One obstacle to understanding the shocking violence of South Africans is our enduring belief that we are different and special. From German gas chambers to the Russians in Chechnya, from America’s chemical warfare on Vietnamese civilians to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Darfur, there is sufficient evidence: people around the world behave like this — sometimes.
If people have a sufficient stake in the society, they tend not to burn it down and their fellow humans with them. But respect for law, institutions we can believe in and morality all help to keep mutual destruction at bay.
This calls for perpetual watchfulness. When we adopted our wonderful Constitution and when then president Nelson Mandela promised that never again would we see the oppression of one by another in South Africa, we should have committed to making these words true. Instead, job done, we retired complacently to bask in the ”miracle” that made us special.
The trouble with miracles is that they rely on faith while someone else does the hard work. We expected our leaders to deliver the kingdom of heaven. In April 1994 we believed we had been cured by the miracle of the elections. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission would cleanse our souls and all that remained was the technical problem of delivering the Reconstruction and Development Programme.
We were wrong and President Mandela was right years later when he called for an ”RDP of the soul”. There is too much anger to have been mopped up by one day of long queues and voting.
Life remains cheap and violence easy, effective and condoned by silence:
o The abuse of women and children is daily as violent as the recent attacks against foreign Africans. It is a guerrilla war waged against the majority; angry denials of this truth from the very top enable the shameful silence and consent manifested by South African men;
o When large numbers of (non-striking) security workers are attacked and killed during a strike and the union is silent or denies responsibility, then violence is legitimised as a means to social ends;
o When commuters torch trains because they are late and the residents of Merafong resist incorporation into North West Province with anarchy, then violence becomes an ordinary response to grievance.
The president of the ANC may decry the use of his ”umshini wami” song by mobs intent on murder; the truth is that the song glorifies violence for political ends, long after such violence had any justification. The song is out there for anyone with a grievance to use and it has the ruling party stamp of approval.
There is a rage that burns in our society and it flares to violence amongst the marginalised who have been untouched by the ”miracle”. The flares turned to brush fire, fanned by the winds of food inflation, slowing economic growth and the arrival of ever more refugees in already stressed communities.
Those of us not at risk of real poverty have much to account for. We really have not committed to the reduction of inequality and to the creation of a mind set that respects the law and the constitution and that values the worth of each individual.
As the ”miracle” has faded, the mood of the country has turned to meanness. This is most apparent in the white community.
We should not forget that in three decades from 1948 the white government declared black South Africans foreigners, then uprooted three million of these ”foreigners” (often at gunpoint) and dumped hundreds of thousands into ”homelands” without infrastructure, where their children died of malnutrition and lack of hope.
Tens of thousands of houses in ”black spots” were flattened in this biggest exercise in ethnic cleansing since World War II.
In the white community as a whole there is complete amnesia about this and other violence inflicted in their name and by their compatriots. The call is to forget the past. Justice means that whites should be left alone with their privilege and any attempt to redress the past is ”Apartheid in reverse” as if the government were herding them into ghettoes and stripping them of citizenship.
The white community has a long way to go in embracing a common humanity, but they are hardly alone in this respect.
As we find ”transformation” harder than we thought, the whole country has descended into finger pointing, blame and mutual insult. We are ultra leftists, or counter-revolutionaries or racists or coconuts. The rhetoric remains one of good against evil: appropriate for a liberation struggle, but not for a mature democracy.
It is a small step from ”coconut” to kwerekwere to inflammable alien.
It seems that the violence has been controlled — for now. But if we think that it is the work of a few criminals and that ”we are not like that”, we will be mistaken. If we continue to believe in the miracle and our right to a special place in the world, we will be mistaken.
We are a flawed and highly unequal society and as a nation we are angrier and more violent than most, with fault lines that can crack wide open and leave us one foot fall from the abyss.
We must work at becoming what we claimed we were in 1994: a generous nation committed to a better life and basic respect for all. We may ask this of our leaders, but we must demand it of ourselves and our fellow citizens.
Otherwise we will soon enough look at the next tragedy and ask: ”How could this happen? We are not like that—”
Cedric de Beer is managing director of a development finance institution. He writes in his personal capacity