Lorenzo A Davids|Published
Roving mobs of vigilantes. The new face of South Africa. Well, really the ongoing face of South Africa. Mob executions. The hostel killings during Apartheid. The Vlakplaas Death Squads. They were a group of rogue vigilantes ordered by the State to murder political opponents during Apartheid.
The Askaris. Captured activists turned into hitmen to murder their former comrades. The Witdoeke (“White Cloths”), a paid pro-government vigilante group that launched violent attacks in Crossroads, Cape Town, during 1986.
The anti-immigrant vigilantes who murdered Emmanuel Sithole, a Mozambican street vendor in 2015, during xenophobic violence in Alexandra, Johannesburg.
A long history of vigilante violence
Our pre-democracy justice system was a system that made torture, execution, and vigilantism a cornerstone of law and order. South Africa has made recurring vigilante violence an instrument of social and political power. We still disenfranchise and dehumanise anyone the moment our violence radar is triggered.
That trigger dehumanises our neighbours, colleagues, friends and family almost immediately and turns us into murderous vigilantes. That murderous rage knows no limits. Our culture cannot restrain us. Our religious beliefs cannot restrain us. Our common sense cannot restrain us. There is no set of values that have the power to restrain us.
Our cultural, political and religious institutions have proven to be too impotent to have any influence on this violence. While Steve Biko argued that the purpose of our political struggle was to give South Africa the greatest possible gift, which is “a more human face,” the reality is that South Africa is addicted to violence.
Vigilantism and the dehumanisation of immigrants
On Thursday morning, 22 October 2026, an unknown immigrant, on his way to work, was beaten to death on Dr Pixley kaSeme Street in Durban by a group of about fifty roving vigilantes. They did not care whether he was here legally. Nor did his humanity matter to them.
How ironic that these violent vigilantes killed an unknown man from Africa for supposedly being an illegal immigrant on the street named after a man who delivered a speech in 1906 at Columbia University in the USA, where he did his undergraduate degree and later studied law at Jesus College, Oxford, titled “The Regeneration of Africa” and for which he won the George William Curtis Medal, in which he famously declared, “The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilisation is soon to be added to the world.” He predicted a future where African cities would thrive with humanistic values, commerce, and advanced seats of learning. He urged Africans to bury their tribal animosities. He famously said, “We are one people.” It is on this street, Dr Pixley kaSeme Street, that they murdered a fellow African, an unknown immigrant man.
A culture of violence that still shapes South Africa
Add to this layer of rogue vigilantism the criminal gangs across South Africa, and we have a multi-layered violence pandemic in South Africa. While the statistics may go up and down, our cultural appetite for violence remains unabated and relentless. I have long argued that two forces help sustain this violence: The arrogant opulence of the State and political parties that ordinary people seek to mirror and cannot, and their impotence to disassociate themselves from this culture of wealth and their inability to condemn this violence and determine to dismantle it and bring it before the courts, for fear of losing votes and becoming targets of violence themselves. We still tolerate political parties donning military fatigues in democratic South Africa.
It’s nonsense. We have no idea how this impacts children growing up in the dire poverty and violence of South Africa. When political movements glorify militarised identities, they risk normalising the idea that political opponents are enemies to be defeated rather than fellow citizens with equal rights. We still defend signing “kill the boer, kill the farmer.” We may as well add “kill the immigrant.” Anyone else we should add to the song’s list? A society that glorifies the dehumanisation of one group, weakens the moral defences that protect everyone else.
The ambivalence of the State and civil society institutions to address our violence pandemic is indefensible. We are sinking into deeper normalisations of public violence. Our attempts at addressing violence are too siloed and shallow. We think housing will fix it. Then we think infrastructure upgrades will fix it. Then we think grants will fix it. Then we think dialogues will fix it. None of these interventions, on its own, can fix it.
We need to de-enrich political office and political parties. We need to give South Africans a new vision of what it means to be a political office bearer and a public servant. Whoever gave Helen Zille the idea of sitting on an open-top BMW and driving into an election rally needs to be fired. They have no idea how political spectacle and conspicuous privilege perpetuate dangerous political stereotypes and seed the cancerous culture of violence.