Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - An awkward conversation crept out to punctuate my gathering with friends as we watched the Comrades Marathon on television last Sunday and caught up on developments in our lives.
Let me start slowly, carefully, with what can be said.
Some friends started sharing photographs, showing four or more young people dead on a cold aluminium surface at a morgue. Their bodies were lined up, so they appeared as though they might be sleeping together. The more I looked, the more I asked: Are these pictures real? Are they staged to feed fake news?
It is painful to imagine that, each day, dozens of parents and relatives approach the morgue’s aluminium surface to identify the bodies of their loved ones and the trauma of dealing with the intensity of violent crime in their lives.
As the conversation proceeded, more photographs surfaced, showing dead young people at crime scenes and social media comments from numerous community members witnessing the events and armed with smartphones to capture and share often trending stories.
The photographs correspond with Police Minister Bheki Cele’s recently released crime statistics for the first quarter of the 2022/2023 financial year, indicating a 0.2% increase in murder in the Western Cape.
Between April and June, more than 994 people in the province were murdered. Of those, 498 were shot.
Police also recorded 176 gang-related murders nationally, with 161 occurring in the Western Cape. Undertakers said the number of funerals for young people had spiked, from one to four a day to six to 12 a day.
“Not even the police college or medical school prepared us for this,” said a friend unfamiliar with living conditions in the gang-infested Cape Flats.
He recalled an incident in a morgue where he had gone to collect evidence for the police forensic laboratory. He had been shocked to see so many young bodies with bullet and knife wounds.
He talked disturbingly about how after a worker inside the morgue had shown a woman the body of her teenage daughter, the woman had burst into inconsolable cries and screams as she cursed the killers, wishing them the same fate.
According to the provincial forensic pathology services, in 2020, it stored 1 307 young people between the ages of one day and 17 years old in the department’s morgue facilities.
In 2021, the figure rose to 1 422. The numbers also add to evidence of the overall increase in the vulnerability of children, especially those in child-headed homes and communities that experience high levels of violent crime.
There is frustration everywhere in the affected communities. Western Cape provincial Community Police Forum (CPF) board chairperson Fransina Lukas told the media that the realities seen in morgues were projections of what occurred in communities of the Cape Flats.
“Gang violence is the order of the day where young people that grew up together now kill each other over territories. Innocent lives get taken during these turf wars,” he said.
Monray Adams, owner of Monray Royal Funerals, told the media there was also a demand to cover more funerals daily.
“I have noticed the influx of young people’s bodies at the mortuaries and, to be honest, it is a sad reality that the undertakers face each day. I have seen an increase in younger men coming with stab wounds or gunshot wounds due to being involved in crossfire.”
Sadly, even those of us with minimal training to spot discrepancies in the story depicted by crime statistics believe that it hangs together in a more complex way than others would have the public believe.
The pictures and statistics are accurate, and the situation is worsening daily, we can conclude. And as we accept that reality, we must confront the challenge that, as a society, we are not doing enough to question their provenance.
We must keep probing. Do such photographs and statistics represent a necessary bearing witness to a gruesome reality that we spare ourselves with a sanitised version of the world?
Why are so few media stories telling us about the perpetrators and the serving of justice? Why are there so few stories of influential CPFs and other participatory crime-prevention programmes?
Why the unresolved questions regarding co-operative governance in policing in the Western Cape between the national, provincial and municipal governments? Why does the national government continue to bail out failing and corrupt state-owned enterprises instead of investing in the citizens and programmes to promote social cohesion and safety?
I am not offering answers here; this is simply an expression of confusion and rage.
It has been easier for many of us engaging as ordinary citizens to approach all this interrogatively because it spares us the exposure of the stated position. And when faced with dead children, no one wants to say anything wrong by blaming anyone for the dereliction of duty and human rights violations.
We retreat into the safety and obedience of silence and mumbling about ineffective campaigns to celebrate public holidays such as Women’s Day.
And then, occasionally, we express our discontent and anger through community action initiatives, lamenting the government’s dismal failure to honour resource commitments to the gender-based violence programme adopted at the presidential summit.
We mobilise voices calling for better policing in our communities.
In most cases, it is too horrible to speak loudly enough about this ugly situation, and it is beyond words.
This is an understandable reaction, considering the heinous crimes fuelled by alcohol and substance abuse.
Indeed, part of the problem with the shocking statistics and the plain and simple images of dead children lying in the morgue is that they do not set these deaths in any broader narrative context without bold community voices demanding government action.
And that allows the viewer to read their view of the world and work in their silo. The danger is that most people are left isolated in their anger when the real challenge is to work together to find a meaningful way forward, one that we can commit to collectively – both emotionally and politically.
Nyembezi is a human rights activist and policy analyst
Cape Times