South Africa is one of the most violent societies in the world, the underlying reasons for which are poorly understood.

The country is an outlier for the extent to which its citizens are hunted by organised criminal gangs. These gangs surveil a target, study its vulnerabilities, and execute a planned, typically armed assault. The victims are not incidental. They are chosen. This is what is called predatory crime.

Today, The Common Sense publishes a special report on South Africa's predatory crime crisis, and with it, the full three-part series by analyst and historian Dr James Myburgh that forms its historical foundation. 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.

Together they set out to answer the following questions: where did South Africa's predatory crime explosion come from, how did it grow to its current scale, and why has the dominant international narrative about post-apartheid crime so badly misrepresented what South Africans are actually living with?

Predatory crime is categorically distinct from opportunistic theft, social fabric violence, or political killing. It is what South Africans describe when they talk about being robbed at gunpoint in their driveway, confronted by armed men in their home at night, or forced to the side of the road and stripped of their vehicle. And South Africa has it at a scale that practically no country comes close to matching.

The roots of South Africa's predatory crime crisis lie in the political violence of the paramilitary structures of the liberation movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s – a period that was, effectively, a low-level civil war. The armed wings of the liberation movements recruited and trained tens of thousands of young people into armed formations, supplied them with weapons, and in some cases explicitly sanctioned robbery as a means of operational funding.

When the 1994 election came, these structures did not demobilise. Some entered the new state security structures without vetting. Others moved into organised crime, carrying with them the weapons and training accumulated during the struggle years. What began as politically directed violence did not end with the political settlement. Rather, it adapted.

The numbers make this plain. Armed robberies stood at roughly 26 000 in 1987. By 2003, that figure had reached almost 134 000. In 2023, it stood at over 150 000. The trend line runs in one direction only, and it starts well before the democratic election of 1994.

This predatory crime crisis is a unique South African phenomenon, with a specifically South African history, and it has been climbing for nearly four decades.

Yet the prevailing narrative in international media and academic circles holds that violent crime in South Africa has dramatically declined since the end of apartheid. The British newspaper The Guardian has stated flatly that “violent crime fell by half during the two decades after apartheid's end”. The special report examines these claims and finds them to be a dangerous half-truth, one that has allowed a real and structural crime problem to go unaddressed for far too long.

South Africans have come to accept predatory crime as a feature of everyday life. It goes largely unquestioned, and largely unexplained. But it is not inevitable. It has causes and a documented history. And understanding that history is where any serious response must begin.