The Epidemiology and Culture of Violence

Abstract

South Africa is a very violent society. Overt violence is present in different forms and contexts but, especially in the political sphere, overt violence by and against the state has become much more conspicuous in recent years. The level of overt violence can be gauged from the numbers killed between 1985 and 1987 when almost 3000 people died in street political violence, the majority of them at the hands of the security forces; thousands more were injured.¹ Since 1986, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of so-called ‘insurgency incidents’ against the police and the army, as well as against unpopular black collaborators, state witnesses and occasionally civilians; over the three years since 1986, there have been about 700 such attacks compared to only 58 attacks against police and military targets in the nine years up to 1985.² Even with this 37-fold increase in annual attack-rates, the death toll of the insurgency incidents (less than 40 per year between 1986–1989) pales into insignificance next to the number of deaths over this period as a result of police and army action in the townships, judicial hangings, incidents of white on black violence in the countryside, or internecine warfare between so-called black vigilantes, often overtly or tacitly supported by the police, and their black political opponents.