Poverty and apartheid are not enough to explain crime in SA

Two weeks ago, I left SA for a month-long vacation across Latin America. As I write this article, I’m Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay.

With a population of just under 4-million, Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America, but also one of the richest and most stable.

But before arriving in Uruguay, I was in Paraguay, a radically different country.

Unlike Uruguay, Paraguay is a relatively poor country.

This poverty can be seen the minute one lands at Silvio Pettirossi International Airport, which is small and dilapidated.

Across Asunción, the capital city, scores of children can be seen begging on the streets, and men and women digging through municipal bins in search for scraps to sell and food to it.

But in that poor city, I was able to do things that I could never do in Johannesburg, my hometown.

Just before midnight on my last night in Asunción, my sister and I walked a few blocks down the road from my hotel to an ice-cream shop.

We had our ice-creams as we walked around the quiet streets of Asunción, chatting happily.

This is something that I have often done in many other parts of the world — Amsterdam, Berlin, Venice, Singapore, Beijing, Copenhagen, Oslo, Zurich, Austria and so on.

But I have also done these late night walks in Mexico City, Gaborone, Harare, Lusaka, Addis Ababa, Maputo, Banjul, Manila and other developing countries.

One country where I would not dare do this is the country that I love most in the world

— SA. I live in a safe neighbourhood in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg.

There are cameras and panic buttons on almost every street light pole in my area.

There are private security vehicles patrolling all over the neighbourhood.

But absolutely nothing would make me take a walk at night — not even if I had an armed bodyguard beside me.

Johannesburg, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, is a very scary place for both women and men.

You cannot be South African and not suffer some form of anxiety that is induced by the debilitating crime that we have in our country, particularly in major cities.

There is crime in every country as crime is universal.

But crime in SA has particularising features that makes it especially horrific.

It is debilitating. To live in that constant state of anxiety is not normal.

In our country, we have all either been victims of crime or we know someone close to us who has.

We have all witnessed some form of crime. And it’s usually excessively violent and gratuitous in nature. It is also deeply traumatic.

Consider, for example, the brazen murder of a bodyguard at the Umhlathuze Local Municipality headquarters last week.

The murder, which was caught on CCTV, was nothing short of terrifying.

But it wasn’t even a national discussion because South Africans have become desensitised to violent crime. We’ve grown too used to it. It is often argued that our country’s extreme violence is the result of apartheid and poverty.

But while these may be contributing factors, there’s something more to the story.

There are many countries with a shared history of apartheid and colonial violence.

There are also countries that are much poorer than us.

But they don’t have our levels of crime.

They don’t experience our levels of violence.

Something in SA is extremely broken and it goes far beyond the legacy of apartheid and brutality of poverty.

And every time I experience a different reality, a life where I don’t have to constantly look over my shoulder, where I’m not in a constant state of fear and anxiety, where I’m not waiting for someone to pounce and assault or rob me, it’s a reminder of just how much we are losing to crime.

Crime has made South Africans lose so much in so many ways — not just materially but mentally too.

We don’t even realise that we are mentally ill with something akin to collective posttraumatic stress disorder because it is part of our identity.

And you see it when you travel because that’s when you realise how other people’s normal is your ultimate fear.

You also realise how damaged we are, constantly jumpy and paranoid about everyone and everything because we come from a place where to be sane is to invite pain and to be carefree is to submit an application for being a victim.

It’s a painful reality to which no-one must be condemned.