For a nation whose past 50 years or so have been shaped by its intimate love affair with the gun, it is truly amazing how one junior minister’s call to use guns for what they were created can cause such a fuss.
Ever since the apartheid government demonstrated at Sharpeville in 1960 that it would preserve the lie of white supremacy by any means necessary, the gun has been the motif that was to define almost half of the century.
For the oppressors it was a tool of preservation, for the oppressed it was a symbol of redemption. The gun was therefore a necessary tool for all involved in the drama of South African life.
One could ask, what’s changed? In my view, very little.
We need a gun-toting hero now as much as we did when Robben Island was not an amusement park. That is why some among us resurrect military men, such as Koos de la Rey and Chris Hani, totems personifying a better life for all. Just as during the teargas and jackboot age, we still have heroes and villains.
There are still those whose intention is to preserve civilisation as we know it. Instead of the rooi gevaar used by apartheid to justify why the bastards had to be shot, we have criminal gangs intent on subverting the laws.
Like their rooi gevaar counterparts of yesteryear, they too are armed to the teeth and are prepared to kill or be killed in the advancement of their cause, however nefarious their vocation might be.
In all these things we have become just like George Bush’s United States. Deputy Safety and Security Minister Susan Shabangu is our Donald Rumsfeld. Instead of al-Qaeda or whatever other incarnation of evil the Bush administration sees everywhere, the devil troubling our souls is the organised criminal gangs that lurk everywhere.
As in the US, fear and loathing have become to South Africans a political manifesto easily sellable to a desperate and terrified citizenry. We have no time to engage in a chicken-and-egg debate about why we’re in this situation. Regardless of how impressive their reasons, the criminals now have us scared.
Shabangu’s call for police to shoot criminals when they threaten lives speaks to our gut.
The mild tempered among us would rather Shabangu en gage in quiet diplomacy with gun-toting criminals. In this view those charged with ensuring we sleep peacefully might be too dumb to understand her and act with a high hand.
But it is a crisis.
The political discourse might have changed radically in the past 18 years, but the reasons we fell in love with guns back then are with us today in this modern constitutional democracy.
We live with the same fear as we did in those years that gave birth to colourful phrases such as ”year of the great storm”.
Even the ”home of the free and land of the brave” lives with the fear that causes the liberal Democrats’ presidential wannabe, Hilary Clinton, to use a picture of her opponent wearing ”Muslim” gear as proof that America will be an unsafe country if he is elected.
Spare a thought then for us in South Africa who don’t have to debate or imagine whether our terrorists are real.
For the purpose of this column it is neither here nor there whether the redemptive powers of the gun are real or imagined. They are perceived by a great many to be there and history confirms this point.
Speaking out against Shabangu’s call misses the point.
Shabangu has spoken for all of us who live in fear and want to hear somebody say something. Or even better, want to see somebody do something.
We don’t know exactly what that ”something” is, but our collective history as the oppressed and the oppressors reminds us that shooting the bastards (they being those fighting on the opposite end of your political aspirations) always made us feel better.
Our calendar is dotted with dates marked by blood and bullets. March 21, June 16 and even Reconciliation Day, December 16, coincides with the founding of Umkhonto weSizwe. It is also the day, in 1838, that Impi ya se Ncome, known elsewhere as the Battle of Blood River, took place. It was the holiday previously celebrated as the Day of the Vow/ Day of the Covenant, or just simply Dingaan’s Day.
The great Nelson Mandela was rejected when, upon returning from prison, he urged the people of KwaZulu-Natal to throw their guns into the sea. Without them saying it in as many words, they said that the reasons they had acquired the guns in the first place still persisted.
Give us sustainable peace and we will give up our guns, they said, in a roundabout way.
Today those of us still around have become petrified about what might happen while we sleep or watch television with our families, repeating the messages our people first entertained when they counted the scores of men, women and children sprawled in the dust at Sharpeville.
Given everything we have seen, show us why shooting the bastards cannot make the situation any better than it is now. Perhaps then we will think of more humane ways to deal with them.