What we need to do to avoid another Senekal

Nibesabani abelungu, Ndosi? (Why do you fear white people, Ndosi?) I hear someone has turned this provocative question into a T-shirt. On social media it became a meme just hours after one Somnandi Hadebe appeared on television confronting police minister Bheki Cele with these words.

It was during a community meeting in Normandien, in the Newcastle area of KwaZulu-Natal, where tensions were running high following the killing of a farmer.

Cele and several government officials were in the area to try to broker peace between the predominantly white farmers and the majority black farm workers and other members of the community.

They did so amid allegations, as yet unproven, that the heinous crime may have had something to do with racial tensions in the area.

A day before Cele’s visit, KwaZulu-Natal premier Sihle Zikalala had been to the area and held his own community meeting. At that gathering, too, it was Hadebe who hogged the spotlight.

He accused the premier and his predecessors of ignoring the plight of farm dwellers in the area who allegedly have their cattle illegally confiscated by farmers and who regularly get evicted.

“People get killed in the farms and you never come here. But one white person dies, you are here. We tell premiers about problems in the farms and they never fix them,” said Hadebe who, according to a television news report, describes himself as a farm dweller.

The Newcastle meetings as well as the turmoil in Senekal, Free State, which followed the killing of young farm manager Brendin Horner, have once again shown how much of a threat our high rate of violent crime is, not just to our safety as individuals but also to our collective security and stability as a relatively young nation.

Our diversity remains one of our strongest attributes as a people. But, given our history, it can easily be turned into a fault line at the hands of those who thrive politically on racial divisions.

There were moments this past week, ahead of the court appearance of the two men accused of murdering Horner, when it appeared that the wedge drivers would succeed. But thanks largely to the work of the police and the organisers of rival protests, tensions

were not allowed to get out of hand.

Yes, there was an incident in which stones and bottles were thrown, a weapon or two were confiscated, a heated exchange of words took place. But no bloodletting. For that we must all be grateful.

We may not be so lucky the next time. So what we need to do, as a matter of urgency, is to address the issues that drove SA to the Senekal standoff in the first place: the high rate of violent crime, especially murder.

Too many murders are committed in our country without the perpetrators ever being brought to book. And in a country still grappling with racial divisions of the past, it is easy for such killings to be turned into a racial issue.

Unless the police pull up their socks and start cracking down on killers, whether they be in rural or urban areas, black or white, we are all under threat.

The state needs to invest more resources in making rural parts of the country safe for all their communities — be they farm owners, workers or dwellers.

Also crucial, however, is for the country’s political leadership to be sensitive to both our past as well as our present conditions by not doing or saying anything that may be perceived as dividing communities.

We landed in the Senekal standoff on Friday largely because the country’s political centre was missing in action. Instead of working to bring the communities together following the killing, the political centre’s silence opened up a vacuum that was quickly filled by those who trade on racial divisions.

As a country we have made a lot of progress towards one nationhood since the early 1990s. But even though 26 years have passed since we voted as one people, we remain fragile as a society, and it is what we do on a daily basis that would make us stronger.

So let’s make it a mission to address the high rate of violent crime. But along with it, let us work towards lasting and workable solutions to land hunger, the rights of labour tenants and the many other issues that make our countryside so susceptible to racial tensions and manipulation by those who seek to keep ours a divided nation.

SA has been through too much to allow such hurdles to keep pulling us back.