Sjamboks were wielded during a recent protest at a Stellenbosch agricultural college.
The sjambok, that most vicious of South African whips, seems to be mounting a slow but steady comeback.
In recent months, the sjambok, a bastardised name taken from the Malay cambuk, has been dominating front-page headlines, think pieces and video clips depicting personal, political and public violence.
On Wednesday this week, the Star newspaper led with the headline “Deadly sjambokking” on a story about how Patrick Wisani, an ANC Youth League chairperson for innercity Jo’burg, had allegedly assaulted his girlfriend with a sjambok and killed her.
A few days earlier, two black members of the South African Navy in Cape Town were arrested for driving alongside white cyclists and sjambokking them. One of the victims was a biochemistry professor from Stellenbosch University.
At the beginning of September, following protracted negotiations over the Elsenburg Agricultural Training Institute’s language policy, violence broke out between the students during a related strike.
One student, who had featured in the film Luister, detailing how beer had been poured on him by a white male at a Stellenbosch club for dancing with a white woman, was one of those identified as having sjambokked white students during the scuffle.
In the ensuing week, there were also conflicting reports about how Land Reform Deputy Minister Mcebisi Skwatsha was sjambokked by youth league delegates at a recent elective conference in the Free State. Skwatsha has since denied it and said his bodyguards had prevented an “attempted” sjambokking.
The sjambok was also seen among the flying bricks and fists during recent violence between students on the campuses of the Tshwane University of Technology.
In November last year, following public violence in Cape Town, activist and writer Sisonke Msimang wrote a piece on the diaspora blog Africa is a Country, titled How to Use a Sjambok and Other Lessons from the South African Frontlines.
At the time of her writing, Cape Town had taken centre stage as a microcosm of the defilement of black dignity. In January last year, 19-year-old white model Djavan Arrigone urinated on a black taxi driver, Michelle Nomgcana, from the balcony of the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Claremont. When confronted by security guards, Arrigone allegedly told the guards that “I can pee anywhere I want to, and I don’t care if it is on a black man.”
In the blog article, Msimang recapped the sjambokking of Cape Town resident Muhammed Makungwa by a white man, who was driving a BMW X5, and the attack on Cynthia Joni by Tim Osrin, who later explained that he thought she was a sex worker.
Makungwa’s “crime” was to be running at 7am. Makungwa’s attacker, Jan van Tonder, a dentist working for the South African National Defence Force, having satisfied himself that his victim was not the thief who had broken into his car, later gave him a lift to his employers.
Johannes Horn and Musa Kheswa of the SA Navy are accused of drive-by sjambokking attacks on seven people. (The Times)
Msimang’s article, which preceded the #RhodesMustFall movement and the subsequent framing of violence in therapeutic terms, is illuminating in that it places the current ubiquity of violent, politically tinged confrontations in the wider context of everyday South African life.
Msimang said it was apt that the sjambok emerged in all these different acts of violence.
“Fact is often more poignant than fiction in South Africa, so historical symbols come back to us for a reason. They re-emerge so that we do not forget where we have been, but also because, in the case of the sjambok, it is sort of embedded into our body politic.
“A sjambok is crafted to inflict maximum damage and was originally intended for use on animals. Its use on humans, of course, is not just deadly, it’s dehumanising.”
The etymology of the word is also instructive. Its Malaysian origins suggest its use was a staple of daily life in places under the heel of the VOC (the Dutch East India Company), which set up the colony in the Cape.
The sjambok continued to morph, from being used to drive oxen during the Great Trek to being a powerful symbol of apartheid violence.
The Pan Africanist Congress president, Robert Sobukwe, acknow-ledged this in an interview with the Africanist in 1959.
“We do not hate the European because he is white. We hate him because he is an oppressor. And it is plain dishonesty to say I hate the sjambok and not the one who wields it.”
Msimang said, although she understood and empathised with the sentiments expressed by sections of the student movement, and was, in fact, proud of them, she felt uneasy about violence.
“This is not because I don’t accept that there is indeed the quiet and loud violence of everyday existence. I am uneasy because, unless you have the ability to sustain violence over a long period and wage a multifaceted campaign that has significant human resources, it simply isn’t a viable option and you will be crushed by a system that has the means to crush you violently. Forever.”
Referring to the case reported recently by the Star, Msimang said it revealed the “long history of nationalist movements using the violence [enacted] on African men’s bodies by colonialism as an excuse for their violence against African women”.
Black Elsenburg students maintain that the confrontation captured on video, featuring sjambokking and fisticuffs, misrepresented the violence that took place on September 1, but its impact has been fruitful.
“It was a [white] lecturer that first slapped me, striking the first blows. The video doesn’t show everything,” said Liphelo Mpumlwana, a student.
She said the students had been supported by the Economic Freedom Fighters on that day, and that the sjamboks were being carried not because violence was being anticipated but because of their symbolic cultural value at black gatherings.
They only later morphed into violent tools in self-defence, she said.
“The incidents of that day have got us moving a step forward in that our demands [about the language policy] are being taken seriously. South Africa is in such a chaotic situation that we have to be forceful in getting our demands heard by white people. We have to protest like it’s apartheid times to get our demands heard.”
Asked about the use of the sjambok, political activist Andile Mngxitama, himself a victim of violence during his political career, said: “The question for me is how black people are responding directly to the white body with violence. That to me signifies a bigger shift in the psyche of the nation.
“We are, I think, heading towards a confrontation where the white body will not be spared as has been the case.”