The Apartheid Legacy of Brutality Lingers on in Our Armed Forces

1 April 2020

The country is now on what is popularly known as lockdown due to the Covid-19. Necessary as this desperate measure is, it has also exposed the deep seated deficiency in our country’s armed forces: the persisting legacy of apartheid brutality 26 years into our constitutional democracy. If our country bears the imprints and birth marks of its apartheid past, the SANDF and SAPS have become a shining example in this regard. They have illuminated this legacy of apartheid brutality with aplomb.  

The great irony of this legacy in the current crisis humanity faces is that black people again are the victims of its brutality. What is even more concerning as a paradox is that the corona virus was brought into the country by the selfish and privileged white elite that had travelled abroad to risky countries and came back to the country without declaring where they had travelled. They came through the OR Tambo and Cape Town International Airports, travelled to such destinations as KwaZulu Natal, Western Cape, Eastern Cape etc, whilst mingling with other people thus putting all our lives in danger.

Our security forces – the SANDF and SAPS – have been deployed to enforce the lockdown in terms of the regulations announced by government. The constant refrain from our officialdom whenever the army is deployed, is that the army is not like the police, they ‘skop and donor’. This translated to me that whenever the army is deployed, they have a licence to brutalise black people.

This logic has become the modus operandi of our army in our townships and elsewhere where black people live. Black people are kicked around, punched, whipped and made to perform some of the most degrading and dehumanising acts reserved only for subhumans. Our townships are slowly resembling the state of emergency declared by Pik Botha in the 80’s. Black people have now become the scapegoat in realising anger for the virus that was brought into the country by the privileged white elite.

Interestingly, if tragically, our army and police treat white people with the highest levels of respect and dignity whenever the latter contravene these regulations. We have seen some white people go surfing, walking their dogs and jogging. Instead of being kicked around, punched, whipped or made to do dehumanising acts by the SANDF and SAPS, they have been treated with respect and dignity, nicely told to go to their places of abode or respectfully ushered into police vans as they get arrested.

This is in stark contrast to the brutality and indignity that black people have been subjected to. Just to illustrate this point, a black man was reported to have been severely beaten and pepper sprayed by the police in Cape Town. He later collapsed and died after telling his family what the police had done to him. He was a good man who had lost his job just a few years ago and had been sent to buy alcohol by a neighbour. This was in violation of the regulations issued by the government. This violation was no different from those who went surfing, walked their dogs or decided to go jogging. But here the police reserved brutality for a black offender, and courtesy for white offenders.

This level of brutality meted out to black people by the SANDF and SAPS betrays an army and police force that is still fundamentally untransformed 26 years into our constitutional democracy. The fact that these armed forces are a creation of the constitution is only academic. Their makeup, outlook and modus operandi still exudes the apartheid logic of brutality. They feel that they have the support from the top echelons of government to behave as they do.

Accordingly, the racialised brutality by our armed forces is also a symptom of a system that is born of structural economic inequalities in our country. As economically distressed people, blacks become easy prey to the SANDF and SAPS because they have no means to challenge in our courts the brutality meted against them. They live in congested squalor and because of that condition, they are easily treated as the scum of the earth who must be brutalised at will by the SANDF and SAPS.

We hasten to point out that we support the general thrust of the measures outlined by the government in fighting the corona virus, whilst at the same time note some of the limitations of these measures. Because we are in unchartered waters, we understand these limitations and hope they will be corrected as we go along. However, the fundamental abuse of black people’s rights by some SANDF and SAPS zealots in their zealous enforcement of these measures, is in itself a violation of these measures and is totally unacceptable. It is a dereliction of their responsibilities as prescribed in our supreme law, the constitution, and deserve unbridled condemnation.

Mzukisi Makatse is an Attorney and Director of Makatse Attorneys based in East London, Eastern Cape