LAVITUDE RAMPHOMANE

Frank B. Wilderson laments the deafening silence around important questions of our times: “[O]ne cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political… are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides and even in socially and politically engaged feature films.”

Nothing leaves me with ambivalent, contradictory feelings like news of dangerous black robbers, and hardened and petty black thieves getting killed and/or arrested in the commission of their crimes.

This is because, at the first ontological instance, criminals are just human beings, and, with the encounter of evidence that these people have degenerated from their natural state to that lower than savages in the jungle, you must ask yourself what compels them to sink to that existence.

Just today on social media, I stumbled upon two incidents: one of the dead body of a young black thief sprawled on the ground after a botched robbery, and five black women who were intercepted at the airport for allegedly trying to traffic drugs worth R5 million.

The main reason so many black people are susceptible to criminal behaviour is an elephant in the room your glorified politicians will rather sweep under the carpet.

You can’t talk about black South Afrikans’s susceptibility to criminality without opening a can which will release two stinking worms: black lives have deteriorated to new lows after “liberation” and “democracy”, and that the hoarding of our wealth by the white minority was actually officialized and accentuated after 1994. This is to say black criminality and disproportionate black victimhood to crime constitute two sides of the same coin.

Now to the other side of the coin: black criminals and criminality (drug trafficking comes to mind) have become a terror to (largely) black people, the kind of terror which actually dwarfs institutionalized apartheid-era terror.

The difference is that at the height of apartheid terror the likes of Biko, Sobukwe, Lambede, Hani, Phama, Moodley, Solomon Mahlangu, Mothopeng, the Cradock Four rose up and spoke out in defense of black people. Forget about the ANC and all black political parties and black politicians: they are career men and women with not an iota of care for your plight. In point of fact, they are your open enemies who flatly refuse to headline (let alone grapple with) the real genesis and building blocks of your suffering.

Today, we have no black freedom fighters to take the fight to corrupt politicians, criminal elements within the police force, criminals on the streets, and also to dismantle the building blocks of the white privilege/black suffering continuum. The bitter irony is that every black criminal who dies at the hands of the police or the community died as a victim of an unjust political order which birthed him and gave him no chance and no better shot and alternative at building a life.

But a dead black criminal who terrorizes black people is welcome news in black spaces. Such are the ambivalent, conflicting feelings which take hold in our psyches.

Is the system intentionally rigged to turn us against each other, something which apartheid governments failed to achieve?

Friday 3 April 2026

This editorial was first published as a Facebook post and is re-published in herri with kind permission of the author.