You think that just because you now make all this money running around with educated people I am no longer good enough for you? … What gives you, a mere woman, the right to pass judgement on the state of [my] cleanliness or lack thereof?
(Mda, 2000:253).
As the man raves, he pours paraffin all over their rondavel and sets it alight. This leaves NoGiant petrified and emotionally traumatised.
The actions of both Napu and NoGiant’s husband constitute emotional and psychological abuse. Mda reveals that men frequently regard women as mere possessions, sometimes by denying them the freedom to choose whether they want to work or not. The men’s quest is to confine their women to the domestic environment. Napu degrades Noria when he insults her and brings his mistress to their home. These acts show contempt and disregard.
NoGiant is degraded by her husband when he refuses to bath because he wants to be in control and use her as he wishes. Moreover, he refers to her as “a mere woman” (ibid.), an indication that he simply regards her as a commodity.
Mda articulates his protest against black-on-black violence as a folly which defeated the objective of unity among blacks who were supposed to focus on fighting the common enemy – the apartheid government.
3.3.1 Black-on-black violence
This type of violence affects children, women and men alike. Besides the hostel inmates who terrorise the township residents, people generally act irresponsibly by going on drinking sprees and ending up committing acts of violence. Mda points out that the violence that reigns is due to the irresponsible behaviour of the people. For instance, he depicts that on Christmas day, “they engage in an orgy of drinking, raping and stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns … [They] walk[ed] in the streets pissing in [their] pants …” (1995a:25).
Noria becomes a victim of violence in the township after the necklacing of her son, Vutha.
As a way of silencing her, comrades petrol-bomb her home. “She fled with only the clothes on her back” (Mda, 1995a:51). This occurs despite the fact that she herself is a member of the settlement community that is involved in the struggle against apartheid.
Mda (1995a:168) furthermore illustrates the magnitude of the violence that is rampant in the township by stating:
In a recent massacre in the settlement, which was carried out by some of the tribal chief’s followers from the hostels, assisted by Battalion 77 of the armed forces of the government, as many as fifty-two people died, including children. Some children were orphaned overnight.
In another instance the community takes the law into their own hands in order to avenge and protect community members who are victims of gang violence. In this case Mda shows that people are applying the “eye for an eye” principle, a principle that divided the people and drove them to more violent and irresponsible behaviour as the following extract evinces:
[I]n a moment of mass rage the villagers had set upon a group of ten men, beat them up, stabbed them with knives, hurled them in a shack, and set it alight. Then they had danced around the burning shack, singing and chanting about their victory over [the] thugs, who had been terrorizing the community for a long time. It seemed [the thugs] … had thrived on raping maidens, and robbing, murdering defenseless community members (Mda, 1995a:66).
These incidents clearly reveal that people have lost direction in that they are no longer fighting for freedom, but their fight has culminated in self-destruction.
3.3.2 Police brutality
Police brutality in South Africa is not a practice that was pertinent only to the transitional period, since the South African police have always been regarded as brutal. For instance, on 26 March 1960 they opened fire on unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville, wounding four-hundred people, including women and children. Sixty-nine blacks were killed (Mandela, 1995:281). Many other incidents of police brutality such as the shooting and killing of 152 revolutionary mine workers in the Rand in 1974, and the 1976 massacre of Soweto students who were protesting against Bantu Education (Christie, 1986:238), are evidence of South African police brutality. Paris (2002:246) ascribes police brutality to the fact that during the apartheid era, the police defended only twenty percent of the population against the rest, and “they are still untrained in the ways of impartiality [in the new dispensation]”. Paris (2002:263) further asserts that “what motivated the apartheid police was the conviction that blacks were satanic and godless, uncivilized and uncontrolled in their impulses. And they were going to swamp [them].” Another observation that Paris makes about the apartheid police is that,
[T]hey were conditioned to see the other as inherently evil and less than human … when they received orders to carry out grisly government-sanctioned tasks, they did not struggle with their consciences … they could kill without passion, because they were part of an important, approved enterprise – and because their victims were undeserving (2002:266).
Paris provides evidence for his arguments by referring to Eugene de Kock’s brutal actions.
De Kock was one of the special branch policemen who appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the brutal killings of political activists on Vlakplaas. Paris (2002:263) remarks:
The brutalization of Eugene de Kock seems to have taken place over a twenty year period, starting in the former Rhodesia where he learned to hang “terrorists”
upside down from trees and pushed burning sticks in their anuses; then in Namibia where he enjoyed cutting off ears as souvenirs and tying those who were about to die to the wheels of Jeeps.
Paris’ observations reveal that the police “learned” and were “conditioned” to see blacks as “less than human”. This information serves to explain why the apartheid police acted and behaved brutally; and why South African protest literature is inundated with incidents of police brutality.
Even today, in the democratic South Africa, incidents of police savagery are reported as evidenced in the following: “… police fired two stun grenades into the [club’s] dance floor, intimidated clubbers with loaded rifles, and beat, kicked and verbally abused men and women” (Sunday Times, 2005:n.p.).
During the transitional period the police, who like ordinary citizens had lost control, went out of their way to torture black people. Even law-abiding citizens did not escape the senseless tortures. One night, Noria’s neighbour, Shadrack becomes a victim of police brutality. While he is waiting in his taxi for passengers, a police van pulls up. Without any provocation he is assaulted and thrown into the van. Mda (1995a:141-2) reveals the savage manner in which he is treated:
His kidnappers dragged him out of the van, and he was ordered to enter a dilapidated room whose door was opened just in front of him. It was freezing in the room. The men told him that they were going to kill him, and started assaulting him again … One of the men grabbed him by the shoulders and ordered him to make love to a corpse of a young woman.
Shadrack is not only physically tortured but also psychologically tortured when he is ordered to perform the inhuman and sacrilegious act of making love to a corpse in front of jeering policemen.
Mda continues to reveal police brutality in an incident where they torture a young man who is accused of stealing bags of maize from a milling company. When the man denies any knowledge of the theft, his “interrogators got angry and punched his testicles. They then tied him to a chair and attached wires to his fingers and neck. They connected this to the electric outlet on the wall, and the man screamed in agony and lost control of his bowels” (Mda, 1995a:62).
Torturing a man until he loses control of his bowels is not only an agonising experience but also extremely humiliating. Even worse than this, tampering with a man’s genitals through exerting any form of pressure on the testicles may result in the loss of his virility since these glands are a site for sperm production (Austoker and Eloff, 1987:259).
Consequently, this might have long-lasting emotional and psychological implications.
Coetzee (2002:37) states that, “[i]n the Transvaal the police [would] fire shots into a crowd, then in their mad way, go on firing into the backs of fleeing men, women and children.”
The madness of the police is evident in Dirk Coetzee’s words (Dirk Coetzee, Eugene de Kock, Mamasela and others were the notorious apartheid Special Branch police who committed the most gruesome murders on Vlakplaas):
“We abducted them and interrogated them in different ways. We gave them electric shocks or smothered them or hammered them on the head. We shot them, then we put them on fire or tyres and wood and burned them to ashes” (Paris, 2002:263).
Bizo (1998:39) explains that at the inquest of Steve Biko, the leader of Black Consciousness who was brutally murdered while in police custody, he discovered that,
“racism had distorted ordinary people, … it has destroyed all morality and decency in a rich and beautiful country”.
Sadly this legacy of police brutality continues to destroy lives in the new dispensation.
Examples that validate this observation will be expounded in the next chapter.