It was a Monday night. The air was cool and crisp.
I had just finished up whatever it was that caused me to go to the farm that night and was walking to my pickup truck.
Then I heard it…
The sound that haunts me to this day and still sends shivers down my spine whenever I think of it.
It didn’t then…
At first I thought it was an animal in distress… I waited listening to see if I could hear it again because it sounded so eerie.
A hoarse pathetic long drawn out wail
There it was again, drifting down from the mountain on the cool evening breeze… the cold thick air enabling sound to travel much further at night and assisted by the breeze heading into the valley to where my bakkie (pickup) was parked.
By the third time… and even more alert now I said to my mother, who had come out of the house to see me off, “that sounds human…”
It was coming from the vicinity of the neighbor’s property with his dogs barking and sounding upset “I better go check it out” I said.
I drove up the dirt track to the top part of our farm to as close as I could get to the neighbors sheds. It’s like fort knox up there. High walls and razor wire, so I went to the fence where the dogs were barking and called out… no response.
I called out a couple more times and shone my torch over the wall through the razor wire, but still the only response I got was from yapping fox terriers…
It must be the donkeys, I concluded and since it was now after 9pm and I still had an hour’s drive back home to town, I delivered the news that it seemed like nothing was out of the ordinary and went on my way.
At 5am with things beginning to stir on the farm my mother heard the pathetic wails again… this time much hoarser and fainter. So when the farm laborers arrived, at first light, she instructed Gerry, the tractor driver, to get over that wall and not to come back until he had spoken to the old man that looks after the place, to determine which animal was suffering.
Gerry came back with even more distressing news…
It was the old man….
He had been tied up with wire and was in bad shape… we would have to get the police and an ambulance as soon as possible.
To cut a long story short… The gang of local scrap metal thieves had entered the property, beaten up the old man that looks after the place… dragged him to a deserted spot on the mountain and… here is the worst of it… Inserted his body into a black plastic garbage bag. The intent was obviously not to do him in right then and there but to let the sun do its work in the daytime and have him roast and die of heat stroke in the black plastic sack.
That was Saturday night…
He had managed to wriggle his way out of the bag but that did not save him from the exposed position he had been placed in. In the two days and three nights he had lain there the sun had burned blisters on any exposed skin and his hands had swelled up like balloons from the wire cutting into his wrists. He was hungry, severely dehydrated and in a lot of pain.
At first he had been too scared to call for help and when I had eventually responded to his cries, the night before, he thought it was the gang that had returned and had remained silent. It’s a good thing Gerry found him that Tuesday morning, he would not have lasted another day.
Criminality is one thing, but barbaric cruelty is another.
South African crime is particularly barbarous and it’s not always race related as some like to imply. This incident above was black on black.
Another of my farm neighbors suffered an ordeal that began in the daytime and lasted many hours. The gang was waiting for him inside his house when he arrived home. They had been falsely tipped off that he kept large sums of cash at his house.
To keep another long story short… they waited for his wife to come home so that they could gang rape her in front of him to get him to talk… a favorite tactic these days. When she did not put in an appearance they resorted to another favorite tactic.
The humble household iron…
They stripped him naked and proceeded to “iron” his thighs and more sensitive parts to extract the information they wanted.
Suffice it to say, they eventually left after clearing the fridge, cooking themselves dinner and leaving him alive but unable to walk properly for a while.
What does this have to do with anarchy you ask?
South Africa has seen some deplorable forms of government. Apartheid benefitted the whites who lived in very ordered and law abiding areas but the “black” areas were often very poorly governed and in some cases completely lawless no-go zones.
Add to that the forced removals, disruption of family life and uprooting of communities and you create a breeding ground for all kinds of nastiness.
Stir into the mix poverty, poor education, lack of opportunity and a migrant labor system.
Since blacks had to live in “home lands” but “black labor” was required on the mines, men would leave their homes to live in “hostels”. These hostels are still today, at times, some of the most violent and lawless places on earth.
Image from http://www.aljazeera.com/
The migrant labor system also deprived families of fathers and husbands and boys of good examples to emulate… mothers had to fend for themselves and children raise themselves. The simplest form of government, the family and home life was destroyed. Small wonder a large percentage of youth grew up on the streets and gravitated towards criminal gangs. These youth have grown up and continue to breed more of their ilk. This is a multi-generational problem now and manifests itself in sheer depravity.
Decades on we are still picking the bitter fruit of poorly conceived policies and governance.
The apartheid government barely cared about crime in the black areas, the current government is overwhelmed and to busy “swilling at the trough” to do anything meaningful… you need to be dead for the semblance of anything to be done.
Murder and rape trial conviction statistics are generally in the single figures, and those are the cases that get to court. Attempted murder and grievous assault are almost treated like petty crime.
Don’t get me wrong South Africa is a beautiful country with beautiful and friendly people… you just need to watch your own back… the current incarnation of the law and government is not going to do it for you…
I might share my own personal horror stories with crime with you someday…
If we look north to the Middle East. We see the disruption of dictatorships and the ensuing chaos in their wake. The Gadhafi, Assad and other regimes are and were detestable but the still offered most of their societies a protection from the worst parts of human nature that resides within each of us.
Anarchist must beware that in their idealizing of anarchist utopia they do not forget that lawfulness and governance no matter how warped they are often protect societies from their worst selves.