History has shown us that people will behave as badly as they are allowed to. From Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and Rwanda during the genocide, we have seen how ordinary people are capable of extraordinary acts of callousness and brutality.
This week I saw it in Jeppestown. The police station was inundated with people fleeing the terror unleashed by the mobs, many of them women with tiny babies in their arms, others bleeding and torn. As the police valiantly tried to assist this human flood, taxis packed to capacity kept pulling up right to the steps of the station, blasting mbaqanga music. The passengers would leap out, blow their vuvuzelas, dance and jeer at the refugees, before speeding away. The way they acted right in the faces of a veritable army of cops in full riot gear gave me some insight into how they might be acting a few blocks away as they looted and burned.
Mobs fired on police with machine guns and engaged them in running battles in the city’s streets. In Marshall Street and Main Street they ripped out security gates with crowbars and climbed through shopfronts, helping themselves to everything from takkies to TVs. As police helped foreign nationals remove their belongings before they were looted, onlookers laughed and promised they’d be living in those houses by nightfall.
Trembling men, with blood pouring from gashes in their heads, told how looters stoned their houses, broke down their doors and — like a swarm of locusts — stole everything, including cooking oil, clinic cards, chest freezers and asylum-seeker documents.
Although there is no doubt that we, the people of this nation, have conveniently forgotten huge chunks of our history — and do not have the grace or compassion to help those who once showed us generosity — there is more to these attacks than just xenophobia.
South Africa has a culture of impunity, with a high level of intolerance for “otherness”, and the combination is deadly.
From the regular murder of lesbians to the staggeringly high rate at which women are beaten and children raped, it is clear that we are a society that believes might is right.
This thuggishness is best illustrated by the taxi industry: where else in the world can vehicles transporting members of the public drive into oncoming traffic because they refuse to queue at traffic lights? Where else would taxi drivers dare to blockade a national highway, assault motorists and attack the Metro police for having the audacity to try to regulate them and their death wagons? Their mafia-like sense of their own power plays itself out on taxis and at ranks — where women are routinely abused and recently even stripped and sexually assaulted. They do these things because there are no consequences.
To date it appears no one has been prosecuted for the attack on Nwabisa Ngcukana or the N1 blockade. Instead, when women marched on the ranks under police escort, men dropped their trousers, bared their bottoms and thrust their penises at them, threatening more violence if the women failed to adhere to the dress code they imposed.
And the taxi drivers are not alone — we are not a law-abiding nation. This is evident from our failure to comply with basic bylaws, from slumlords who allow buildings to decay as they squeeze more out of the poor to the guy who eats his Kentucky chicken then turfs the box of bones out of his car window at a busy intersection. Of course, it also plays itself out more seriously in places like Khayelitsha, where rampant crime continues to devastate the community and where rape, murder and robbery are so commonplace that many residents have given up reporting them.
Statistics tell us that just over 10% of rapes are reported. Of these only 14% result in prosecution and the conviction rate is just 8%.
So helpless do we feel that when people report crimes such as a car theft or burglary, it is generally only because insurance companies require a police case number to process a claim and not because there is any hope of actually tracking down the perpetrators. For criminals it’s a low-risk, high-gain proposition with very little deterrent.
We also have the world’s highest incidence of road rage — because the average yob in a 4×4 or a BMW knows there is a slim chance of retribution if he were to get out of his car and punch or harass another driver.
Even the rate at which our cops are murdered tells its own story.
In most countries, from America to Angola, killing a policeman is unthinkable and criminals know that doing so will invoke the full wrath of the law. Last year we killed 108 officers, eight times higher than in the United States.
A Mozambican man told me how the mob had ripped the little woolly hat off his baby’s head. And why shouldn’t they? Who will stop them? For every looter shot with a rubber bullet, 10 others will enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labour. Those are damned good odds.
This week the victims are foreigners. Next week it may be gays. Or Muslims.