Note to readers: this series was sparked in part by revelations and claims in three recent books about South Africa – Jonny Steinberg’s “Winnie & Nelson,” Justice Malala’s “The Plot to Save South Africa,” and Eve Fairbanks’ “The Inheritors”. Quotes attributed to these authors are derived from the works aforementioned. This article is the third in the series. The second article can be read here, and the first article can be read here.
Introduction
The previous article in this series dealt with the escalating political and criminal violence through the transition from apartheid and white rule (1989 to 1994). The political conflict between liberation movement forces and those opposed to them drove a doubling of the number of murders recorded by the South African Police between 1987 and 1993, the peak year of the conflict. There was also a dramatic increase in the number of armed robberies in this period.
In 1994 the main armed actors drew back from the brink. There was a large drop off in political violence after the April 1994 elections, and President Nelson Mandela’s graceful leadership through the transfer of power saw the threat of counter-revolution evaporate. It was also at this point that the Western world started rapidly losing interest in developments within the country. The subsequent under-reporting and non-reporting of developments has left a significant gap in the Western and particularly American understanding of South Africa.
Eve Fairbanks’ book The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of a Brave and Bewildered Nation is perhaps the most important recent effort to fill that void. This book was commissioned and published by Simon & Schuster, one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the United States. It is the product of over a decade of research, starting in 2009, and is very much a report back to the American elite on the progress of the post-apartheid project. A summary version of her findings was published as an essay in the Atlantic Magazine.
There is much in this book that is revealing and insightful. Yet there is a recurring argument around violent crime that is deeply questionable. It is important to critically examine this for, if inaccurate and left uncontested, it is likely to be accepted as authoritative by its American readership.
The great white imagining
One of the major themes of Fairbanks’ book is that “white people suffer because they deserve punishment and didn’t get it.” She thus questions the press focus on violent crime post-apartheid - and novels where home invasions provided pivotal scenes, such as J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) - taking the view that such depictions were at odds with the documented reality, if not fictions conjured up by the guilt-ridden white subconscious.
Fairbanks writes that while the police had “logged an uptick in robberies, especially in white-dominated farming areas” under Mandela, self-reported “victimisation rates – the number of crimes people told academic surveys they’d experienced – didn’t rise nearly as much, suggesting a lot of the increase in crime represented South Africans’ new willingness to report incidents” to a newly legitimate police force. “By the end of the ‘90s,” she continues, “the police were recording only half as many incidents of crime as they did in the early ‘90s, despite a population growth of nearly 40 percent.”
Having convinced herself that concerns about ever-rising crime were vastly exaggerated, Fairbanks takes white South Africans to task for “starting to talk as if the country was already falling apart”. The white suburbs of Johannesburg and elsewhere remained as safe as “anywhere in Western Europe”, implying that fear-driven reactions to the contrary were wrong if not deranged.
She expresses disappointment in the “New York Times” (actually the New Republic) for reporting on a white “suburb dweller” who constantly “visualized a vivid scenario in which she faces black gunmen” in a car hijacking. Fairbanks says the “paper reported this concern as if it was totally legitimate” while apparently ignoring countervailing statistics showing a dramatic decline in crime. SABC TV – “still white-run” at the time, we are told – is similarly excoriated for reporting the results of a poll finding that a majority of whites “believed they were ‘very unsafe at night’.” (Fairbanks’ emphasis.)
Worst of all was Anne Paton, the 71-year-old widow of Alan Paton, author of Cry the Beloved Country, who wrote an open letter explaining that crime was driving her to leave her home just north of Durban for the United Kingdom. Paton’s concerns, Fairbanks suggests, were delusional and racially insulting to boot. “Black South Africans barely had a year or two to right things”, she states, “yet the letter was passed around as evidence they wouldn’t.”
In her essay in The Atlantic Fairbanks summarises her claim as follows: “Concerns about crime dominated the news in the years following apartheid. But the rates of violent crime were only half as high by the end of the 1990s as they had been before apartheid ended.”
