KGAUGELO MASWENENG | My peaceful village caught the spark of violence. Why?

It’s bad enough dealing with the challenges of the Covid pandemic, the stresses and strains of job losses and, to add fuel to that fire, the political instability around former president Jacob Zuma’s arrest.

The lockdowns have been strenuous and are not unlike an emotional pressure cooker.

Before all of this, as a South African, you could wake up, be assured that you would work hard, earn a living and be relatively be certain of your safety. It feels as though the uncertainties are starting to outweigh the certainties.

The mood in the country is that of being gatvol and as a result some have resorted to violence, a common method of expression in our history. Last week we watched our screens in shock at the images of the lootings in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

This has trickled down to other parts of the country and some communities are catching the spark.

Last Friday, at around 10pm when my family were sitting around the fire chatting up a storm in my village, Dennilton, we heard a mob shouting from across the street. This was strange for a village so peaceful and relatively crime-free.

What transpired was contrary to our way of living. We are not a violent community nor one that unites around acts of crime, especially mob justice. Naturally, the men in our yard peeped out and tried to see what was happening. They were told the mission was to go to all the homes where foreign nationals lived and chase them out.

Chase them out they did, because on Saturday morning groups of foreign nationals were at the roadside hitchhiking, where to, no-one knows.

Some of these people work as herdsmen, while others reside in houses in the area. Those homes were left empty and locked.

For a community that has never had a real problem with foreign nationals, this was strange.

I asked myself, what could have gone through their minds and convinced them to take such a drastic step? It made me wonder how we lived so peacefully for years, and yet overnight a mob mobilised and our neighbours became the enemy.

Some claimed it emanated from a rumour that one of the foreign nationals had held someone’s goat and its kids hostage at a RDP house he was renting.

Then it became clear, the goat allegation was neither here nor there. The villagers were giving in to the mood of the country and this was how they could vent their frustrations.

Though they did not harm anyone physically, the experience must have been traumatic for the victims.

People were angry and triggered. Every bush was on fire and none of us could have contained it, even if we wanted to.

The local police spokesperson, Sgt Inanda Selala, said no cases were opened and the police knew nothing about it. “There’s nothing in black and white about the alleged incident,” he said.

This, of course, is not an unfamiliar situation, as the police were also nowhere to be seen in most places where businesses were being reduced to ash.

This fire started off as a spark but it caught on, and with the way political winds are blowing in the country, it became difficult to douse the flames.  With Cape Town also experiencing a different form of violence, in the form of taxi wars, what more is to come?

Then I rested on this thought: violence breeds violence.

Political analyst Ralph Mathekga was right in saying the looting was largely due to the socio-economic situation in the country.

“There is a political culture in this country that violence always accompanies protests, whether it’s a service delivery protest or a protest about a child that has gone missing or killed,” he said. 

“Everybody knows that looting goes with socio-economic conditions. It’s not justifiable, but let’s take it as a factor and understand it,” he said.