Propensity for violence needs interrogation
The ongoing lockdown has given us an opportunity to reflect on the state of our nation.
It has provided us with the opportunity to take time out from our usually busy lives to think about our place in the world.
I have been thinking deeply about where our country is and some of the critical challenges with which we are confronted.
In particular, I have been thinking about the nature and reality of violence, and the many ways in which it shapes who we are as a people.
The next lockdown that must happen in SA must be geared towards forcing everyone in this country to undergo therapy.
Ours is a country in desperate need of collective psychological treatment.
There is something deeply and fundamentally broken with SA society, and it needs intervention beyond the political.
The levels of violence in this country are not normal and our growing desensitisation is evidence of this abnormality.
A few days ago, I watched the video of the senseless killing of Andile “Bobo” Mchunu, a teenager from Tongaat in KwaZulu-Natal who was beaten and tortured to death, allegedly for stealing alcohol.
It is reported that his mutilated body has since been found.
The video was one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever seen and the savageness with which that young man was killed is the stuff of nightmares.
That a teenager had to die in so brutal a manner over alcohol shows the extent to which violence is a normal response in our country.
We don’t know how to communicate and, as such, frequently resort to violence.
It expresses itself in our high levels of gender-based violence and even in our language of protest, which is steeped in violence.
We burn things down and destroy everything in our wake. We seem incapable of engaging unless a degree of violence is involved.
This is not normal.
It is sick. Martinique philosopher Frantz Fanon contends there is a link between coloniality and mental pathologies that develop in colonised subjects.
While I do believe our history of violence has a lot to do with the contemporary violence in our country, I also say there is more to it than this.
Systematic violence is not unique to SA, it is a shared history on the continent.
There is more to our culture of violence than our brutal past, even as this too contributes significantly.
And the use of carceral power is inadequate.
Justice must at all times be done, but we cannot look to prisons as a solution.
We seem married to the idea of imprisoning people and not so much to dealing with the factors that result in them becoming criminals in the first place.
We must start having a multidisciplinary conversation about how we can deal with this deeply institutionalised and systematic violence that defines SA life.
It is a conversation that demands participation by everyone from government to civil society.
Violence is haemorrhaging this country.
May the Mchunu family find healing and may their beautiful boy rest in peace.