Fairbanks makes a few missteps here. Firstly, there was not a 40% jump in the size of the population in the 1990s. It increased by 16% between 1990 and 1999 - and by only 7% between 1994 and 1999. Secondly, it is not possible to track crime trends in this period using crime victimisation surveys as there was only a single such survey conducted by the state statistical agency, in 1997. The source for the claim that formerly white suburbs were as safe as anywhere in Western Europe relates to the 2014/15 period, and its validity will be examined in the next article in this series. So, this leaves us to contemplate Fairbanks’ claim that police were recording half as many incidents of violent crime in 1999 as they had in the early 1990s.
As previously noted, four “independent” Bantustans rejoined South Africa in 1994. The reformed South African Police Service (SAPS) started producing crime statistics for the unified country from 1996 onwards, simultaneously compiling estimates for 1994 and 1995 as well. If one updates the murder and robbery graph accordingly this is what emerges:
Evidently, the number of murders peaked in the 1993 to 1994 period at the height of the political carnage in South Africa, at about twice what it had been in 1987. Thus, according to the SAPS series, there were an estimated 26 832 murders in the whole of the country in 1994, and 26 637 in 1995. After stabilising at this high level, they gradually trended downwards as political tensions declined.
If one looks at the number of reported robberies, there is also a period of stabilisation between 1994 and 1997 followed by … a completely different development to that proclaimed by Fairbanks.
To get a sense of what happened here one needs to follow the thread through from the beginning.
The people’s army
In exile, Stephen Ellis notes in External Mission, ANC officials had become “deeply involved in smuggling Mandrax, diamonds and cars”. As operatives of the security services sought to penetrate the ANC’s networks, they too entered this underworld and were sometimes corrupted by it. Among the criminal practices sanctioned by the ANC was armed robbery. The message quietly communicated to MK cadres was that - as one operative later related to the TRC - when they infiltrated back into South Africa, “you know that the ANC has limited resources. Those resources in the country are your resources. You are being deprived of your resources. So don't be over moralistic. Be realistic. You need it, it is there, you're justified to get it."
The previous article in this series described how, after the formal suspension of the armed struggle in August 1990, the ANC persisted with the major thrust of its prior people’s war strategy by forming and arming “Self-Defence Units” (SDUs). The PAC’s armed wing Apla was also highly active in the 1992 to 1993 period, launching numerous offensive operations from its sanctuary in the Transkei homeland. Both the PAC and ANC allowed for the recruitment of criminals into their armed units, though in the latter case they were meant to be “reformed” ones.
While Apla unashamedly approved of armed robbery as an instrument of racial “repossession” the ANC too quietly instructed its SDUs to “use their own initiative” to secure weapons and funds. This was done in a manner that enabled the leadership to plausibly deny responsibility; the SDUs “knew” that approval for this practice came from the very top but nothing was written down or formally documented. This all contributed, alongside the general breakdown in law and order and the increasing availability of illegal firearms, to the surge of armed robberies, and attacks on policemen and farming communities, recorded in the early 1990s.
The declared intention of the ANC was that the SDUs would, when combined with MK, form the basis of a future “people’s army and police force”. By the time of the transition the ranks of this armed force had swollen to the tens of thousands. Though this was not the sum of it, 42 100 individuals were eventually entered into the Certified Personnel Register for either integration into the new South African National Defence Force (SANDF), or demobilisation. Of these, 32 800 came from MK/SDUs and 9 300 from Apla.
Those from the MK/SDU forces also formed a powerful political component of the ANC itself, with commissars and commanders taking up senior positions in government and the security services, post-1994. These revolutionary networks, and their capacity to conduct covert operations and orchestrate violence, did not magically vanish in a puff of smoke on 27 April 1994.
Threading the needle through the transition
The ANC’s chief challenge in the negotiations was to provide the white minority – and particularly officers of the security forces – with sufficient reassurance that they peacefully surrendered power; while ensuring that the terms of this settlement placed no long-term obstacle to the pursuit of goals that the liberation movement regarded as inviolable. This was not a question of just ideology, it was more akin to a sacred covenant. The promise used to summon the movement into existence and motivate it through all the decades of struggle was that all the immense sacrifices of the present would ultimately be redeemed following the seizure of power, when all the wealth of the country would be “given back” to “the people” from whom it had been “stolen”.
The ANC reconciled itself internally to the compromises of the transition on the basis that while these goals remained sacrosanct, the more sensitive ones would be deferred (not discarded), allowing the national revolution to be pursued incrementally and through stages.
