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South Africans: Sick, violent people

Are we psychologically sick, violent people? Our President says so. We repeatedly hear that we have the world record for rape, our murder rate makes headlines annually, violent crime is in the headlines daily.

Does this all stem from apartheid as suggested by the President?

We have had centuries of violence in South Africa. In recent times many people grew up with bodies on the streets; children viewed necklacings, we had violent protests and massacres caused by the security police. We have had had families torn apart by the need to earn money and the migrant labour system that developed. Unfortunately the advent of democracy did not mean that violence stopped and we are almost routinely informed of more atrocities.

Often these horrors are committed by ordinary citizens on their fellow citizens. On a more intimate level, numerous children grow up with domestic violence, with substance abuse and all sorts of misery with little safety in their homes or schools. South Africa is not a kind country.

Apartheid itself was a violent, brutal systematic dehumanisation of most of the population. Generations of people grew up in this country knowing that they were inferior to whites. This affects the way people view themselves. Steve Biko discussed this in I write what I like. When talking about the impact of white power on black people, he referred to “… a kind of black man who is man only in form. This is the extent to which the process of dehumanisation has advanced” (Biko, 2004, p. 30).

This type of damage does not repair in a generation or two. People may know intellectually that everyone has value and should be valued; it is a lot harder to know it emotionally. Parents who have had their humanity damaged have to work very hard to not pass on the pain they have experienced to their children.

Inter-generational trauma is an area of study that developed in the investigation of the effects on the children of parents who were in the Holocaust. We are finding examples of inter-generational trauma in South Africa.

Whites are not except from the damage wrought by apartheid. We have been damaged in our moral fibre. How do you participate in the systemic damaging of millions of people and think you were not touched? Biko quoted Karl Jaspers: “There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant.”

Our very denial says we are still too close to acknowledge the damage it has done to us. We take refuge in statements such as: “I was always good to the blacks.” And don’t recognise how damaged we must be in order to make a statement that reeks of power and privilege without recognising that power or privilege.

Better to have acknowledged that we were wrong and have been damaged. The torturer who shocks his victims’ genitalia is not undamaged by the brutal act. He has given up his innocence and become a corrupted human being. If we have harmed others, even if it is by being a passive bystander, we carry the shame of not having moral courage.

Shame is a theme that runs through our history. Shame for demeaning people, shame for being black, shame for being white, shame for allowing ourselves to be dehumanised. Shame causes us to want to hide, to not be seen. Shamed people often react out of their shame with aggression. It leads to anger.

We are a damaged nation and it will affect us for generations to come. Not only in the violence that we have seen, see and will continue to see, but in how we view ourselves as people.

Biko, S. (2004). I write what I like: a selection of his writings. Johannesburg, Picador, Africa. 

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