What if apartheid didn’t do it?

One reason the apartheid-did-it explanation doesn’t completely satisfy is that South Africans are not unique in the world in having gone through long periods of disenfranchisement, oppression and collective violence.

The Poles and the Chinese, the Koreans and the Rwandans, the French and Vietnamese and Russians and Algerians: pretty much every nation on the planet outside North America spent some portion of the 20th century on its knees, the victim of catastrophic violence directed either by local tyrants or by foreign overlords.

And yet only a handful has levels of violence that even approach ours.

Take, for example, tiny El Salvador, where a 12-year civil war through the 1980s saw 75 000 people die out of a population of less than five million. In his book The Massacre at El Mozote, a careful reconstruction of the slaughter of hundreds of people by government forces in December 1981, Mark Danner recounts how the war was marked by the ‘mutilated corpses that each morning littered the streets of El Salvador’s cities”.

Some of the bodies, he writes, ‘were headless or faceless, their features having been obliterated with a shotgun blast or an application of battery acid; sometimes their limbs were missing, or hands and feet were chopped off, or eyes gouged out; women’s genitals were torn and bloody, bespeaking repeated rape; men’s were often found severed and stuffed into their mouths”.

This kind of hyperbolic violence — far greater in absolute, annual and per capita terms than the direct violence of apartheid and resistance in South Africa — has created a society with high levels of violence and a deeply entrenched, peculiarly violent gang culture.

Even so, its murder rate, estimated in 2002 at 38 per 100 000, was still at least 10% lower than South Africa’s at that time. And, in this, El Salvador is an exception rather than the rule: most Latin American countries have gone through periods of intense repression or outright civil war of the Salvadorian kind, but most have less violence — often far, far less — than South Africa.

It might be that this is because the consequences of the centuries of racial humiliation and disenfranchisement in South Africa are different from those left from a brief civil war. But it is not as if the troubles in Latin America were brief spasms of violence disrupting otherwise stable, reasonably just social systems. In El Salvador itself a civil war in the 1930s left 12 000 dead. Besides, it seems clear that Latin American societies, like our own, must have had deep, long-term structural features that were painfully oppressive and unjust.

And this is the problem: if we are to rely on the injustices and oppressions of our history to explain present-day violence in South Africa, we need to show either that all societies with histories of violent oppression and exploitation have similar legacies — something which is patently not the case — or that there was something about apartheid that made it so much more damaging to the moral well-being of its subjects.

We also need to show why, 13 years after the installation of our democracy, we still suffer its ill-effects. It is far from obvious how this is to be done. Still, only an apologist for apartheid would argue that our past is not a principal reason for the problems of the present. What matters, however, is that it can only ever be a part of the answer.

This might actually be a good thing for, as Robert Guest points out in his book on Africa, history is a bit like geography. You can’t change it.

Apart from our history, attempts to explain violence in South Africa tend to focus heavily on our current socioeconomic indicators, themselves an effect of that history.

We all know that far too many South Africans live lives of misery and desperation. The wretchedness of their conditions, so the argument goes, means that many lives are rich only in humiliation, helplessness and the petty cruelties that keep people awake at night, angry and resentful.

The result is a build-up of rage that must sometimes be discharged. For the most part, it is the people nearest to them who suffer; often enough, though, their rage is directed at strangers.

One problem with this became obvious to me in 1999 when I was doing a ride-along with cops who arrested a man for dealing in hijacked vehicles, but who also had a full-time job at a sports marketing company in Rosebank.

Another is that Limpopo is our safest province, but is also one of the poorest. A third is that there isn’t as much support for the proposition that poverty causes crime in the international criminological literature as you might expect. This might be because crime statistics from the developing world are hopeless, but the reality is that, when not suffering a civil war, the majority of countries that are poorer than South Africa are also much less violent.

Besides, even if one could show that poorer places tended to have more crime, there would remain the difficult question of whether poverty caused crime, crime caused poverty (by deterring investment and chasing away those rich enough to move), or if both were caused by something else. This is why academic criminologists cast doubt on any simplistic linkage between poverty and criminality.

By contrast with the lack of consensus about the links between poverty and crime, however, there is a much stronger conviction among academics that inequality causes crime; that the difference between what the rich and poor earn matters more than the depth of poverty.

The fact of inequality could create raw resentments against which experience of the world grates, breeding humiliation and rage. How this could lead to crime and violence needs no sophisticated psychological theories.

For these reasons inequality is frequently identified as a major cause of crime in South Africa because, as almost everyone knows, our Gini coefficient, the standard measure of inequality, is among the highest in the world. ‘Aha!” you can almost hear criminologists exclaim, ‘That’s why we’re so plagued by criminality.” If we are one of the most unequal societies in the world, we should expect to have the highest rates of crime, too.

But there’s a problem.

The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality: it measures how concentrated income is in the hands of those who earn the most. By this measure South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. But, by Third World standards, South Africa is also a country with a phenomenally well-developed welfare state. In fact, we stand apart from many — possibly most — developing countries in that public expenditure actually ameliorates inequality rather than worsening it. Here, after you factor in the tax that high-income earners pay and the benefits that the poor receive from government, levels of inequality actually fall.

This is quite different from many other developing countries where the social contract is that the rich pay no taxes and the poor receive no services.

The inequality-causes-crime argument, therefore, needs some qualification. One way to do this might be to argue that our welfare state is new and so the reduction in inequality has not had an effect on crime rates yet. Another approach might be to focus on asset inequality rather than income inequality. Both of these qualifications might make a more satisfactory case, but somehow they feel like patch-up jobs, the kind of ad hoc reasoning that give social scientists a reputation for finding ever more elaborate defences for pet theories that are contradicted by the facts.

There is, in relation to the inequality-causes-crime argument, an even more serious problem. This is that a large body of economic thinking suggests that the widening of inequality is one of the inevitable by-products of rapid economic growth in developing countries. There is no universal consensus on this, but if inequality really does tend to widen as economies expand, then we had better hope that it is not the principal reason we’re so violent because it isn’t going to get better soon.

Five ways to beat violent crime

South Africa’s problem is not the volume of crime, but its extraordinary violence. This has to shape the policy response, which should include:

This is an extract from Antony Altbeker’s new book, A Country at War with Itself (Jonathan Ball Publishers). Altbeker is a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies