Remember when we talked about violence?

It wasn’t that long ago. I complained about the violence in the country, particularly in strikes, and now I’m seeing something even worse. I’m not talking about when the striking miners later threatened to kill the management, although that’s still unacceptable. Maybe we can at least hope in the future we will be a more peaceful and reasonable people. I kinda hoped that until I heard about six Grade 1 pupils (between six and eight years old) who beat a boy so badly that he had to go to hospital.

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Move away from the culture of violence

There is a culture of violence in South Africa which is retarding any efforts to move the country forward. Violent protests end up causing more problems than there were originally and, even worse, those aggressive tendencies are manipulated by politicians in order to maintain power. We know there is a problem with violence when we look at crime but at times we become so used to it that we seem to forget to call it out when it happens.

The most notable recent violence has been the Marikana massacre where 34 striking miners were killed by police and around 80 injured. Obviously such an event is a tragedy and there will be an inquiry into the events to find out exactly what happened and what went wrong but one aspect of the problem is already obvious, the culture of violence in South Africa. Whether the police were wrong to respond the way they did I don’t think we can just dismiss what the workers themselves were doing. Professor Pierre de Vos seems quite happy to ignore their actions.