Get to root of violence – don't condemn

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Eusebius McKaiser It is suspiciously easier to condemn violence than to ask why violence takes place. Violence, in its various permutations, means the destruction of public property like libraries, auditoriums, schools and universities. Away from the public gaze, violence might mean being beaten up in your own house, raped and murdered even, invariably by an intimate partner, a relative, a known neighbour, and less often by a stranger. This domestic reality is what led Tracy Chapman to ask: "Why is a woman still not safe when she’s in her home?" We are a society saturated with violence. To many of us, it would seem that all violence is morally indefensible, and even if not always indefensible morally, the choice to resort to violence, ever, is invariably a poor tactical choice. Is this intuition, upon reflection, easily sustainable? We do ourselves no favours, living in a deeply unjust society, if we simply rehearse moral condemnation with no regard for the realities that inform the behaviour of people we are disgusted by. We can allow ourselves the space to ask why some people resort to violence without thereby legitimating the use of violence through the mere posing of the explanatory question.

Yet, there has been a refusal to ask explanatory questions about why violence takes place in our society because the sheer aesthetic and moral revulsion many of us feel block us from asking, "Why are they resorting to violence?". We prefer, instead, to impute lack of imagination, lack of moral clarity and sheer hooliganism to "them". It is easier than grappling with social discontent.

Well, we do no one a favour by occupying a false moral high ground. Let’s take, for example, the violence that has been playing out on some of our campuses most recently: from the destruction of artworks at UCT to the burning down of an auditorium at the University of Johannesburg and the violence at Fort Hare, including the looting of food reserved for VIPs at a centenary celebration and the reported theft of pots.

Should illegal activities be ignored by these institutions or by the state? No. I do not agree with some analysts who imply – few have argued so explicitly – that since exclusionary praxis and violent institutional norms occasion these violent protests, the law should not be used to bring to book those who destroy property or break other laws, including intimidating or harassing dissenters.

But law and justice do not always coincide, which is why apartheid laws were unjust but were, nevertheless, sources of law enacted by the apartheid state until they were struck down after the fall of apartheid.

And it is precisely this reality – the tension between law and justice – that demands of us to ask why some protesters are prepared to break the law? The reasons are fairly self-evident once we go down this path.

An appropriately expansive account of what constitutes violence must, in my view, include the recognition that poverty and exclusion are forms of violence.

And the victims of a society that perpetuates the misery of poverty and exclusion are unlikely to simply quietly wither away on the margins of that society. You can trample on the dignity of the poor, but you cannot easily obliterate a basic will to live among all human beings.

And as long as that will to live, and live flourishing lives, remains alive in those who are on the wrong side of the inequality divide, a tug-of-war between them and those of us who are privileged will remain inevitable.

That is why looting of food happens and the burning down of public property. Of course, in one obvious sense, the escalating public cost of restoring these facilities, let alone building new infrastructure to expand access, means that the very protesters involved here might wait longer to enjoy substantive equality and living in a just world.

But that is not a sign of stupidity on the part of the poor or the protesting student who resorts to violence. It is a sign of the depths of despair, a longing to be included in the spoils of democracy and a deep yearning for recognition.

I am not implying, in case the recalcitrant critic pretends otherwise, that violence is a necessary means to transition from a neo-colonial state (which is what we live in whether or not the ANC hates such a depiction) to a genuinely post-colonial society, let alone a society approximating a just ideal.

What I am most certainly arguing, however, is that just as some protesting students are irresponsible in their refusal to theorise violence more fully, and to think through the consequences of violence, similarly, many critics are irresponsible in their refusal to ask why violence has become normative.

We would do well to not run away from making sense of our madness.