organised murder on the railway lines. It might not be directly related to the security guards’ strike, they suggest. It might just be just normal South African crime.

With a body count rising to the 30 mark? With eyewitness accounts of how this savagery is actually conducted? With gunfights on the few trains where private or public officers of the law actually take on the problem ending in these marshals being disarmed, as happened this week on one of the suburban lines in Cape Town?

Apart from all of that, why is it that vicious, personal crime continues to be regarded as normal in South Africa? ‘We just happen to be a violent society,” a lawyer friend said to me some years ago when I was trying to get my head around it all.

But there is no such thing as a society that just happens to be violent. Violence, at this level, of this nature, that consumes all in its path, is a representation of an enormous social ill. And it is this that is not being dealt with by the driver of the train, as it careers its way, willy-nilly, supposedly according to a timetable, stopping at each station to disgorge is bloody load.

Train violence was a hallmark of the political conflict of the 1980s, when rival organisations terrorised captive audiences on the country’s sketchy public transport network. Train violence seems to have become a new weapon in a poorly articulated new war for social justice. ‘We want 11%,” is the seemingly reasonable opening salvo of the overworked, overstressed grunt of the private security industry. Taking of lives, not of the obstinate bosses, but of those who choose to keep on working under these ridiculous conditions, is the outcome.

What has become of us? With obligatory commuters subjected to the whims of rival taxi organisations and their AK-47s and Makarovs, what choices are there? What happened to the rights of the Common Man and Woman? Where is the cop on the corner, or on the station platform, or mingling in the crowd, who will stop all this happening? Why are all the commuters, observing their own hell, necessarily cowering?

So it becomes another news story, but one not amplified to any responsible degree. Another body on the tracks.

Even if this were to be rapidly resolved, and that meagre 11% be agreed on, where would it leave us? I recently took part in a conference on the implications of the security industry in general, and what it says about the society we live in. What stake do the men and, in a few cases, women, really have in protecting their fellow citizens? Like the police, they are paid a lousy wage to risk their lives and limbs in defence of a society in which, as I said, the wheels are rapidly coming off. Why should they bother, except for the fact that i-job-i-job?

You carry a gun because it’s a job. So does the other guy, who wants you out of the way while he helps himself to what life never gave him. Neither really expects to survive the unequal fight for life. But in the meanwhile, each tries his utmost to draw the gun before the other does, just to survive.

The train driver makes precious little comment. His job (i-job-i-job) is to move the train as smoothly as possible between stations. If stuff happens in the carriages behind, it’s not his indaba. Or is it?

Those of us who are lucky enough occasionally travel to saner places. I recently said to a friend that a peaceful existence is not a privilege, it is a right. I was talking about the experience of being on Zanzibar, an island state that has had its share of turmoil and bloodshed, but where, nevertheless, human dignity and connection to the fruits of the earth is not even taken for granted: it just is.

So what can we say about savage South Africa, the one we see baring its teeth within itself, against itself, with its personal disregard for the most basic of human rights, while parading itself on the world stage as a beacon of the triumph of human dignity against adversity?

My brain is busted. I guess we wait and see.