On a recent gorgeous South African spring night, leaving a close friend’s house after a dinner party, I commented on how wonderful it was that the street light outside their house was working for once and that the bicycle patrol guard had arrived to see me safely to my home one block away.
Five minutes later, my host was lying in a pool of his own blood. As he and his wife stood on the pavement saying goodnight to another guest, a car sped around the corner and three men jumped out, one throwing the guest on to the ground and grabbing for his wallet and cellphone. Our host’s wife turned back towards the house to phone the police. One of the men pointed his gun at her and her husband tackled him before he could shoot her in the back. Seconds later two shots rang out and my friend was hit.
What do you call men like this — hoodlums, hooligans, gangsters, gunmen, thugs? A thug is a person inclined to treat another roughly, murderously. In fact, today in South Africa we have a growing element of people who, because of the level of brutality they exhibit, could be classified as feral in their actions — feral meaning wild and untamed, as defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English.
These words, wild and untamed, make me think of the Wild West and therefore what it took to ”tame” the West. Back in the days before government people had to protect themselves. They acted as individuals and families, doing whatever it took to protect their loved ones and their property. Both in the outlying areas and the towns, men would arm themselves and be ready when the outlaws came through. And I am sure this situation is common to all humanity wherever government is weak or does not exist.
This type of behaviour doesn’t happen anymore, either in the West or anywhere else for that matter. This is because most societies have turned this role over to the state. A government’s prime responsibility is viewed as being the safety and security of its people.
In South Africa our Constitution protects the right to life, freedom and security and the policies that flow from it are supposedly aimed at combating crime so that everyone can feel safe and secure. Surprisingly, a reading of this widely acclaimed document has only three short sentences in the Bill of Rights when it comes to the rights in respect of life, freedom and security. It does, however, have more than a page of rights for those arrested, detained and accused.
So even though the state might have proclaimed this role for itself — and without having an emotional and ultimately pointless debate about the statistics — everyone living here, whether young or old, rich or poor, black or white, knows that the words of the state are becoming hollower by the day.
At the same time, as citizens we have been warned that it is not our prerogative to take back this role, at which the state is so utterly failing. We are told not to take the law into our own hands, and where it finally does happen, the people doing so are accused of vigilantism.
Hence we form community watches and join policing forums, we meet as neighbourhoods to try to agree to put all manner of extra measures in place. My host had spent an enormous amount of time working with the neighbours to put extra measures in place because of a similar incident he and his neighbours had experienced a year ago. And we were finally beginning to breathe a bit more easily in our neighbourhood because of his efforts.
But now he is lying in hospital and our emerging hopes of a safer neighbourhood have been dashed. So it is at this point when the thoughts of ”fleeing” start to flood into people’s minds, because it is becoming harder and harder to delude ourselves that this government will ever fulfil its role and prevent South Africa from descending into a feral state.
Mary Tomlinson, a housing policy analyst, is a Visiting Fellow at the Graduate School of Public and Development Management at Wits. This article is written in her personal capacity