Black lives don't matter – until elections
Imagine that you land in a foreign country, pick up a local newspaper and learn that 19 local young men had died at the hands of known people over the past few weeks – and yet very few had been arrested or would face the courts for it.
Imagine learning that this is occurs twice a year and that last year 44 boys died under exactly the same circumstances.
No one had been convicted for those deaths.
Imagine learning that since 2006 a total of 788 young men had died in similar fashion – at traditional circumcision schools. Few are held responsible. Every year there is shock and horror and a few write-ups in newspapers.
Then these young boys get killed again. It’s regular as clockwork. This time next year it will be exactly the same.
I arrived in SA last week and these were the statistics I read in the City Press newspaper on Sunday. I have read and written about these statistics before, yet they never fail to shock me. Young men are dying right in front of us, and we do nothing. Once again, these black lives don’t matter.
Interestingly, powerful politicians have been talking all weekend. At the ANC’s national executive committee meeting the party’s secretary-general, Ace Magashule, told reporters that his comrades in government should stop blaming former president Jacob Zuma for the load-shedding and other problems we currently find ourselves in.
At the EFF's conference, leaders banned journalists and complained about the state of the country. Neither Magashule nor EFF leader Julius Malema used their powerful platforms to bring this terrible tragedy to greater attention or to put pressure on authorities to bring it to an end.
What is going on here? The truth is that we cannot seem to halt terrible illegal acts in SA.
The state is incapable of stopping these easily stoppable murders (for that is what they are), just as it is incapable of providing electricity to its people despite knowing since the mid-2000s that we have an electricity problem in the country.
The state is incapable, and it illustrates this every day through its inability (or lack of care) to stop young boys being massacred at these traditional circumcision schools.
Hundreds of young men have met terrible, fearful deaths at the hands of illegal practitioners of circumcision for decades. The problem intensified in the 2000s.
Yet, year in and year out, administration after administration, SA has failed to stop it. Clearly, this is a state without investigative abilities, a state incapable of identifying these known murderers and incapable of putting together a winnable case against the perpetrators.
This is simple. We have put in power people who cannot lift a finger to stop the murder of their own young people. It is beyond tragic, really.
I am tempted to say that if a right-wing racist had killed just one of these boys the likes of Mbuyiseni Ndlozi and others would be screaming blue murder. It would seem that black lives only matter when there is a racial tinge to their being cut short.
The silence of our politicians about these deaths points to one thing and one thing alone: we are incapable of just loving our own people and standing up for them to live, just live, unless there is political capital in it for our leaders.
What is happening with these deaths, the only conclusion to draw from this tragedy, is that these lives are considered cheap.
They are cheap because despite these many deaths every year, nothing meaningful is done. They are cheap because we don’t even talk about them.
Have you heard your leader call for action on these deaths?
Have you heard just one “never again” that is followed by meaningful legal action?
No. These are poor, rural, black boys who are dead or dying. They only matter at election time.
They only matter once in five years. Then they die. No one, certainly not our political class, cares.
Over the next few weeks more children will die at these schools. The people at whose hands these children die will be protected by traditional leaders and their supporters, who will bang on about how this was part of our traditions.
Well, I would love to hear one of these leaders say the same thing when it is their child lying in a cheap coffin, dead from a putrified penis and from lack of water.
What a terrifying, lonely, sad, preventable death.
Who cares, though. Certainly not our political leadership. Certainly not us, the people who again and again put the same failed political leaders in power and fail to hold them accountable.
The whole thing is tragic. And it will continue.
Imagine learning that since 2006 a total of 788 young men had died at traditional circumcision schools