There is a dominant international narrative that holds that the end of apartheid brought a measurable reduction in violent crime. Earlier this year, the British newspaper The Guardian stated flatly that "violent crime fell by half in the two decades after apartheid's end".

The data behind this claim are real. They are also deeply misleading.

South Africa's murder rate reached over 70 per 100 000 in 1993, the highest recorded in the country's history. What followed was a genuine decline, reaching a low of around 30 per 100 000 by 2012. That is the data The Guardian and others point to as evidence that violent crime fell sharply in the post-apartheid era. But to understand what that decline actually represents, you first have to understand what produced the 1993 peak.

In its latest special report, The Common Sense has researched the history and origins behind the 1993 murder peak in detail. What it found is that the extraordinary violence of that period was not a crime problem. It was a war.

Through the mid-1980s, the African National Congress (ANC) was waging what it called a "People's War", making the townships ungovernable and taking the conflict into white South Africa. When President FW de Klerk unbanned the liberation movements in 1990, the violence did not end. It intensified. Competing political factions raced to arm and organise inside the country. The ANC's armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe, recruited and directed township-based combat formations known as Self-Defence Units. At the same time, the Pan Africanist Congress fielded its own armed wing, the Azanian People's Liberation Army, while Inkatha, the ANC's principal black political rival, was being covertly armed by elements within the apartheid state.

The country was flooded with illegal weapons in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A generation of young men were trained in their use and organised into armed formations. The result was a surge in political violence that drove the murder rate to extraordinary levels in the early 1990s, as seen in the chart below. Layered on top of this was social fabric violence, the impulsive, interpersonal violence of poor and overcrowded communities, turbocharged by the weapons flood.

These are not crime statistics. They are wartime figures. When the political settlement was reached in 1994 and the weapons supply dwindled, both political killings and social fabric violence declined, and the murder rate fell with them.

Saying that South Africa became a less violent society because the murder rate fell after 1993 is the equivalent of saying Europe solved its crime problem after 1945 due to a drastic drop in violent deaths. The Second World War ending was not a crime reduction. Neither was this.

And the improvement did not last. South Africa's murder rate began rising again around 2012 and has climbed almost without interruption since.

As seen in the graph below, South Africa recorded just over 27 000 murders in 2023, a post-apartheid record, at a rate of approximately 45 per 100 000 population, among the highest in the world.

The narrative that violent crime fell by half after apartheid is not a lie. It is something more insidious: a half-truth that has done real damage. It does not mention that in 1994 what ended was effectively a civil war. It does not mention that while the murder rate was falling after 1994, every other measure of predatory crime — robbery, carjacking, home invasion, and cash-in-transit heists — was rising as South Africa was awash with illegal weapons and young men trained in their use. And it does not mention that the murder rate itself has been climbing again for over a decade. What this narrative has done is substitute a flattering metric for an honest account of what South Africans are actually living with, and in doing so, giving the false impression that South Africa’s violent crime epidemic is an inevitable feature of the country rather than a structural crime problem with a documented history that could be solved with political will.