A few years ago, I had an interesting exchange with a prominent expert on crime and policing. Knowing that he’d in the past argued in favour of strict gun control – and had worked with Gun Free South Africa – I was surprised at the take he expressed to me during our conversation.
He could not, he said, make the same case after the riots in July 2021. I didn’t get the sense that he had changed his view on the desirability of a gun-free society, but he said that irrespective of the negative externalities that firearms may hold for a society, if the state abrogated its responsibility to protect its people, it lacked the moral authority (and for that matter, a coherent pragmatic case) to deprive them of the ability to defend themselves.
This came to mind in the aftermath of the attack on Ian Cameron.
Readers of this column probably need no introduction to him. Cameron is that charismatic and photogenic chairman of Parliament’s police portfolio committee. He had established a prior reputation through his work on crime in the townships around Cape Town. The Cele meltdown – SHURRUP! SHURRUP! while members of the beleaguered Gugulethu community nodded in agreement with Cameron – made him a folk hero.
No doubt many South Africans saw his conduct in much the same light. While Cameron was on the road with two associates, their car was attacked by three assailants. In the dramatic moments that followed, Cameron drew his firearm and shot at the attackers, wounding one. Living in such a crime-ravaged society, South Africans tend to rally around those who give criminals a bloody nose. (Or threaten to: General Mkhwanazi became a sensation after he denounced his superiors and positioned himself as the nemesis of organised crime.)
Not everyone feels this way, though. Brett Herron, secretary general of the GOOD Party and a member of the Western Cape provincial parliament, took a sardonic take on the “folk hero” narrative. “That Cameron has been hailed as a folk hero in conservative circles for shooting a black youth reinforces old divisions. His actions are symbolic of the apartheid propaganda films depicting ‘civilised Whites’ with guns overpowering ‘Black savagery’. If Cameron doesn’t feel safe doing his job in black neighbourhoods, he should have the emotional intelligence to ask the Speaker of Parliament to facilitate protection rather than behave like a latter-day Rambo or Piet Retief.”
In a way, that’s to be expected from GOOD. It has a particular axe to grind and a narrative to push. An act justified as self-defence (and in which the “Black youth” – Herron’s emphasis – initiated the confrontation) is caricatured as reckless, racist adventurism.
Not dissimilar was the Daily Maverick’s coverage, in an article by Vincent Cruywagen. Although presented less emphatically and with greater balance than Herron’s remarks, the overall thrust was recognisable. “There are ongoing questions over whether the force was reasonable and whether he should have been carrying a firearm at all,” it read.
The article acknowledged that an attack with bricks could “reasonably be seen as a life-threatening”, but noted that the “the assailants themselves were apparently not armed, and their exact intent remains unclear”. (It seems to me that a brick can make a pretty lethal weapon, and that having wielded it as they had, their intentions were clearly not benign.)
Admonished
It quoted another GOOD representative, local councillor Axolile Notywala, who admonished: “It is only the police or the courts that can be able to tell us whether it was appropriate for him to respond to an 18-year-old and 16-year-old carrying bricks to respond with shooting at them.” (Correction here: these young people were not “carrying” bricks; they had used them as weapons.)
Notywala went on to say that, as a councillor, the procedure would be to approach the Speaker for assistance with protection, if working in a hazardous area.
Both pieces – one explicitly, the other implicitly – take aim at Cameron for resorting to force to protect himself, and, specifically for using a gun, as this is as much a contested artefact of our political culture as an actual weapon. And each suggests that he should have relied on South Africa’s authorities to protect him.
There is a grounded logic in this. The basis for the existence of a state is to ensure some sort of order. This is its role, irrespective of whether the state in question has the interests of its people at heart or not. Dictatorships ensure order by coercion and inspiring fear. Democracies seek to maintain such order by bargaining and consensus.
South Africa’s reality – and a long-standing indictment on its governance – is that in many respects, it is not able to maintain order. A foremost concern from the earliest moments of South Africa’s democracy has been personal security, (although violent crime had been on the rise for years previously.)
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, 36.7 per 100 000 in 2019, according to the World Bank’s database. (2019 is the last pre-Covid year for which information is available across the world). In the same year, Brazil – another country notorious for criminal violence – registered a little under 21.
More recent estimates, for the 2023/24 period, post-Covid, put the murder rate in South Africa at 45 per 100 000.
South Africans are fearful, and the state offers indifferent protection. Afrobarometer’s invaluable polling finds that some three quarters of South Africans felt unsafe in their neighbourhood, and close to two thirds, in their own homes. (Incidentally, it found an elevated sense of insecurity among black and coloured South Africans in their neighbourhoods – so, contra Herron, it’s not only white MPs who feel this way….)
Moreover, there is a dire lack of public confidence in the police. Some 61% feel that “most” or “all” of South Africa’s police officials are corrupt. Some 43% evinced no trust at all in the police and a further 23% just a little.
A large majority
For Cameron to go about armed merely reflects an assessment of the country’s security situation shared by a large majority of the country’s people. The state lacks the ability to guarantee order, or to protect life and property.
This is not merely perception. The country’s law enforcement agencies have been politicised, their operations poorly managed and under-resourced. Many people have personal experience of this. Many more know people who have. In 2021, during unprecedented public unrest, the state was reduced to impotence. It was private security outfits and ordinary people who stepped in.
This brings us to the advice that Cameron should have sought additional security. As an MP, this might have been possible for him. It’s also the sort of thing that encourages resentment. The sight of the police minister flanked by a phalanx of armed and armoured guards while he declaims the need for a gun-free society is one of those near-parodic images that define public cynicism. Indeed, in his article, Cruywagen quotes some observers questioning whether police officers would have responded as expeditiously (after the fact) to someone less prominent.
Don’t misunderstand or romanticise what went down. That Cameron and his colleagues were able to emerge – bloodied but alive – may mask the full, sinister implications of what took place. Citizens were left to fend for themselves and to make dreadful, split-second choices that weighed on the life of another human being. These choices, in a functioning society, would have been handed to the state agents detailed to protect them.
Cameron’s actions – justifiable on their own merits by all available evidence – stand conceptually not too far from those of frustrated community members who might “deal with” an “obvious” child molester or gangster. Go down that road far enough and the prospects for a successful modern society recede into the background. We may not like what we find at the end of such a journey.
“Taken life needlessly”
I’m reminded of the words of Colonel Tim Collins, a British army officer, to his troops prior to the launch of the Second Gulf War in March 2003. A haunting extract reads: “It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly. I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts, I can assure you they live with the mark of Cain upon them.”
Cameron represents a revealing lens for the state of people’s sense of security and for the deficient conduct of the state. That citizens are forced to rely on their own resources to protect themselves speaks to the broken social contract in the country. Cameron was able to navigate it, and to mitigate its effects. Thousands of others are not.
[Image: Max Kleinen on Unsplash]
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend