JONNY STEINBERG: Minorities become what they fear when confronted with anger

In May 1878, in the British crown colony of Griqualand West, a group of two dozen Tlhaping men stormed a shop belonging to a white man named Burgess and beat him to death. Burgess was the master of the local cattle pound; he was murdered in revenge for the property he had confiscated over the preceding year. Three months later another white man, Francis Thompson, was also attacked and killed. He had been taking vast amounts of firewood from the properties of his black neighbours despite a court order for him to desist.

In response to the two murders the administrator of Griqualand West, Owen Lanyon, declared the Tlhaping to be in a state of rebellion, assembled a heavily armed force of white civilians and either killed or captured every leading Tlhaping aristocrat, a swift and brutal decapitation of an entire society. The victors of this encounter wrote the history books, so to this day it is still remembered as the Griqualand West Rebellion, despite the fact that in its entirety the “rebellion” consisted of two isolated murders.

The story struck me as eloquent, here and now, in July 2022, as we mark the first anniversary of last July’s violence. I’m not sure anyone has yet noted the irony: the greatest concentration of killing last July was not inflicted by the rioters but by members of a racial minority who mistakenly thought they were under attack. I am talking, of course, about what happened in Phoenix, in KwaZulu-Natal. Fake news circulated on social media that Indian communities were being invaded. In response, residents of Phoenix murdered 33 black pedestrians and motorists with pangas, axes, knives and guns.

I am not trying here to institute a perverse competition between black, Indian and white people about who is the most violent. My point, rather, is to draw attention to a terrible irony: in their deep-seated fear that enraged mobs of black South Africans will slaughter them, racial minorities have, at various moments in modern history, formed enraged mobs and slaughtered black South Africans, becoming precisely what they fear.

The terror that racial minorities will be subsumed by black anger is old and deep; it was invoked by Louis Botha when he became SA prime minister in 1910, and it has been invoked over and over ever since: generations of white and Indian South Africans have imagined dying a thousand brutal deaths. And so it is worth pointing out that in the 370 years since Jan van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape this terrible nightmare — the mass slaughter of members of an SA racial minority by black people — has happened just once, in January 1949 in Durban, when 142 Indians were killed in three awful days of violence. It was such a shocking occurrence that it triggered years of deep soul-searching among African and Indian leaders and issued in the inspired reimagining of the SA nation by the likes of Albert Luthuli.

I do not wish in any way to diminish the significance of last year’s violence. But it did not come close to the general conflagration generations of people have feared. It was confined to pockets of the country in which violent mobilisation has been endemic for decades, such as Gauteng’s hostels and the old battlefields of KwaZulu-Natal’s 1980s civil war. Everywhere else — an everywhere that includes the overwhelming majority of human settlements across SA — remained at peace.

That the greatest concentration of killing came not from the riots themselves but from a mistaken response to them, is for me one of the great lessons to be learnt from July 2021. There is a sense of instability in the air. Between escalating load-shedding, the ANC’s looming elective conference and the slow-motion crisis closing in on SA’s president: it is a brittle time, when rumours spread like contagion and people talk each other up into greater and greater states of fear.

Overblown diagnoses, born of anxiety, have a propensity to become self-fulfilling.

• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.