“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.
This observation shows that the leaders of the struggle are more concerned about their own comforts, and disregard the poor, by failing to attend to their needs. For example, when Noria needs the empathy of the leadership after her son’s death, she is dismissed in a heartless manner. At first she is made to believe that when the leaders come to the settlement for a meeting, one of the issues that would be addressed is her son’s necklacing and that the leadership would apologise to her publicly. However, this does not happen,
“Instead, they called her privately, and added insult to injury by saying that her child, who was only five years old, was not completely blameless” (Mda, 1995a:178). Had Vutha perhaps been the son of one of the prominent figures in the struggle, the case might have been treated differently. The following case illustrates the tendency towards preferential treatment which is afforded to those who are regarded as more equal than others:
Following the media frenzy around Jacob Zuma’s rape charge, the media and the public were barred from attending his first hearing … This added to the on-going favouritism claims caused by the fact that the rape complaint was laid against Zuma on November 4, and he was not arrested as is procedural with rape cases (Msomi, City Press, 2005:n.p.).
The theme of the preferential treatment of the “Aristocrats of the Revolution” (Mda, 2002) is treated in detail in Mda’s The Heart of Redness as will be shown in Chapter Four of this study.
3.4.2 Unscrupulous civil servants
Besides the leaders of the struggle, even the civil servants and government officials are corrupt. They fail to provide services in an honest, friendly, respectful, and effective way.
Their failure to perform their duties in line with the latter has merely served to undermine the principles of Ubuntu and Batho Pele which propound that people should be served with respect and impartiality.
Mda protests against such unscrupulous individuals by referring to an incident where a mortuary clerk treats bereaved people and those who are looking for their missing relatives with rudeness, instead of being compassionate. He depicts their uncouthness as follows:
The woman at the counter looked at the [woman in the queue] briefly and then doodled on a piece of paper. Then she shouted to a girl at the other end of the office, and boasted to her about the Christmas picnic she and her friends were going to hold. They discussed dresses, and the new patterns that were in vogue … The girl said she was going out to the corner café to buy fat cakes.
Rudeness and disregard for the plight of ordinary people are not the only thing that civil servants are guilty of as Mda (1995a:38) further points out that civil servants also misuse public resources or facilities for private matters by presenting the case of a health assistant who has an affair with a married woman. To access the woman’s home in the village, the health assistant dons a white coat and steals a stethoscope, thus disguising himself as a doctor. In addition to this, the health assistant, goes to the police station and asks the officers for their Land Rover. He tells them that there is an emergency in the village over the hills … and conscientious policemen drive him to the village (Mda, 1995a:38).
By behaving in such an irresponsible way the health assistant is doing the community a disservice. Firstly, his absence from the clinic means that those who require his assistance will not be helped. Secondly, he is removing the police from their post, where their services may be required. Christie (1986:199) observes, “[Civil servants] are showing that instead of liberating their humanity by giving it a chance to express itself, the education they have received has degraded their humanity”. Christie (1986:199) further observes
“With such an attitude a person will inevitably spend his life sucking from the community to the maximum … and contribute the minimum”.
Mda’s observation about the misuse of government vehicles is affirmed by an exposé that was presented by a team of reporters from NMG (Northern Media Group). This team reveals that government vehicles are still used for personal gain. The team asserts,
Most of the employees tend to use these cars when buying groceries, for family responsibilities and sometimes they are also seen at parties during the night, which make it seem like the law of not drinking and driving doesn’t apply to them (Polokwane Express, 2007:2).
This exposé is accompanied by photographs of state vehicles which were spotted at various spots in Polokwane, among those vehicles which were photographed were two police cars, an ambulance and a van that belonged to the Department of Education.