The ANC would achieve its medium-term goals with regard to the state with subtlety and sophistication. It agreed in 1993 that serving officers in the police and the army would retain their positions and that their career paths would be protected. These guarantees were written into the interim constitution. Such officials were solemnly assured that their skills and experience were deeply valued by the incoming ANC government. The ANC was however always careful to ensure that the “representivity” principle was included in every agreement it signed.
At the same time thousands of members of the “people’s army” were integrated into the military, intelligence services and, to a lesser extent, the police. The equally solemn assurance was issued that these comrades were leaving their old political allegiances at the door and entering non-partisan service in the state.
During the integration and amalgamation processes the ANC insisted that no security clearances or vetting be done on their people. As a result, a considerable number of compromised and criminalised individuals acquired key positions in the security services.
One of the preferred placements for former MK/SDU members was the police’s VIP Protection Services where such individuals could continue serving as the armed guards of their former commissars. In response to a parliamentary question in 1997 it was disclosed that 121 members of the VIP Protection Service, at national level, had criminal records, including for attempted murder, robbery and assault. Even more strikingly, 198 members were currently facing criminal charges, 22 for murder, 18 for attempted murder, 22 for pointing a firearm, and four for robbery. A similar question put to the Minister of Intelligence in 1999 brought forth the revelation that 155 members of the intelligence services had faced misconduct charges since amalgamation in 1995, for offences ranging from insubordination, fraud and theft to armed robbery, attempted murder (eight cases), and murder (five cases). Few of these matters had been finalised and only ten officers had been discharged.
By the end of 1995 the ANC’s people were on the inside. In 1996 the final Constitution was adopted, with the ANC carefully gutting the section guarding the professionalism of the public service. FW de Klerk withdrew the National Party from the government of national unity at this point as well. The ANC now embarked upon a campaign against “old order” officials, labelling them as obstacles to transformation. The message was that “demographic representivity” was the ANC’s holy grail; the merit system was being scrapped, and white officials would have minimal prospects of advancement in the future. The affected officers were then invited to take generous severance packages. With this process well underway the ANC moved to implement a formal policy of cadre deployment. As the existing incumbents departed, state institutions were to be largely composed of and entirely led by “trusted representatives of the people”.
The period between 1994 and the early 2000s was thus a transitional period where the liberation movement was infiltrating its members into the security services, and expanding their influence, but had yet to gain complete control.
SDUs and criminality
Although ANC SDUs remained on a war footing against Inkatha in KwaZulu-Natal, political fatalities declined through the second half of the 1990s, falling from 2 476 in 1994 to 1 044 in 1995, 683 in 1996, 470 in 1997, 356 in 1998, and 325 in 1999. It is noticeable, however, that the killings of policemen barely declined post 1994, while attacks on farming communities picked up. After shooting up like a rocket through the early 1990s the number of reported robberies flatlined between 1994 and 1997 – at around 120 000 per year – at a level over twice that of 1988.
Of the 42 000 MK/SDU and Apla members on the central personnel register in 1994, 14 500 of the former and 3 600 of the latter did not end up reporting for either integration or demobilisation by the time the process closed in late 1997. One of the MK members who had been signed up for but then skipped integration into the SANDF was Collin Chauke. Chauke had been a late joining member of MK, receiving his military training in the Transkei in 1991 after returning from a brief period in exile. He had been elected to the executive committee of the ANC branch in Winterveld outside Pretoria in March 1992. He was first arrested by the police later that year after being caught driving a stolen BMW in the Johannesburg northern suburbs. Sentenced to four years in prison in September 1993 he somehow managed to walk out of jail.
In 1995 he was elected an ANC councillor and continued living a high life funded in part by crimes such as vehicle hijacking. He was investigated by the Rosslyn vehicle theft unit, which arrested him in May 1995 while driving another stolen BMW. A series of charges were then brought against him, including car theft, two cash in transit heists and an armed robbery at the Morula Sun Casino. These charges were however dropped, and Chauke was “set free on the orders of a senior cop who claims Chauke has ‘powerful connections in government’." (City Press, 24 January 1999)
Chauke would be arrested again in December 1997 for his involvement in a SBV heist in Pretoria in which R18m was stolen. The gang network of which Chauke formed part was linked to 17 cash-in-transit heists in which R100m (R400 million in today’s rand values) had been stolen and 30 people murdered.
