OPINION

Lynchings in the RSA

The SAPS recorded 789 popular executions in 2018/19

Twenty four years after the formal abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, at least 789 public executions were carried out by the people between April 2018 and March 2019. This is according to the latest annual crime report by the South African Police Service.

Over the past two years the SAPS have provided a detailed breakdown of the circumstances behind murders, where this was established and recorded. This covered 6 306 or 30% of the 21 022 cases recorded by the SAPS in 2018/19. This lists “Mob justice/vigilantism” as the “causative factor” in 789 murders. This is a minimum not maximum figure, given that the “causative factor” in 70% of murder cases was not known.

The sheer number of such summary, community-level, executions of various categories of enemy of the people (mostly criminals), is striking from a historical perspective.

In February 1990 President FW de Klerk announced a moratorium on the death penalty. In 1995 the Constitutional Court declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional. In his judgment Arthur Chaskalson wrote that “The rights to life and dignity are the most important of all human rights, and the source of all other personal rights in Chapter Three. By committing ourselves to a society founded on the recognition of human rights we are required to value these two rights above all others.” The ANC released a statement welcoming this ruling saying, "never, never and never again must citizens of our country be subjected to the barbaric practice of capital punishment."

Through its twenty-five years in office it has been true to its word, resisting persistent calls from the right for the reinstatement of the death penalty. The ANC has traditionally been less averse however to forms of summary justice emanating from the popular will; these having been integral to the liberation movement’s highly successful People’s War strategy of the mid-1980s which helped vault it to power by 1994.

In 1989 the Human Rights Commission reported that 1 335 people had been hanged in South Africa between 1978 and 1988 - excluding in the ‘independent’ homelands - following their trials, convictions, and unsuccessful appeals. This was in most cases for murder, though also occasionally for rape, robbery with aggravating circumstances, and treason. For example in 1982 there were 99 executions, 95 of which were for murder. In 1983 there were 90 executions, 83 of which were for murder and 3 for treason.

By contrast, in the past two years the SAPS recorded a total of 1 635 popular executions (846 in 2017/18); more than the total number of hangings in the last twelve years of capital punishment in South Africa. From a comparative perspective too, these are very high numbers. The Montgomery Advertiser reported on 26 April 1959 that:

“While lynchings [in the United States of America] have about reached the vanishing point in recent years, Tuskegee Institute records show 4,733 persons have died from mob action since 1882. Except for 1955, when three lynchings were reported in Mississippi, none has been recorded at Tuskegee since 1951. In 1945, 1947, and 1951 only one case per year was reported… For a period of 65 years ending in 1947 at least one lynching was reported each year. The most for any year was 231 in 1892. From 1882 to 1901, lynchings averaged more than 150 a year. Since 1924 lynchings have been on a marked decline, never more than 30 cases which occurred in 1926.”

In 2018/19 there were thus three times more popular executions in South Africa than the highest annual number of lynchings in the United States (in 1892). At this rate we surpass every five years the total recorded mob killings committed in the United States between 1882 and 1959.