Thirty years ago, dreams of freedom gave people the strength to fight oppression; now let the blood-letting end, says Hamilton Wende.
Johannesburg - I remember it so well. February 1985. The daylight fading over the Cape Flats as the protests in Crossroads by shack-dwellers, then called “squatters”, against their removal began to ebb.
All day, we journalists had witnessed running battles between protesters, who threw rocks, and a thin line of policemen who fired rubber bullets, tear gas and birdshot in response.
It was a classic confrontation between the white-ruled apartheid state and disenfranchised, poverty-stricken black youths. I was a rookie reporter then, working on my third or fourth story as a young soundman for BBC News.
I was shocked, and frightened by the violence, and I remember noticing that at least half the policemen firing at the youths were black. At the time, it was a detail we would gloss over. Black police firing at black youths didn’t fit the narrative of the struggle for liberation from white supremacy.
Now, 30 years later, and post Marikana, it is clear that it is a crucial fact to point out. The country burns now almost constantly with xenophobic attacks on foreign shopkeepers, violent service delivery protests, and lawless mayhem over provincial boundary disputes.
The response from the police is hopelessly clumsy and brutal, and so the cycle of attack and counter-attack repeats itself, over and over again. None of this violence has anything to do with the struggle against white supremacy.
We, all of us, black and white, share a legacy of brutality. It certainly has its roots in the armed conquest and domination of this country by a white minority.
But it would be absurd to suggest that South Africa was some idyllic haven of peace before the arrival of white settlers. Violence is bred into our bones like it is for all humanity but, somehow, we South Africans seem incapable of transcending it, of finding ways to resolve our problems without the threat of physical brutality.
There are a number of sociological reasons for this: ongoing poverty; the division between rich and poor and the shocking state of our education system, which leaves young people unfit for working in an economy that has little ability to absorb them anyway, leaving them angry, directionless, often hopeless.
There is, however, something deeper we need to address. Other societies are riven with income disparities, other societies have broken education systems and dysfunctional economies, but very few, other than the narco-autocracies of Latin America or the psychotic delusionaries of extremists in the Middle East, have such horrifying rates of cruelty towards other human beings.
Late that afternoon, 30 years ago, as the sun began to set, and the lambent clarity of the Cape summer twilight glowed in the air, the blue-clad ordinary policemen withdrew.
For a few moments, silence hung in the air, and then the sound of diesel engines at high revs, surrounded us. A convoy of armoured Casspirs roared past us.
Inside were men dressed in camouflage uniforms – the riot police, many of them Koevoet soldiers fresh from the Angolan border. They circled the vehicles into a laager. This was a moment of war.
The officers jumped down from the vehicles and conferred for a few minutes. There was the crackle of radios, and the officers climbed back inside, then they roared off in different directions, towards the shacks.
Moments later, two or three of them stopped in the middle of an alleyway between the shacks. A murderous hail of shotgun fire erupted from the inside of the Casspirs. Then silence descended again. The police jumped out of the vehicles and began pulling blood-soaked corpses from between the shacks. We counted seven bodies.
That night in the shacks was a turning point in the lives of the youths. In the bare, candlelit darkness, they crossed an ancient threshold of human choice: blood lust must be met with blood lust.
Early the next morning when we filmed the protests, there were no longer just rocks being thrown, the low whine of pellet guns and the sharp crack of 9mm pistols being fired at the police echoed through the chaos.
Today, we are a nation haunted by that threshold, by that dark night between the arrival of the Casspirs, the shooting of the youths and the morning of the pellet guns.
We are a people drunk with the rage and hope that blood lust brings.
Then, the violence was understandable – the response of the oppressed to meet the ruthlessness of their oppressors, and to overthrow them. There could be no negotiating then. Hostile force was a Fanonesque necessity to liberate a people.
Liberation demands a level of brutality and excess. It was, as Nelson Mandela said when he began the armed struggle, “useless and futile to continue talking about peace and non-violence to a government whose only response is savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people”.
Freedom requires balance, tolerance, restraint and understanding. It requires education, open-mindedness and respect for others. They all seem such trite clichés and yet, without them, we will sink.
Thirty years on from that night in Crossroads, we are imprisoned by the mythology of liberation. The blood-letting continues unabated, and yet, we live in a democratic, open society. We have a generation of nihilists who have no need of liberation but still have no understanding of freedom.
Thirty years on. We have too many leaders, including our president, who have not educated this generation in the necessary truths of freedom. They are now unable to halt the cycle of violence that is our horrifying legacy as South Africans, because they are trapped in the hopes and agonies of the liberation past, drawing us all down with them. They cannot conceive of a future beyond themselves. We will have to do that for them.
* Hamilton Wende is a Joburg-based commentator, freelance writer author and television producer. He has covered wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In television he has worked for a number of international networks including the BBC, NBC, ABC (Australia), SBS (Australia), NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Al Jazeera English and a number of others.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Star