Apartheid’s legacy of anti-black violence lingers

Pumlani Majavu

South is one of the most violent countries in the world.

The fact that some of the most violent crimes primarily play out in the historic Fanonian zones of nonbeing means that as a country we are yet to officially break away from our past white political order.

In a sense, the racial politics of the past coexist and are entangled with our present. Consequently, being black in South Africa still means that one is more likely to be a victim of violence.

One of the most tragic outcomes from the white political order of our past is the normalisation of anti-black violence. It made it normal to see black lives as lives that do not matter and hence disposable.

This normalisation has historically not only been limited to how whites view blacks, but also how blacks come to see each other. The purpose of normalising was to ensure that over time it became acceptable and, indeed normal, for all members of the society to see black life as lacking human worth.

Part of normalising anti-black violence deliberately involved the process of making the primary victims of violence to internalise their supposed disposableness.

According to Fanon, once internalised “black turns on black” it then becomes “not uncommon to see the colonised subject draw his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from another colonised subject”.

One of the important points that Fanon makes is that even though violence has been entrenched and normalised on black bodies and their communities it will not always be confined to blacks or where blacks reside. Inevitably, violence travels and affects zones of peace and order.

In our case, the violence that was meant to be restricted to the township is now truly a nation-wide problem that affects all of us – one way or the other.

If the greatest crime of the previous white political order was to make violence a core of who we are, then the greatest crime of our time has been the inability to address institutionalised inequality. And the inequalities of our time, much like who is likely to be a victim of violence in South Africa, are primarily along racial lines.

The people who continue to enjoy privileges of life in South Africa are white, while those who are disadvantaged are black. They are privileged because they are white; and others are disadvantaged because they are black. The point being that rather than class-inequalities what we have are racial inequalities. This argument, of course, is in line with Fanon’s suggestion of rethinking Marxism or class analysis when it comes to societies like ours.

One of the reasons why we have so much violence across the country is partly due to the failure to deal with these historic anti-black inequalities.

In fact, if one listens to the rhetoric of some of these violent criminals of our time, they seem to be using violence to create, in their criminal ways, an equilibrium of sorts.

The armed criminal men, incorrectly referred to as the mafia in media reports, who are disrupting construction sites etc often justify their criminality as a means of correcting an historic injustice.

They are telling us that they are carrying big guns and have resorted to these criminal formations because for so long they have watched the wealth of the country go to people who do not stay in their communities. In a sense, they have become these violent criminals because the country continues to think that certain blacks belong to perpetual suffering in the margins.

There is no doubt that these armed men are criminals. However, because they are criminals does not mean that they cannot think. Rather than being criminals at birth, they are thinking people who have, in more ways than one, been turned into immoral and violent criminals.

Criminals who have been properly taught that violence pays. Criminals that the rest of us, rightly so, fear and loath. But these violent criminals, at the end of the day, are products of a violent political order that has consistently demonstrated to them that violence, even at the risk of death, is rewarding.

As Fanon says, people can accept being dehumanised and marginalised for only a limited time. Sooner or later the ones who are in the margins find ways of responding to the violence that is confronting them.

For a society like ours that has been built on violence it is no wonder that those who have been violently placed on the margins will probably respond with and through violent means. As Fanon points out: “The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force”.

No, Fanon is not an apostle of violence. If he is an apostle of anything, he is one of moving away from violence. A careful reading of Fanon is that the violent order, both of the past and of our time, must be put to an end by a political order that recognises the human worth of all people.

It is a recognition that we cannot have white men who earn millions of rands while, down the road, blacks, probably in a ‘four-roomed’ house, or a shack knows not when or how the next meal will come.

We have a moral obligation to call out both the armed criminals who terrorise us on the streets as well those who impoverish our society – and thereby force people to resort to immoral and violent criminality.

* Dr Majavu teaches political studies and international relations at North-West University.

Cape Times