Chauke then proceeded to bust out of prison and, while on the run, hobnobbed with senior ANC politicians, before finally being arrested at his girlfriend’s townhouse by detectives of the Nelspruit Murder and Robbery Unit in early 1999. After his recapture, Chauke was sentenced to fifteen years for his involvement in the SBV heist. He died in prison in 2003 at the age of 33 – probably from AIDS related causes.
One “senior government official” told Wally Mbhele of the Mail & Guardian that those behind these violent heists were mostly former SDU members who had been given quick and dirty military training in the early 1990s, and who had then been integrated into the SANDF before dropping out again. The official said that “the modus operandi used in highway robberies mirrors the methods of military training the self-defence units were given on how, for instance, to ambush police or vehicles.” The motive was not political, the official suggested, “They look at people they used to struggle with who all drive flashy cars while they remain poor and they want to be rich too."
It was not just the SANDF dropouts who were involved in crime, however. There were numerous cases from this period of former MK/SDU or Apla cadres carrying out armed robberies while in the employ of the police, the intelligence agencies, or the SANDF. The involvement of former MK, SDU and Apla combatants in violent crime was widely discussed and acknowledged. What was not properly understood was how complicit the ANC and MK leadership had been - and therefore potentially still was - in such criminality.
Last year of the miracle
The political violence of the early 1990s had left a difficult legacy – especially in the form of a cohort of armed, ill-educated and brutalised youth – but by 1997 it seemed that the security forces were finally regaining a handle on the situation, with the levels of violent crime having at last stabilised. For this President Mandela credited “better co-ordination among all arms of the security services: the police, the intelligence services and the defence force, as well as co-operation across Southern Africa.”
It was at this hopeful moment that the ANC set about its bloodless purge of the security forces, with top police, defence force and intelligence officers pressured by their political overlords into taking the severance packages on offer. A senior police officer told the Saturday Star in April 1997 that “it is the experienced policemen with expertise, the role models” who were leaving in the thousands. “While the total number leaving is a problem, the real issue is the number of quality, top-calibre policemen who are going…. The best people are leaving the police because they can get jobs elsewhere, and it’s those who cannot who stay behind.” The impact on policing in Gauteng was likely to be particularly severe, the newspaper predicted, with critical units (such as the anti-hijacking unit) losing their leading detectives.
The top ANC leadership itself also now set out to harvest some of expected but delayed rewards of liberation through the arms deal. Beyond this point, the sort of independent investigative units necessary to keep any ruling class (or society) honest would be regarded as a mortal threat, requiring them to be either disbanded or placed under tight political control.
In December 1997 Thabo Mbeki was elected unopposed as ANC President at the party’s national conference in Mafikeng. It was here too that Mandela abandoned his former reconciliatory posture and reemphasised the movement’s historic racial nationalist commitments. The ANC was planning to “transform our country, fundamentally” Mandela stated in his political report to the conference. “The accomplishment of this task requires that we should all be made in the metal of revolutionaries.” Mandela went on to bewail the “massive propaganda campaign that has been conducted on the issue of crime” and disparaged whites for propounding the transparently absurd notion that “merely to walk in the streets in these white areas is to invite death and that this has been the case since 1994”.
In its resolution on the “transformation of the SAPS” the conference complained that some police functionaries were still resisting “transformation” and “change” and that the “distribution of police resources is still skewed in favour of mainly white communities”. It complained too that “The special units of the SAPS (the Child Protection Unit, Murder and Robbery Unit, Stock Theft Unit, etc.) are not accessible to all communities” and the SAPS “is still not reflective of the demography of South Africa, more especially at a managerial level”. It resolved to do whatever was necessary, up to and including changing the constitution, to “enable the acceleration of the process of transformation”.
The second surge
The ANC NEC’s January 8th statement of 1998 – the document that traditionally gave the movement its marching orders for the year - echoed earlier calls to action from the mid-1980s, declaring:
“The fundamental transformation of our society requires an enormous effort of popular mobilisation which should even surpass what we achieved during the struggle to end the system of white minority rule.
