Luthando* is very, very tired. His mouth, usually quick to soften into a lopsided, matinee-idol grin, is a hard, tight line, and there is no banter with his regular customers.
He has many reasons to be exhausted. He and his partner had a baby girl some months ago. He has to wake up at 4am to get to his job on time. The restaurant where he works is always short staffed.
But Luthando usually takes those in his stride. Today, he is close to breaking because he and his little family live in a failed state, owned by warlords, 10kms from Cape Town’s safest suburbs.
Months ago, when taxi gangs shot at each other in the street outside his home, he asked me when the media was going to tell the story of the collapse of Philippi. I muttered something about editors and attention spans, mumbling impotently across the demilitarised zone that separates my experience from Luthando’s.
Now, however, it’s worse. He won’t say it. He’s brave. He’s a father. He’s a professional and doesn’t want to bring his problems to work. But his life in Philippi is exhaustingly, relentlessly, terrifying.
Fundiswa*, a mother of three, has no such qualms. On Sunday she told her employer that she is frightened. The six women murdered on Friday night were shot not far from her home. She didn’t sleep that night, and has struggled to get much sleep since, spending most of those long, anxious hours in the dark praying. She intends to leave Philippi as soon as she can find somewhere else to live.
To speak to these South Africans, and then to read the newspapers spread across the bar counter where Luthando makes cups of coffee, is to see yet again the catastrophic disconnect between the powerful and those they are supposed to be helping: the brave, the tired, the faithful, the frightened.
President Cyril Ramaphosa wants to build a version of Silicon Valley in SA, to reap the rewards of a high-tech future. Julius Malema is furious that Mmusi Maimane doesn’t want to install EFF mayors in coalition-run municipalities. Public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane is throwing everything she has at Pravin Gordhan in one final attempt to remove him from office.
On and on, round and round: the personal pursuits of ambitious people, moving through their distant, red-carpeted, wood-panelled world in a bubble of money, surrounded by phalanxes of armed men, waited on by full-time spokespeople whose only job is to pump the soap opera into our eyes and ears and make us believe that their employers live difficult, dangerous lives.
And it works. I read everywhere that Mkhwebane is “gunning for Gordhan”; that Ramaphosa is in danger of being “stabbed in the back” and that the Zuma faction is giving him “sleepless nights”; that Malema sits in his “war room” and plans his next “attack” on the “forces” of counterrevolution. Such big, brave, scary words for such soft, safe, rich people.
Of course, it wouldn’t matter if they were fighting quite so hard or so bravely for Luthando and Fundiswa: then, they could be as melodramatic as they wanted, because at least there would be a plan, even if it was being carried out by self-aggrandising performers dazzled by their own virtuosity.
But 62 people murdered in 48 hours in one city, as happened in June, is not a plan. It is hell. And while our leaders and their myth-makers make us believe they are locked in life or death struggles, South Africans are being literally stabbed in the back, having actual sleepless nights as real, literal monsters gun for them. And every day, 49 more neighbours are murdered, and thousands and thousands of people endure another night of fear.
Perhaps this shifting of focus — from real victims of crime, living in places like Philippi, to metaphorical victims living in mansions — is why it feels oddly old-fashioned to exclaim about crime, as if it were one of those petit bourgeois gripes from the late 1990s about taxis driving badly or why there were so many public holidays. Perhaps the complexity of the crime pandemic — a Gordian knot in which policing is just one strand — has made such exclamations feel naïve or overly simplistic. Perhaps it’s all just become too depressing.
But amid all the complexity, we cannot forget one hard, clear fact: It is the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens. So where is the state? Where are those tough talkers? How long must Luthando keep his brave face? And for how many more nights will Fundiswa lie awake, praying not for wealth or power or fame, but just for evil, violent men to stay away from her door?
* Names have been changed
• Eaton is a Tiso Blackstar Group columnist
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