It is crucial we defeat our country’s culture of violence

I have a couple of childhood friends who spent their late teens living in countries such as Tanzania and Uganda. It wasn’t strictly out of choice but due to the political turmoil most of our country was undergoing in the latter part of the 1980s. 

Some had illegally skipped the country’s border fences in search of better education abroad, others had left in the hope of returning as trained freedom fighters, while others just wanted to escape the killing fields that many townships had become. 

They all tell fascinating tales about their individual experiences as political refugees in countries north of the Limpopo.

Some stories were told by friends who had lived in Mazimbu and Mgagao in Tanzania and invariably included two or more South African refugees arguing among themselves, often after a drinking spree at a local watering hole. 

The screaming match would soon escalate into a physical fight. In no time, broken bottles and knives would be drawn — each party in the conflict threatening to spill the other’s blood over whatever misunderstanding they might have had. 

As the friends told the story, one would find nothing out of the ordinary. Alcohol-fuelled knife fights were — and still are — a common occurrence in many of our townships, informal settlements and other areas inhabited mainly by the working poor and the unemployed.

Even now, police will tell you that a high percentage of the murders that occur between Friday night and Sunday take place in the vicinity of shebeens, taverns and other drinking centres, and often involve victims and perpetrators who know each other. 

What would be surprising though, from the stories, is how the Tanzanians often reacted. They would be shocked that individuals pulled knives on each other. To them, such weapons were not for maiming and killing other people but for slaughtering animals and other household-related chores. 

That a person would seek to fatally wound another just because that person accidentally spilt their beer or mocked their favourite South African team seemed scandalous to the generally peaceful Tanzanians.

They deemed it shocking that the South African refugees considered human life so cheap. 

Though far from home, these refugees — at least the ones who engaged in such violence — were prisoners of the violent past they purported to be fleeing from. They had been raised in neighbourhoods where disputes, no matter how insignificant, could easily degenerate into orgies of killing, and then be followed by revenge killings. 

Back then, when the contrast was made between how people in countries like Tanzania and Uganda viewed violence as opposed to we South Africans, it was with the hope that once our national conflict had been resolved, we would join other postcolonial societies whose citizens lived in relative peace.

That a person would seek to fatally wound another just because that person accidentally spilt their beer or mocked their favourite South African team seemed scandalous to the generally peaceful Tanzanians

But alas, despite our relatively peaceful transition to nonracial democracy some three decades ago, South Africa remains one of the most dangerous countries on the continent. In some instances our murder rate is higher than that of countries engaged in bloody civil wars. 

We can’t just blame this propensity to violence on our painful and bloody past. For then how do we explain the fact that it is much safer to walk the streets of Maputo and Luanda — two capital cities of countries that were hardest hit by civil wars in the southern African region — at night than it is to walk down Claim Street in Johannesburg during daylight? 

How do we explain the fact that in Kinshasa, the commercial capital of a sprawling country that has never really known peace, hardly anyone loses their lives for a cellphone? 

We might not have the Democratic Republic of Congo’s murderous Kadogos — child soldiers — but, as the Lusikisiki killing of 18 people in one household in the Eastern Cape reminds us, we have bandits who wantonly mow down entire families with high-calibre weapons. This in a country that has supposedly been at peace for 30 years. 

Now that the police minister, top national cops and Eastern Cape politicians have been to Ngobozana village in Lusikisiki, the scene of the harrowing incident, we are likely to soon collectively forget about this massacre — as we have forgotten about many other mass killings before it — and turn our attention to other headline-grabbing developments. It is what we do as South Africans and maybe that’s why we never seem to solve anything. 

Yet, along with high unemployment and extremely low economic growth, defeating the culture of violence should be uppermost in our minds. 

Though absolutely important, the battle will not be won by the police and courts alone. What is required is a society-wide effort whose main objective is to make the culture of violence as anathema to our communities as it is to those of Mazimbu, Mgagao and many other parts of our continent. 

The much spoken about national dialogue would be amiss in its task if it discussed everything economic and policy driven but failed to talk about how to end the culture of violence and make our country safe for all.