We should aim to ensure that every citizen becomes a patriot and that every patriot should be engaged in the struggle for social transformation. Only in this way will we be able to carry out our historic responsibility of speedily wiping out the apartheid legacy and bringing about the changes which all of us yearn for.
This gigantic task of sustained mobilisation will pose a special challenge to all the structures of our organisation, from the branch upwards, to be in dynamic contact with the masses of the people on a daily basis.”
It is not entirely clear how the two were related, but the ANC’s return to revolutionary fundamentals was followed by a renewed surge in violent crime. The number of aggravated robberies recorded by the SAPS leapt 21% year-on-year - from 69 691 in 1997 to 88 319 in 1998. The increase from 1997/98 (April to March) to 1998/1999 was even more marked, rising 26% - from 73 053 to 92 630. Carjackings rose 20% to 15 773 in 1998/99, and truck hijackings by a third, to 6 134. There was also a striking increase in the numbers of attacks on farming communities. According to police figures, 142 people were killed in 769 attacks on farms and smallholdings in 1998. Forty-two of these murders, stemming from 164 attacks, occurred in KwaZulu-Natal.
It was in the midst of this period that the Sunday Times (London) published the article by Anne Paton about her decision to leave South Africa - the one Fairbanks felt was was tainted by exaggeration and racist conspiracy theory. Paton wrote that among her friends, and friends of friends, she knew of nine people who had been murdered in the past four years. She herself had been carjacked a few years before and been attacked twice in her home in 1998. In the first incident she was throttled, gagged, tied up and thrown into the guest room, while the robbers ransacked the property. In the second the aspirant robbers had continued to try and smash their way into her house, despite her seeing them and setting off the burglar alarm.
The 1998 crime wave also coincided with a systematic effort by the ANC to neutralise any remaining independent centres of power within the state, and extend its control over “all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on." With the establishment of the National Prosecuting Authority in 1998, and the deployment of ANC cadres to run it, the liberation movement achieved ultimate control over every prosecution in the country.
Dipuo and Godfrey
Despite her belief in the unreliability of white perceptions on the matter, Fairbanks’ account does nonetheless provide a rare and striking insight into the attitudes underlying the violent criminality of the late 1990s.
For Dipuo M, one of Fairbanks’ subjects, the compromises agreed to by the ANC in 1993 were a bitter pill to swallow. As a loyal ANC activist, Dipuo “expected a substantial turn toward economic redistribution” after apartheid. “Like many black South African activists,” Fairbanks writes, “she considered herself a socialist.” After giving birth to her daughter, Malaika, in 1991, Dipuo returned to high school at night and after successfully matriculating secured a “a job at an American-supported NGO in Pretoria… Foreigners and their money were pouring into South Africa, and she bought herself a fridge and a long table like the ones she remembered from the white people’s dining rooms in which her mother worked.”
The white middle class lifestyle remained elusive, however, and the material situation of Dipuo and Malaika remained highly precarious. It was different though with Godfrey, Dipuo’s brother and Malaika’s favourite uncle. As Fairbanks relates through the eyes of Malaika, Godfrey’s job meant he was away a lot of the time. But he was always immaculately dressed and when he returned to the family home in Soweto he always brought back “incredible things” – food, sweets, jewellery, pretty furniture.
Godfrey’s “job”, it turned out, was robbing homes and carjacking vehicles of “white people in neighbourhoods like the suburb where [his mother] had toiled in ‘the kitchens’.” The family disguised his identity when the police came looking for him in March 1999, after an informer fingered him for the murder of a policeman - one of the 204 such killings that occurred that year.
Although Dipuo knew that Godfrey’s actions were “wrong”, Fairbanks relates, “she privately celebrated her thug brother. She and Godfrey would joke that he was ‘liberating’ cars and TVs from their ‘colonial masters.’… She and Godfrey referred to his crime sprees as ‘affirmative repossession’.” He seemingly acted with impunity until late 1999, when he was shot by security guards in a Sowetan mall after he and an accomplice had tried to rob them of their weapons for a heist they were planning. He died in hospital of his wounds.
