How South Africa can save itself

A criminologist believes he has the answers to the post-apartheid crimewave, writes ash smyth

The death of reggae star Lucky Dube, shot last week in Johannesburg, has South Africans yet again questioning why there is so much violence in their ostensibly transforming society.

Dube's murder - seemingly incidental to a carjacking - is particularly poignant: in his 2001 song Crime and Corruption, Dube (right)bemoaned the level of violent crime (car-jacking explicitly included) and asked his countrymen to "join us and fight this".

Fifty people are murdered every day in the 'new' South Africa, a culture of violence matched only in truly broken countries like Sierra Leone, Iraq, or Colombia. To add insult to fatal injury, only 20 per cent of the murderers are ever convicted, despite generally being connected to their victims.

To explain this "exceptionally, possibly uniquely, violent society", the South African criminologist Antony Altbeker has written a

Violent crime is now so widespread that there is almost no incentive to obey the law

much-needed, depoliticised, zero-bullshit analysis, A Country At War With Itself.

In what he calls "a society deformed by its fears", Altbeker argues that violence has been a politically charged issue for decades. Both the apartheid government and its opposers used violence (actual or threatened) as a political tool.

Even now there is much violent potential in the disappointments of liberation. Violent crime, Altbeker concludes, is now so widespread - and so ineffectually punished - that there is almost no incentive, moral or legal, to obey the law.

Critically, though, he insists that the past must now be recognised as exactly that, and ANC officials must stop abdicating responsibility for the here and now by attributing all the failings of post-1994 government to historical causes. It's bad enough that South Africa is stuck with its history, without choosing to remain stuck in it, too. It's fighting talk, but Altbeker's 13 years of dealing with crime statistics - several at the Ministry of Safety and Security - have