We are a people who justly prided ourselves on being generous, hospitable, given to sharing so much so that we used to eat out of one dish and drink out of one calabash to express this strong communal sense. We had a deep reverence for life. We believed that to harm another person was ultimately to injure oneself because Ubuntu/Botho declared that our humanity was bound up with one another’s; for a person was a person only through other persons; for we existed only in a delicate network of interdependence. And therefore, to perpetrate certain deeds was unthinkable.
What has happened to us that an adult can callously rape a baby? What possesses those who hijack a car and, even after the victim has handed over her keys and money, gratuitously mow her down with her helpless children, or who murder farmers so brutally? What has seemed to strip us of our very humanity so that we jettison our traditional values that made us respect the elderly and care for the vulnerable in our communities?
We might point a finger at unacceptable socio-economic factors. Of course poverty, squalor, deprivation are fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of ills — and yet that cannot be the full answer.
Had poverty been the direct cause of violent crime and other social misdemeanours, then all poor people would be thieves and killers. This is patently not the case. The vast majority are decent, hardworking and law-abiding citizens with remarkable resilience, bringing  up their families in abominable conditions, being able, amazingly, to laugh and to rear children who are clean for school — and this in conditions that would make me scurry for cover.
No, most of the violent crime — the cash-in-transit heists, the car hijackings — is committed by highly organised, sophisticated syndicates, often with cross-border connections. And then there is so-called white-collar crime. We must look elsewhere for the causes and so perhaps find possible solutions.
It is clear we have all been wounded by apartheid more than we usually admit to be the case. I am not looking for a convenient scapegoat. It was a policy that dehumanised both the victim and perpetrator. Black life was cheap but, in dehumanising others, our former rulers were in the process themselves dehumanised.
We need every relevant institution and organisation, but especially the faith communities, to help us all recover our humanity, to recover our reverence for all life. We need deliberately and consciously to relearn how to treat one another considerately and courteously in our offices, in our shops, in our homes, in the way we drive — yes, to apply the golden rule to try to do to others only as we would want others to treat us.
We need to recover, especially we blacks, a sense of our self-worth as black consciousness tried to inculcate, so that certain things would really be infra dig, below our dignity. We made South Africa ungovernable through disobeying apartheid’s unjust and immoral laws. We are many of us still in that mode.
Hey, let us wake up. We live in a democratic South Africa. Her laws are our laws. A decent and mature South African is a law-abiding citizen. We should have zero tolerance for law-breaking. We should not, for instance, help crooks by buying their stolen goods.
We need an efficient, well-trained and properly equipped police force that will be an effective law enforcement, crime prevention and detection force. Many police officers are hard-working and dedicated. Weed out the inefficient and corrupt ones. Visible policing works. Let the police patrol on foot, in cars, on horseback, on bicycles, on motorcycles. Criminals must know they will be hunted down, apprehended and prosecuted.
New York reduced its high crime rate by targeting petty crime first, such as painting graffiti, traffic offences, littering. We too can. We defeated apartheid. We jolly well can defeat the scourge of crime. We will.
This is the first in a series of articles by religious leaders on the causes of crime and what we can do about it