“Dooming the fight against crime”
In the elections held on 2nd June 1999 the ANC increased its share of the vote, falling just short of a two-thirds majority in parliament. President Thabo Mbeki now appointed the former MK Political Commissar, Steve Tshwete, as Minister of Safety & Security. The ANC had allowed the police to remain Afrikaner-led up until 1999, under national commissioner George Fivaz. In an internal party discussion document drawn up in 1999, which assessed the ANC’s success in seizing control of the state machinery, the party complained that the “transformation of the police has been hampered in part by the lack of personnel to occupy key positions”. It called for an improvement of the liberation movement’s “capacity to introduce major changes in the police - whether through regulation, legislation or deployment”.
After 1994 there was what Stephen Ellis called “reconciliation of a special type”, as criminally inclined ANC security and intelligence men discovered that there were few sources of friction between themselves and less scrupulous ‘old guard’ operatives and officials and they, and the shady businessmen now flocking around the new administration, could do business together. Conversely those with a strong sense of integrity and duty, be they ex-MK or ex-Pretoria, found themselves on slippery ground when their actions brought them into conflict with powerful political-criminal networks.
In October 1999 cabinet announced the appointment of former ANC NEC member, and serving Foreign Affairs Director-General, Jackie Selebi, as the new national commissioner of police. Before he had even settled into office in January 2000 Selebi found his will being frustrated by serving officials in the SAPS. Both Tshwete and Selebi were house friends of the Pakistani-born businessman, Rehan Syed, who had been a benefactor of leading ANC politicians from the time of their days in exile in Zambia. Syed had been under police investigation since 1998 for his alleged involvement in the international trade in stolen vehicles and narcotics.
The police’s anti-corruption unit meanwhile had intruded into the businessman’s affairs after busting a policeman for issuing false clearance certificates for stolen vehicles that had been smuggled into South Africa, inadvertently seizing a Mercedes Benz of Syed’s in the process. The ACU was able to establish that the vehicle had been stolen from its owner in London. To his frustration and fury Selebi was, despite his status as national police chief, unable to secure the return of the car to his friend. (Sayed was deported in 2001).
A month after he began work as national commissioner Selebi signalled that he intended to centralise control over the police’s many elite specialised units. By late November the SAPS had finalised a plan for these units to be broken up. The news that these units were to be closed – with murder and robbery units in and around Johannesburg among the first on the chopping block – caused an outcry. In a press statement on 29 November 2000 the Democratic Alliance described this decision as “inexplicable” and one that would have far-reaching consequences for combating crime in South Africa. It noted, “The majority of specialist units were extremely successful in their fight against crime and shutting them down does not make any sense at all.”
In January 2001 Selebi nonetheless pushed ahead with the plan. On 12 January he sent out a letter to his provincial subordinates ordering them to immediately close 200 of the police’s 503 specialised units. Among the first to be dissolved was the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit, the unit responsible for investigating armed robberies in Johannesburg. The detectives from this, and the many other murder and robbery units being shut down around the country, would be scattered around the police stations that they had previously supported.
The commander of the Brixton unit, Superintendent Tienie van der Linden, told The Star newspaper that its closure would spell doom for the fight against crime. The clearance rate of his unit was 65%, compared to the 15% achieve by detectives based in police stations. He also pointed out that there had been seven cases of heists, bank robberies and other serious crimes in the previous month. His unit solved all of them, arresting 17 suspects.
White fright, ANC indifference
In his memoir on his time as a special advisor in the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki Tony Heard writes that public concerns over high crime were met with the same sort of nonchalance in the higher reaches of government that Dipuo had exhibited over Godfrey’s exploits. He writes, “‘It’s mainly privileged whites who are complaining,’ was a refrain I heard at advisers’ meetings from the justice, crime prevention and security (JCPS) cabinet cluster.”
Heard’s meetings were private, but government could be sneeringly dismissive in public as well. In 2000 the number of aggravated robberies reported to the SAPS rose to 110 590, a figure 58% higher than in 1997, and four times that of 1987. One of the groups hardest hit by this type of crime was the Portuguese community around Johannesburg. This was a typical immigrant community of small businessmen and shopkeepers, paid mostly in cash, and so a tempting target. Many members of this community (or their parents) had earlier been dispossessed and driven out of Mozambique after the revolution of 1975.
