South Africa was deeply shaken this week, rocked to its very core, just as the United States was on January 6 this year. It will take us a long time to recover and to rebuild, but we shall overcome.
On January 6 this year, the world looked on in horror as thousands of people stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, the home not just of U.S. democracy, but of an inspiration to democracies the world over.
On July 11, the world looked on aghast as thousands of looters made their way home across South Africa carrying whatever they could in an unprecedented orgy of looting. These events happened half-a-year and half-a-world apart, but they share a compelling similarity—both were premised on a lie
In the United States, that lie was fomented by a soon to be former president—that the election that had unseated him had been stolen. In South Africa, the lie was that the former president was being jailed without trial, ignoring that he had chosen not to appear before the commission or give the apex court any reasons why he should not be jailed when he was eventually convicted of contempt of court.
Jacob G. Zuma’s supporters immediately started agitating for his arrest, openly inciting insurrection as they vowed to close the country down. Zuma went to jail, eventually, at midnight on Wednesday, July 7. By that Saturday night, thirty-five trucks had been destroyed by firebombs at a toll plaza on the main supply route between Durban, Africa’s busiest port, and Johannesburg, the country’s economic heartland.
By Sunday, the looting began. This was the second lie. The people who were looting were not doing so because they had been incensed by the jailing of a self-proclaimed people’s president, but because they were hungry and desperate, battered after months of one of the harshest Covid-19 lockdowns in the world, in a country that could ill afford the crushing effect on its already faltering economy.
By Monday, as several well-off South Africans opportunistically decided to use the anarchy to benefit themselves, while other looters appeared strangely organized with light delivery vehicles to load their loot into, we saw the third lie. This unrest wasn’t only about poverty in a country with historically high levels of joblessness and the highest youth unemployment rate in the world—this was about lawlessness and impunity, something that Zuma’s administration had normalized and now weaponised.
By Tuesday, many of us were beginning to lose hope as infrastructure began being targeted; cell phone towers destroyed, community radio stations robbed of their equipment, schools torched, and major economic distribution and warehouse centres ransacked and burnt to the ground. We heard reports of people being dropped off at certain places, with petrol to start the fires. This was the fourth and final lie; what we were seeing was not a popular uprising fuelled by anger and hopelessness, but an insurrection with only one aim—to upend our internationally acclaimed constitution, destroy the rule of law, and unseat the government. This was not being done for the poor of South Africa, but to escape being held accountable for their own acts of corruption and state capture—and then benefit economically from the chaos.
