The pathology of violence, the pathos
It’s a deep cultural malaise in our country. Why we think it’s worse than it is, is difficult to identify. We know only that it traps us and it saddens us
Africans are obsessed with crime. It looms large because although it disproportionately affects poor black people, it also affects enough middleclass people for it to have become a “national question”. It looms larger still in our collective imagination as something that is done by the oppressed to the oppressors.
This is false, of course. Criminals come from all walks of life, but the violence “the nation” fears erupts from the poor and the downtrodden and finds its targets among the guilty and the rich.
Indeed, as Johnny Steinberg suggests, crime is not just crime. In The
he suggests “the very idea of banditry has always been a deeply unsettling phenomenon; it tampers with the boundary between acquisitive crime and political nobility; it hovers ambivalently between an aspiration to social equality and an antisocial violence”.
In other words, South Africans are caught between forgiving crime and violence because we understand that the divides in our society are unsustainable and abhorring violence because we fear that ours will be the next throat to be slit.
We worry that crime comes from the pathological need for historical vengeance. And because the national questions of race and reconciliation have yet to be resolved, we secretly forgive one another even the most heinous of crimes because we recognise that apartheid did a number on us all and that there is much unfinished business. The question, of course, is how long this business can remain an agenda item that we never manage to address.
Although it is not, South Africa has been described as the rape capital of the world. About 64 000 rapes were reported to the police. In the US, whose population is seven times bigger than ours, that figure stood at 90 000 rapes last year. Our murder rate is four and a half times the global average and too many of those killed are kids: three children were murdered every day in this country last year.
We are told things are getting better. Official figures from the SAPS indicate the murder rate has dropped by half in the past 20 years. Theoretically, then, we are a far safer society today than we were at the end of apartheid.
The problem is that few South Africans actually believe this. If you ask most South Africans – regardless of race – if one of the dividends of democracy has been increased physical freedom, they are likely to answer “no”.
Although crime has consistently decreased, surveys regarding the perceptions of crime show that people don’t believe this to be the case. South Africans feel unsafe, even though they are ostensibly living with less crime.
This lag between the experience of crime and the perception of it is a global phenomenon, but in our context, it feels more deeply embedded in our body politic.
Some people argue that government statistics do not reflect the truth; that crime is not decreasing and that people sense this through the daily experiences of assault that confront them wherever they go.
This is unlikely. Even discounting the possibility of state manipulation of police figures, experts on crime agree that violence is no longer at the levels experienced in the early 1990s.
In part, this was to be expected. The scale of violence would have been difficult to sustain outside a conflict zone.
So there is no question that, at least to some degree, crime has decreased. The question then becomes why, regardless of this decline, so many South Africans, across race and class lines, continue to feel so physically insecure.
The obvious answer is that violence in South Africa signifies a deeper malaise. It operates as a stand-in for declining levels of trust in those who we thought had liberated us forever more, and to a large degree, it serves as a foil, a way for those who are wealthy and have maintained the economic status quo to avoid culpability for their financial sins.
In contemporary South Africa, rage is our lingua franca. It increasingly accents the exchanges between the freedom fighters and the comrades and it has become the clarion call of the disaffected.
Violence serves as the battle cry of both the haves and the have-nots. It has become the currency for power invoked to denote both political radicalism and economic might. We are a nation beholden to criminals; we hate them and yet we cannot ignore the contexts that create them.
We are caught, it seems, between the devil and the deep blue sea.