JAMIL F. KHAN | Crime is not the disease, it’s the inheritance

In last night’s State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa, yet again, put forward a plan to tackle crime. Organised crime, particularly gang activity, was singled out as a threat to democratic, social and economic progress.

The solution for this problem which is framed as a Western Cape problem is now to be solved by the military – a strategy which has repeatedly had devastating consequences wherever it is implemented.

While the presence of heavily armed, and hopefully trained soldiers may serve up the optics of safety, its presence in communities only invites more danger. The function of a military resource is to eliminate whatever it deems to be a threat to security, which includes any person living in that community.

The use of military force, disguised as safety patrols, as a crime elimination method is currently wreaking havoc on communities in the USA where a fascist government continues to dismiss the harm it is causing citizens. Nowhere has the deployment of military resources in communities ever brought about the solutions it claims to bring.

It is of course the easier, less intellectually demanding solution because it treats the symptoms and not the causes of crime.

That remains the boring, and less spectacular conversation about inequality that is often met with eyerolls and deep sighs, exactly because it forces a conversation about historical injustice.

We do ourselves a great disservice when we approach (violent) crime as a problem which came to prominence in a democratic South Africa. We do ourselves a further disservice when we locate the sociology of it squarely in apartheid.

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Apartheid was the grand finale of a particular kind of fascism in South Africa, for which the foundation was laid hundreds of years before. This country is built on the foundations of a slave economy in which human beings were ranked, traded and exploited as the goods on which that economy ran.

The idea of buying and selling goods was standardised in the laboratory of slavery where human lives were the goods to be traded and priced.

After centuries of generational exploitation, not being entitled to the fruits of their own labour, enslaved people where “set free” to compete in an economy still run by various forms of exploited labour, now entitled to the crumbs of the economic feast colonial overlords continued to enjoy.

Since its abolishment, not one economic decision in this country has substantively reckoned with its origins. This legacy has been dragged all the way into the present where our economy still largely functions to subjugate, exploit, exclude and denigrate a helpless and hopeless working class for the benefit of a cold, unaffected elite.

When we speak about our horrific past, we sell ourselves short by not giving due attention to the enduring legacy of slavery on modern South African life. The idea that a human being could and should be subjugated through labour shapes how we see the vast majority of lives here and has worked to normalise inequality as a natural outcome of social life.

The normalisation of inequality has a much longer history than we are willing to admit, and today’s unemployment crisis, income inequality and crime cannot and will not be solved through solutions that are not sufficiently informed by the original crime of enslavement.

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Of course, there are certain kinds of criminality that rely on pathologies which persist regardless of social circumstances, but for the most part, we know that crime is often committed by desperate, economically excluded people who are mostly Black, on behalf of comfortable, wealthy elites who are mostly white.

This economy we abide by has so deeply infiltrated our ideas of human value and worth that for most, the only pathway into claiming a sense of humanity and community is through wealth.

That a person is willing to end another life or cause immense suffering to attain that wealth speaks to a much longer history of dehumanisation, that itself is an economy that one can participate in.

In the president’s SONA, he refers to gangsterism as organised crime, which conceals the sociopolitical dimensions of inequality that necessitate gang fellowship in the first place.

Many of those who are part of gangs in the Western Cape are descendants of those who were enslaved and freed into a competitive economy rigged against them, and now find themselves still locked out of a humanity that can only be accessed through money.

For others, events of generational dispossession through other colonial periods and later, apartheid, surfaced a realisation that without money they will never be seen as people worthy of dignity.

When trying to get this money, which is a proxy for humanity, honestly they were confronted with the emptiness of a promise of freedom that never comes for them, but stays gagged and bound on a leash controlled by those who tell them to keep looking for a job that might pay them a living wage.

Crime in South Africa is not simply a mindless spectacle of violence, it is the wages of slavery. It is what was inherited from the normalisation of assaulting Black people’s humanity and tying it to money. It is the inheritance of generational dispossession, no accountability, and a reconciliation that smiled with its front teeth and bit down on its back teeth.

Not even the biggest, baddest monster in the iconography of crime in South Africa can be understood outside of reality of how deeply humanity was and continues to be wounded here, perpetrators and victims alike. It is the realisation that if you do crime correctly, you can one day be washed clean of consequence by attaining political office. In South Africa crime pays, and our politicians remind us of this all the time.

We need to ask more serious questions about the human condition in South Africa and what constructs it. We need to think more deeply and openly about our origins as a slave port that was a gateway to Western wealth, and what this means for an economy built on extraction.

Until we are willing to see ourselves as a product of the slave trade, we will continue to tell these simplistic lies that pin crime to a lack of discipline, and its solutions to the use of military force.

Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.