South African Façade Crumbles

             Many of us who have traveled widely in Africa have been asked to recommend a first place to go on the continent by new Africa sojourners.  I often say Egypt or Kenya, but many will suggest they go to South Africa because it is the most Western-friendly, with many modern conveniences, numerous English speakers, many great hotels and museums and Western food choices along with Africa fare.  I often refer to it as “Africa lite” for those very reasons. 

However, recent events in South Africa have revealed the truth: despite the notable heroism of Nelson Mandela, his fellow liberation leaders and the success in the movement for majority rule, South Africa is a deeply divided nation between haves and have-nots and those who embrace democracy and those who favor a more authoritarian style of government that loots this nation’s vast resources and economic opportunities.  And the façade of a country whose people all enjoy the blessings they have in abundance has now been ripped away in a fury of violence from within.

During the waning years of apartheid, many families refused to accept what was known as a Bantu education, which training steered their children to be servants and manual laborers.  This noble effort to resist ongoing pigeonholing of the black children carried a heavy price, though.  A whole generation or more now lacks the skills to succeed in the modern economy.  Many of them have become school dropouts with few skills to use in the labor market.  Faced with widespread unemployability, many young people took to drugs and criminality. Drug abuse has emerged recently as the most worrying problem among the country's youth, but the existence of a violent criminal element in South Africa has existed for some time, though it hadn’t shown itself as dramatically as the scenes of burning and looting witnessed in the past couple of weeks.

According to Statistics South Africa, a government agency, income inequality has remained constant despite majority rule being established in the mid-1990s.  In fact, the World Bank estimates that income inequality in South Africa is the worst in the world.  Moreover, one of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns only added to the economic woes for the average South Africa, and unemployment in the country reached 32.6 percent in the first quarter of this year and 46.3 percent among youth under 35.  According to other estimates, about 43 percent of people aged 15-65 can't tind jobs, and about two-thirds of the unemployed are below the age of 34.

 

            The growing poverty in South Africa only added fuel to a simmering political crisis that resulted in the rioting and looting that gripped certain areas of the country recently, particularly the provinces of Gauteng and Kwa-Zulu Natal.  The proximate cause for the violence was the arrest and incarceration of former President Jacob Zuma.  Long rumored to be involved in widespread corruption, Zuma turned himself in, but his supporters evidently expected that the threat of violence would prevent him from being jailed and would render him immune from any government effort to bring him to justice for the  crimes with which he has been charged.

Many observers cannot understand why the government was unprepared for what has happened in the country, shown to the world in numerous videos of people looting and stores and warehouses burning.  Initially, 2,500 law enforcement officers were called out to handle the increasingly ferocious situation.  Defense Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula subsequently requested around 25,000 more soldiers to be deployed on the streets.

            Violence against tourists and residents has long caused some areas around Johannesburg to become criminal-controlled, such as Hillbrow.  Crime statistics show that Hillbrow is one of the most dangerous places to live in; at any time these days, one can be murdered there.  Hillbrow is Johannesburg’s inner city.  It is mainly comprised of African immigrants, who have been victims of xenophobic violence in South Africa for quite some time.  It now suffers from high levels of population density, unemployment, poverty, prostitution and crime.  But my first visit to the area was quite different.

            In 1992, I was introduced to the African restaurant Ayavaya by friends.  It was in a trendy part of Hillbrow, and I promised myself I would return for the wide selection of non-South Africa continental food when I returned to South Africa.  Two years later when I returned for a conference I had organized in the outer suburb of Rosewood, I traveled to Hillbrow to the restaurant to find it had gone, as did the surrounding businesses.  The little mall where the restaurant and a travel agency had sat side-by-side were not only gone, but the area looked like a war zone.

            On every visit to South Africa since the 1994 elections, I have been warned about rampant crime – from a higher level of rape than in any country without an ongoing civil war to carjackings and home invasions in which victims were often slaughtered.  If one was careful, you could visit South Africa safely, but then I had the advantage of U.S. Government protection as a Congressional staff member or USAID official.  Many other visitors were not so fortunate.  So, the “secret” of criminality in South Africa has long been known, even if most of the violence we read or heard about was directed by South Africans toward immigrants from elsewhere in Africa.

            Many of these immigrants were professional people or those with entrepreneurial skills forced out of their countries by persecution of some kind.  However, many of them were more highly educated and had more business savvy than indigenous South Africans.  For example, Zimbabweans driven out of their country for various ethnic or economic reasons prospered in South Africa to such an extent that the banking industry in South Africa came to be dominated by people coming from their northern neighbor.  In poor rural or exurban areas populated by African immigrants, most had their own shops for residents to purchase necessities.  Unfortunately, during one visit to South Africa, I was told that shopkeepers in the cities resented the competition and sometimes paid unemployed youth to attack and burn the stores for immigrants so the customers would have to go to town to shop.  Again, this kind of violence was never given the international coverage the recent looting and burning received.

            A great deal of focus is being given to the political cause for the recent spate of violence.  There is certainly justification for such attention, but South Africa has long been a powder keg waiting for a spark.  I have seen this in Washington, DC.  In the 1968 riots touched off by Martin Luther King’s assassination, there was looting a burning that looked a lot like what I saw in South Africa, and the reaction of the looters in Washington demonstrated that they had no commitment to Rev. King’s nonviolent struggle for economic justice — just an opportunistic effort to steal products to sell, which people did for days afterward on the streets of Washington. 

In the South Africa explosion of looting, those who spoke to the press in between clearing shelves of food, clothes, furniture, appliances and electronic goods often said they had been hungry for too long and joined in the looting so they wouldn’t miss the opportunity to grab necessities before they were all gone and might not be available for sale anytime soon.

            Current South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told reporters recently that he believed the violence was a political tactic.

“It is quite clear that all these incidents of unrest and looting were instigated, there were people who planned it and coordinated it,” he said.  “We are going after them, we have identified a good number of them, and we will not allow anarchy and mayhem to just unfold in our country.”

Certainly, the South African government can’t allow lawlessness promoted by Zuma supporters to overcome due process and the rule of law.  Impunity among the governing class has been a problem in South Africa for some time, and if Zuma were to get an easier sentence or be released early due merely due to the violence and threat of more would undo what so many liberation leaders fought and died for.

Nevertheless, a political response alone will not help restore peace and stability in South Africa.  People there are suffering, and the government must focus at least some of its attention on helping the chronically unemployed and those mired in poverty.  The grandmothers and youth carrying goods out of stores apparently were not trying to free Zuma.  They were trying to get what the economy didn’t allow them to pay for.