Society drenched in violence

AS ONE of those citizens who lauded the students for a peaceful and successful #feesmustfall campaign I feel duty bound to again condemn the violence associated with the students of Fort Hare and elsewhere.

Having said that, the governing party must realise it is not completely blameless for the culture of violence that we see today.

All their past political campaigns have been drenched in violence, entrenching the notion that a revolution that has no measure of violence is no revolution at all.

I remember that even the push to remove old civil servants was unnecessarily violent. Those who were fingered to go were threatened daily, making their lives very uncomfortable in the workplace.

In my book, Dashed Hopes, I deal extensively with the tendency by the new order to turn to violence as a way of getting their way even in circumstances where this was unwarranted.

Of course they can argue that they were forced to adopt this strategy as the apartheid regime used violence to entrench itself.

Looking back at the society of that time violence was extensively used to discipline us so that sometimes it is impossible to revive agriculture because my peers argue that it is a pastime that was introduced though violence by our fathers.

At the time society generally felt that in order to make a black child listen, a heavy dose of punishment was the answer.

You didn’t have to display arrogance or oppose what was said to incur the wrath of your parents.

Until there is general acceptance that our society is drenched in violence we are going nowhere fast in our efforts to build it.

This has led to the general determination that for change to happen one has to destroy what exists first which I believe has its roots in political revolution. I will argue again as I had done in the past that the first thing the ruling party should have done when it as sumed power was to re-orientate the people into the new culture of non-violent protest accompanied by the ethos of the new democratic order.

Reconciliation should have been a good start but was left to the efforts of one individual. Others remained forever shocked as to why he would speak like that after such a heavy dose of suffering in apartheid jails. — Vatiswa Ntshanga, via e-mail urge them to fulfil their historic duty envisaged in their founding charter. Liberation has not been achieved yet as long as many of our people languish in poverty, ignorance and disease. To provide leadership they will need to be sober. — Wongaletu Vanda