Lucky Dube's 'killers' heckled in court

South Africa: the land of honey and guns

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By Brilliant Mhlanga

LUCKY Dube. Slain for no cause. The police are saying that it was a botched case of car hijacking. It doesn’t matter now. Lucky Dube is gone.

This is the sad reality of living in South Africa today, a country that is supposed to be celebrating the strides made to arrest apartheid’s destruction of the social fabric and gains achieved so far; with the World Cup just by the corner.

South Africa, a country touted as the citadel of hope in democratic ideation, is in a state of social decay, with the future likely not to have anything to show except guns pointed at innocent people and graves of people whose lives are being wasted by their own.

We will remember Lucky Dube for his strong message as he prophesied his death, in a way, in his 2001 song, Crime and Corruption: “Do you ever worry about your house being broken into? Do you ever worry about your car being taken away from you … Do you ever worry about leaving home and coming back in a coffin, with a bullet through your head? So join us and fight this.”

Lucky Dube contributed strongly in the fight against apartheid, and was one of the shining bearers of South Africa’s liberation torch. He would have scarcely imagined he would be gunned down by his own. It is a case of a well orchestrated struggle, which then turns against its purveyors and begins to devour its children.

Lucky Dube is one of many souls that are just wasted in South Africa day in, day out. The question remains: how can one critically engage the South African internal social dynamics of crime and their genesis?

I have lived in South Africa for many years. Many Zimbabweans have been forced to migrate to South Africa in search of ‘greener’ pastures that almost always yield a high turn-over of coffins. For many, South Africa is a second home. But the violence and general crime rate have become worrisome.

In my engagement with respected South African colleagues, they have always told me that the future of South Africa cannot be defined by seeking to enact tough legislation to deal with those who commit such crimes. Capital punishment, of course, is fiercely rejected. Comparisons are drawn with Botswana which has a high crime rate, despite the threat of capital punishment.

It might also be helpful at this juncture to highlight that the problem of widespread use of fire arms in South Africa has its genesis in the apartheid era. It has now become wholly institutionalised. The spread of guns among the black townships in South Africa was not only based on the cause to fight in the struggle for freedom. It was a deliberate creation of the white apartheid system whose focus was that if you starve an African and deny him certain privileges, then you are assured that he will turn against fellow Africans.

Black-on-black violence and killings have become a big headache, particularly through the ‘tacitly encouraged’ system of gangs. All this was encouraged by the white apartheid system. The other way by which they encouraged widespread use of fire-arms was through security firms whose personnel were always hired as cheap labour from the locations.

Bank robbery has since become a big phenomenon; you would recall one of the first cases of bank robbery on April 28, 1971, which was later dubbed the ‘The Great Trust Bank Robbery’ (found in this website: http://www.africacrime-mystery.co.za/books/fsac/index.htm).

All this was aggravated by the fact that ordinary civilians who could easily access guns were now ready to use them for their day-to-day sustenance, and for most people it was to address their selfish ends of wanting to make a quick buck.

There are a lot of horror stories from the New South Africa. Take the case of Little Leshey who was killed by a stray bullet while she and her cousins were waiting by the gate for her mother to alight from the train from work.

What of the baby killed by a stray bullet while strapped on her mother’s back? The dramatic narrative presents the painful aspect of it; that when the mother felt wet on her back, she decided to change her baby’s nappy only to discover it was blood. That is when she realised her baby had been hit by a stray bullet during a shoot-out, and was already dead.

In another incident, a high school teacher was killed by a pupil.

The litany is inexhaustible. But it serves to show how lives continue to be wasted in South Africa. I believe that it is a direct backlash of the apartheid regime. Now it is made worse by the fact that the gap between the poor and the rich is widening in South Africa.

Unfortunately, in South Africa the open secret is that the economy is still in the hands of whites and a few Indians. This presents a very precarious position for most of my white colleagues who are afraid of openly agreeing that they are direct beneficiaries of a benevolent system which served their interests and oppressed the other.

In South Africa this has caused most propertied people to construct high walls, with electric fences and notices that read: ‘mind the vicious dogs inside’. This is a very common feature of the posh low density suburbs in South Africa. These people creating their own small kingdoms of peaceful existence, shut out from the violent reality of life outside.

President Thabo Mbeki was forced to admit: “We must also grieve the death of an outstanding South African and make a commitment that we shall continue to act together as a people to confront this terrible scourge of crime, which has taken the lives of too many of our people - and does so every day.”

Indeed it does so every day, and the future of South Africa lies squarely in the hands of South Africans.

Brilliant Mhlanga is a human rights activist and an academic. He can be contacted on e-mail: bsigabadem@yahoo.co.uk
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