On 15 November 2000 members of this community marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria and delivered a memorandum calling on President Thabo Mbeki to do something about crime. "There is no doubt that the African dream, or renaissance, has become a lifetime nightmare for many of our people, as the criminals continue to impose their brand of injustice on all levels of society," it stated. Among the protestors, the Pretoria News reported the following day, was Kyle de Castro, 11. He held a placard stating: “I hate crime. It killed my mom.” His mother Ana, 29, had been gunned down in the family’s bottle store. Another child at the march was Dino Baptista, also eleven. His father Jose, 40, had been shot dead when gunmen had robbed his shop in Sandton. Then there was Rita dos Santos who had been widowed when her husband Manuel, 37, had been shot dead during a robbery of his fast-food restaurant in Boksburg.
On 12 February 2001 the government released a five-page reply to the memorandum. Signed by Tshwete, the text contained many of Mbeki’s distinctive turns of phrase. Noting that many of the protestors had fled Mozambique and Angola in the mid-1970s it accused them of coming to South Africa because “they knew that the colour of their skin would entitle them to join ‘the master race’, to participate in the oppression and exploitation of the black majority and to enjoy the benefits of white minority domination.” It then added ominously:
“You are aware that our government was elected by an overwhelming majority of our people. These masses do not share the contempt you have for our government and President. They remain confident that the government they freely elected will, working together with them, succeed to eradicate the legacy of apartheid, which you seek to blame on our government. These masses need to know about your view of their government. We will therefore take the necessary steps so to inform them.”
On the same day this letter was released Tshwete confirmed at a press briefing that government was proceeding with the dissolution of “specialised units such as SANAB, Vehicle Crime, Commercial Branch and Stock Theft Units” and the “Murder and Robbery, Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences and Taxi Violence units.” The detectives involved were either transferred to newly established overarching units, where political control could be exercised over them, or to local police stations, where they lost most of their effectiveness.
After Tshwete died at the end of April 2002 Charles Nqakula, a former Operation Vula commander, became Minister of Safety & Security. One of the few elite units still surviving at this point was the Anti Corruption Unit that had frustrated the return of Selebi’s friend’s stolen Mercedes. Established in 1995 to counter the growing problem of corruption in police ranks, it had earned an exemplary reputation for successfully investigating wrongdoing by cops. (It was not, however, allowed to investigate the VIP protection units). In October 2002 Selebi ordered that it too be dissolved, a decision given full effect the following year. Its members were not readily accepted back in police stations or other units, given the nature of their work, and many left the police for good. In January 2003 the SA Narcotics Bureau was also informed that it was finally to be shut down in July.
A heat map of SAPS crime statistics for property and violent crime from April 1994 to March 2000. The 1994 and 1995 figures, for the entire country, were compiled retrospectively and only released in 1997. Some of the numbers for this earlier period, especially the figures for armed robbery, should be approached with caution.
Five years of people’s violence
Let us now return to Eve Fairbanks’ claim that there was a halving of the incidents (or rates) of crime by the late 1990s - whether from 1990 or, more plausibly, 1994. Either way, this is clearly not right. To be sure, the overall murder tally declined along with political violence and its aftershocks, but there were increases in most other categories of crime through the second half of the 1990s, especially after 1997.
The 1998 to 2003 period was particularly dismaying, with the number of robberies with aggravating circumstances rising relentlessly upwards year-on-year, from an already high base. The peak was finally reached in 2003/4 with 133,658 such robberies reported - double the number of 1996, and five times the number reported to the SAP in 1988. Adjusting for population growth the aggravated robbery rate per 100 000 people rose from 148,1 in 1996 to 277,9 in 2003, an 87,6% increase. Between 1998 and 2003 farm attacks ran at twice the level recorded in the early 1990s, at the height of Apla and SDU activities in such areas. The rise in most other categories of crime was less dramatic, but the peak in the number of reported incidents would generally be reached in the early 2000s.
For Fairbanks to then claim that there had been a halving of the incidents (or rates) of violent crime through the 1990s is not just wrong, but the converse of what happened. Yet even more strikingly none of her readers, reviewers or editors thought fit to check this claim.
How this error was made, and the remarkably changed pattern of violent crime that emerged in the 2000s, will be the subject of the next article in this series.
This article first appeared on the Konsequent substack.
