Mbeki, a racist on crime

• This column was first published in South African business magazine Maverick, on 19 April 2007. Click here to subscribe to it the way it was meant to be read.

Thabo Mbeki is quite right about the white right. But he’s wrong about people who complain about crime. Mbeki’s latest theorising reveals his own racist prejudices, and deeply offends victims of crime.

I wasn’t going to write about it, but Thabo Mbeki changed my mind.

Unlike David Bullard or Jeff Koinange, I enjoy the (dubious) luxury of relative obscurity. So two months ago, when armed intruders held a knife to my throat, tied me up, and cleaned me out, I could choose whether to keep it private or go public.

For one, the trauma of such an event is an intensely private affair, and I preferred to keep it that way. It’s not the first time. Not that long ago, after a burglary on the day we moved into a house my then-partner and I were hoping to buy, I spent four months on nightwatch with a crowbar and torch. I chased off armed intruders eight times. The financial, legal and emotional scars remain, so I think I know something about crime-related stress and insecurity. I didn’t think going public would make it any easier this time.

Professionally, I had to consider the “write what you know” theory of journalism. Unlike most readers, I can write about it, and some would argue I have a moral duty to do so. A contrary theory holds that I’m too close to the story, the experience is subjective, and therefore I can’t be unbiased. I anyway don’t like writing about myself. I’m a sample of one, which is not representative. My life and times and petty complaints are little different from yours. I didn’t want to join the “poor me” or “phear my righteous rage” chorus that permeates so much of what passes for journalism nowadays.

This all changed when I read in the Sunday Times that Thabo Mbeki blames entrenched racism for the perception of crime: “The fact of the matter is that we still have a significant proportion of people among the white minority … that continues to live in fear of the black and especially African majority.”

This made me angry. As it turned out, the Sunday Times changed the tone and meaning of Mbeki’s words by selective quotation. For example, it used an innoccuous ellipsis to omit a crucial caveat: “but by no means everybody who is white”. So contrary to the impression left by the report, Mbeki wasn’t calling everyone who complained about crime a racist.

But his diversionary attack on the white right was no less reason to be upset.

Mbeki came across as callous to the distress of victims of crime – me, my domestic worker, the black guy living next to me who promptly ceased paying his rent and is fleeing the suburb, the domestic worker next door who had to receive trauma counselling after a similar event.

I was lucky: I had the nicest armed robbers you could hope to meet. I wasn’t hurt, they didn’t take my bicycle, and they did relieve me of an embarrassing stash of organic cotton t-shirts. What’s bankruptcy and mortal fear when I still have my bicycle?

Yet in the two months since I was robbed, and despite no effort whatever to keep track, I learned of eight other journalists who joined the ranks of crime victims. David Bullard, Jeff Koinange, Jedi Ramalaapa, Adel van Niekerk, Mahlatse Gallens, Candice Klein, Celeste Tema, and Jon Tullett. What am I to make of this? That there’s a plot to target journalists, because the crime problem is just being exaggerated by right-wing racists?

Mbeki’s divisive rhetoric is disingenuous. He blames white racists, when in fact it is Mbeki himself who casts crime as a racial issue, perpetrated by blacks upon whites. No, Mr Mbeki, I was tied up with a knife at my throat, but so was the black woman I employ. Her purse, cellphone, watch and money are also gone. A white friend of mine was badly beaten up by hijackers, but his black neighbour lost a son, brutally stabbed to death for a cellphone and R5.

Crime is happening to everyone, black and white. Even provincial ministers of safety and security aren’t safe. Of course there are still racists among whites. Of course the white right will use crime as a political issue. That’s what opposition parties do.

Yet Mbeki, who should know better, falls for this. He hammers home the racial wedge held up by white racists. Very few people pay attention to the right wing. Very many people pay attention to the president. So his recognition gives credibility and prominence to what most whites would consider a lunatic fringe.

Worse, that the president insists on viewing a practical security issue as one of race reveals more about his own views than about the white racists. His view perpetuates the racist stereotype that blacks, unjustly impoverished by oppression, commit crime out of need, and target their erstwhile overlords, rich whites, who in turn whine about it merely because they’re afraid of black rule.

This is offensive to blacks, most of whom are decent, law-abiding citizens who don’t feel poverty is an excuse for crime, and are just as likely to be victims of crime as whites. It’s offensive to poor people, because while the criminals drive flash cars and spend unearned loot, the majority are living proof that poor people aren’t criminals. It’s offensive to whites, many of whom are by no means rich, and don’t deserve to be assaulted, robbed or killed either way. For that matter, few whites under 35 or 40 had anything to do with white rule, so are justifiably offended when they’re tarred with the same brush as a few throwbacks of the past.

But the anger is mostly personal. What happened to me wasn’t propaganda, Mr Mbeki. It wasn’t perception. It wasn’t right-wing exaggeration. It wasn’t some dialectical inevitability of racial oppression.

It was very real. It was personally distressing and financially ruinous. Two months later, I still don’t sleep at night. Whenever the cat jogs the window handle on its way in or the dogs bark at the newspaper delivery van, I still find myself prowling the darkened house on bare feet, pathetically wielding a decorative hardwood bat. Then I feel like a stupid git and go back to bed. Then I’m angry at myself for feeling like a stupid git and not being able to sleep. Then I’m angry the bastards stole my fearsome old crowbar and torch. I’m angry at the people who casually violated the sanctity and security of my home. I’m angry that I respond in ways that make me feel like a stupid git. I’m angry at the people who condescend and call me racist when I fortify my home.

And when I hear someone – the president himself, to boot – claim that the problem is a few white racists who exaggerate crime for their own political ends, I get positively livid.

It’s time to stop with the pop-sociology and the political rhetoric, Mr Mbeki. It only highlights government’s failure to stem the tide of crime, and strengthens the propaganda of the racists you claim to oppose. No amount of rambling will unite and heal the country when transparent racism in our own president’s rhetoric does more to divide us than any white racist could ever hope to do.