South Africa has lived with staggering levels of violent crime for three decades. The question of how this came to be is the subject of a three-part series by Dr James Myburgh, now available in full on The Common Sense.

Read Part One Here | Read Part Two Here | Read Part Three Here

The following is a summary of that work.

The World Before the Transition

South Africa is one of the most violent societies in the world today, the underlying reasons for which are poorly understood. In seeking to understand the country's extraordinary levels of criminality, Myburgh poses two central questions: "Why did once-safe commercial farming and suburban areas in the eastern half of South Africa become so insecure in the 1990s, and why have they remained so to this day?" and "What happened to the guardrails that were meant to protect citizens from criminal predation, and when and why were they removed?"

Myburgh begins with South Africa’s violent crime situation before the democratic transition of 1994.

Under apartheid, violent crime was heavily concentrated in townships. Soweto in 1978 recorded a murder rate of over 75 per 100 000, while white South Africa was largely shielded, with a white murder rate of 4.8 per 100 000 during the same period.

In September 1984, an insurrection against apartheid and white rule erupted across the townships of South Africa. From exile, the African National Congress (ANC) sought to give effect to its “People’s War” strategy by calling on its supporters to make the country ungovernable. Though there were repeated calls between 1985 and 1987 for the “war” to be taken into the “white areas,” and for weapons to be seized from the homes of the whites, these calls to action were mostly frustrated by severe state repression.

In 1987, only 313 of 9 800 murder victims nationally were white. Of the 46 288 robberies recorded that year, 25 957 were classed as robberies with aggravating circumstances (essentially, armed robberies). The revolutionary violence that had engulfed the townships had reached white suburbs and farms, in Myburgh's phrase, only as "an ominous echo".

The Transition Unleashes the Storm

That changed rapidly after February 1990, when President FW de Klerk announced the unbanning of the liberation movements and the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison.

In the turbulent period that followed, competing political factions raced to establish and arm paramilitary units inside the country, each justifying the move as necessary for self-defence against the others. The ANC's armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), recruited, trained, and directed township-based combat formations known as Self-Defence Units (SDUs). The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) fielded its own armed wing, the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA). And Inkatha, the Zulu nationalist movement led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the ANC's principal black political rival, was being covertly armed by elements within the apartheid state itself.

The country was soon flooded with illegal guns, with an ever-growing cohort of youth trained in their use and organised into armed bands. The result was a massive surge in political violence. The numbers of murders recorded by the South African Police (SAP) rose from 11 750 in 1989 to 15 109 in 1990 and 19 853 in 1993.

These various paramilitaries often drew from lumpen elements and many soon turned to crime. The PAC's APLA had an explicit policy of funding its armed struggle through so-called "repossession operations”, which were in effect robberies. Though the ANC denied pursuing a similar policy, many of its SDUs too became notorious for their involvement in predatory criminality. This period also saw a dramatic surge in the number of armed robberies from 30 498 in 1989 to 39 211 in 1990 and 60 089 in 1993.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the post-apartheid body established to investigate human rights violations committed by all sides during the conflict, later confirmed through its amnesty hearings that MK and SDU commanders had, in fact, been covertly encouraged to use their "initiative" to secure weapons and money. As the TRC's final report put it, "The ANC turned something of a blind eye to acts of robbery for operational purposes." Many Inkatha Self-Protection Units (SPUs), or their remnants, also ended up involved in criminal activities.

After the Miracle, and the Second Surge

The 1994 election brought a dramatic fall in political violence and related killings. But the predatory criminal violence seeded by the low-intensity warfare of the early 1990s did not see a similar dissipation. Tens of thousands of MK, SDU, SPU and APLA combatants who had been recruited, trained, and armed through the transition years did not have a civilian life to go back to.

Thousands of these combatants were absorbed, without vetting, into the new state security services. However, of the 42 000 MK/SDU and APLA members initially listed, 18 000 never reported for integration or demobilisation at all, with many drifting into organised crime. This found its most dramatic expression in the hundreds of cash-in-transit heists executed annually in the mid-1990s.

As Myburgh notes: “One ‘senior government official’ told Wally Mbhele of the Mail & Guardian that those behind these violent heists were mostly former SDU members who had been given quick and dirty military training in the early 1990s, and who had then been integrated into the [South African National Defence Force] before dropping out again. The official said that ‘the modus operandi used in highway robberies mirrors the methods of military training the self-defence units were given on how, for instance, to ambush police or vehicles’. The motive was not political, the official suggested. ‘They look at people they used to struggle with who all drive flashy cars while they remain poor and they want to be rich too.’”

Though the police had forecast the opposite to occur, the 1997/1998 period saw a second surge of predatory violent crime. The number of armed robberies leapt from 73 053 in 1997 to 92 630 in 1998. Rather than seeking to strengthen the capacity of the police units best able to respond to this crisis the ANC government actively sought to undermine them. This was done initially by offering voluntary severance packages to many of the most capable and effective police officers. Then, even as the crime crisis continued to escalate, the ANC set about completely dismantling these units. The national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, the first ANC cadre to head the police, ordered the closure of 200 specialised police units in January 2001, including murder and robbery and anti-hijacking units.

American journalist Eve Fairbanks, in her widely praised book The Inheritors, claimed that crime had halved by the late 1990s and that white South African fears of being attacked in their homes were exaggerated. Myburgh examines this against the actual South African Police Service (SAPS) data and finds it not just wrong, but "the converse of what happened". That murders started declining year-on-year from 1999 to 2010 was true, but this reflected the wind-down of organised political killing (in 1994) followed by the gradual decline in the easy availability of illegal firearms and a fall in interpersonal “social fabric” violence in the townships as living conditions steadily improved. Apart from a brief dip at the time of the 2010 Football World Cup the levels of predatory violent crime have remained at levels vastly above what they were in 1994, let alone in the late 1980s.

It will not be possible to address this crisis, Myburgh argues, until the origins of this crisis are acknowledged and understood, and the institutions rebuilt to combat it. The expertise to combat organised crime exists within South Africa, yet it has long been a matter of state policy to avoid tapping into it. This is despite South Africans regarding crime as one of their top five priorities. However, government will only be forced to re-establish the requisite state capacity when the ruling party fears public opinion more than it fears the criminal elements that continue to wield influence within its ranks.

Myburgh is the director of the Bremen Centre for Democratic Research (BRE-DE-RE), a think tank based in Germany, editor of Politicsweb, and a regular guest on The Common Sense podcasts.