Innocent people are getting burnt alive. Vicious vigilante mobs are lynching people merely because of the circumstances of their birth. Evil is roaming our streets.
As we all know, because AfriForum told the international media, a white farmer is killed by black people every five days. Because the government is doing nothing about it, it’s up to white farmers to defend themselves.
To that effect, Operation Pushback commandos will patrol for suspicious-looking black people in farming areas, and if they cannot provide a valid reason for their presence, burn them alive.
Nine out of ten serial killers in South Africa are black, so Operation Pushback will also lynch any black people caught loitering without papers in urban areas.
If the police won’t do anything, the people must rise up and eliminate these criminals themselves!
What – other than the invented context of this story – is wrong with this picture?
That white farmers are getting murdered, mostly by black perpetrators, is not in dispute, although whether these murders happen at an extraordinary rate is arguable. That most South African serial killers – and for that matter, most South African criminals – are black is also not in dispute. Demographics alone ensure that.
Yet most South African victims of crime are also black. In fact, black people are victims of crime more often, per capita, than white people.
This kind of collective blame-laying and collective retribution is factually and morally wrong.
Three evils
There are three egregious evils in the fictional scenario painted above.
One is to blame a person’s actions on an entirely irrelevant physical characteristic, like shoe size, pencil-test hair, or dusky skin. There’s a word for this kind of thinking… let me think… oh yes, it’s racism.
Crime is driven by many things, but race is not one of them. Socio-economic circumstances, broken family homes, poverty, mental health, education, despair, and ineffective policing are all factors that influence crime. Skin colour has nothing to do with it.
A second evil is to generalise from a subset of a particular group of people to the entire group.
Just because EFF members are communist firebrands does not mean all black people are communists. Just because AfriForum espouses Afrikaner nationalism doesn’t mean that all Afrikaans people agree. Just because Marcus Jooste committed accounting fraud doesn’t mean all corporate directors are criminals.
Just because most crimes are committed by black people doesn’t mean black people cannot be trusted to be honest and law-abiding. Just because some people from difficult socio-economic backgrounds commit crimes doesn’t mean that a majority, or even a large minority, of poor people are likely to turn to crime. Most don’t.
Conversely, one cannot generalise from group characteristics to every member of a group.
The third evil is turning to kangaroo courts and vigilante violence to address grievances. If a criminal is apprehended by the community, they must be handed over to law enforcement agencies for investigation and, if necessary, trial.
Mob justice violates fundamental human rights, including the right to a fair trial and the rights not to be tortured and not to be treated or punished in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way.
It also creates division and hatred, promotes a violent society, and can lead to all-out civil war.
Operation Dudula
That is exactly what is happening in South Africa today. Social media is riddled with trending topics like ‘Diepsloot’, ‘Operation Dudula’, ‘Go Home’, and ‘Zimbos’.
Instead of the racial hatred sketched above, Operation Dudula (which means ‘pushback’), led by wealthy 35-year-old Soweto businessman Nhlanhla ‘Lux’ Dlamini, is aimed at foreign nationals.
Dlamini and his operation parade around in paramilitary attire, calling for a militant uprising against illegal immigrants.
Driven by the exact same prejudice and flawed logic outlined above, a mob – incensed by a series of violent crimes allegedly committed by Zimbabwean immigrants – took matters into their own hands.
Only hours after police minister Bheki Cele had promised increased policing in the township of Diepsloot, the mob illegally entered a property to illegally demand papers from residents.
Elvis Nyathi, a Zimbabwean man who could not produce immigration documents, fled. The mob hunted him down and burnt him alive. Nyathi’s family protested his innocence.
Even assuming the truth of the allegations against certain Zimbabwean nationals, lynching them in the most cruel and horrifying way imaginable is not justice. Burning the innocent alive is undisguised, barbaric evil.
Prejudice and hatred
Justice would be to help the police to track down the actual criminals and bring them up on charges.
Out of millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, there will inevitably be thieves, fraudsters, rapists and murderers. The same is true for millions of South African citizens.
There is no evidence to suggest that immigrants are any more or less likely to commit crime than citizens in similar socio-economic circumstances. Arguably, the opposite is true.
Nor is there evidence to suggest that immigrants cause economic hardship for the local population. On the contrary, immigrants contribute to an economy. Their economic activity creates jobs. Barriers to immigration are actually a massive obstacle to economic growth.
Tarring an entire group with the same brush is fallacious reasoning. It is prejudice. It is pure hatred, of exactly the same sort that white nationalists and right-wing militias exhibited towards black people under apartheid, and in the American South.
Dangerous demagogues
The dangerous demagogues who whip up these mobs against foreigners have innocent blood on their hands.
Operation Dudula claims to be working to eliminate criminality in its ranks. Dlamini, when he was arrested on charges that his mob illegally ransacked the home of an innocent, told the media that he was merely a humble crime-fighter, doing what the police weren’t prepared to do.
The gangsters at the Patriotic Alliance, the xenophobes at Action SA, and the African nationalists at the Economic Freedom Fighters all claim that they act only to protect the community from dangerous illegal immigrants and put South Africans first, because the police are failing to do so.
They should all know better. It is their rhetoric that caused the blood in the streets of Diepsloot. Their words burnt Elvis Nyathi alive.
Some of them will try to wash their hands of this horror. Some of them will double down on their rhetoric. But they are all guilty.
It is illegal to commit violence against others, even when they really are criminals. Everyone in South Africa, including illegal immigrants and including criminals, have basic human rights that may not be violated. It is illegal to assume police powers simply because you’re unhappy with the police’s performance.
South Africans do not need defence against immigrants, legal or illegal. Legitimising xenophobic prejudice always ends in pogroms by violent mobs. As I’ve written before, that is exactly how Hitler got started.
Condemnation
President Cyril Ramaphosa, to his credit, has been unequivocal in his condemnation of Operation Dudula, telling eNCA: ‘The concern that we have is that we’ve got a vigilante force-like organisation taking action against – illegal action against – people who they are targeting and these things often go out get out of hand. They always mutate into wanton violence against other people.
‘We’ve always said let’s act within the parameters of the law,’ he said. ‘Let us act within the framework of the law and if we are unhappy about anything that is not being done at state level let us have it addressed. So we cannot support a vigilante type of move against a group of people, and particularly targeting them as foreign nationals, because what we are doing then is just to divide our people on the African continent. Of course people who are here illegally have to be dealt with within the framework of the law.’
South Africans need to be vocal in their condemnation of Herman Mashaba, Gayton Mackenzie, Julius Malema, Nhlanhla ‘Lux’ Dlamini, and all the other stirrers of hatred and mob violence.
They cannot be tolerated on the grounds that illegal immigrants are here illegally, or on the grounds that some illegal immigrants have committed crimes.
Their xenophobic approach to the problem is unjust, illegal, hateful and inevitably ends in uncontrollable violence. They are, objectively speaking, evil people.
They will destroy the fabric of society if we let them. They will leave the country bleeding and burning. Then they will dance on the graves of innocents, claiming victory.
They must be stopped.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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