Anti-Apartheid Activist Changes Her Mind: SA's criminality and violence is not a ‘legacy of Apartheid’

This is an old article, from 2000, and nothing has changed. Jennifer Schute, “was arrested for fighting apartheid,” but after her brother and sister in law are violently attacked, raped and tortured, she wonders “what good is freedom if rampant violence terrorizes blacks and whites alike?”

Here's the short version, ..... Ben, who's 37, had come home from work that night after midnight. He works in arts management, so late nights at performances or events are part of his job. Annie, his 29-year-old wife was asleep at home... As usual, Ben drove his car through the electronic gate and parked in the lot. He was walking the few hundred yards down the path to his door when somebody emerged from the darkness behind him and thrust a gun to his head.

Although Ben immediately offered up his wallet and car keys, three young men with guns forced their way into the house, proceeded to rape Annie (in Ben's presence, à la Clockwork Orange), pistol-whip both of them, tie them up, gag them and torture them intermittently for the next five hours. During those hours, having bundled Ben and Annie into duvets so they couldn't see, breathe or move, the intruders robbed and trashed the place at their leisure, pausing only to cook themselves a meal and drink all the liquor in the house.

Quite a party they threw themselves, apparently, interrupting it now and then to threaten Ben and Annie with death if they so much as coughed.... A horrific experience by anyone's standards. But hardly uncommon in Johannesburg, which now has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. The murder rate there is about nine times that of the United States. A rape occurs every 10 minutes in South Africa today, and a violent housebreaking is so common that it doesn't even make the papers and is only perfunctorily investigated by the police, who, outnumbered, overworked, undertrained and often corrupt, hold out no hope of solving it (or the thousands like it). The only noteworthy aspect of this case, apparently, is that my brother and sister-in-law weren't killed.

Its about her struggle between her ideals of racial equality, and her mother's 'racist' reality.

All these years -- as an angry adolescent, as an anti-apartheid activist, as an exile separated from family and country for 13 years and as a writer -- I have labored hard to prove my mother wrong. I thought, finally, that I had -- that history had. But now, with the violation of my family, I see that she has, in a sense, been proved right. Right for all the wrong reasons, perhaps, or for reasons more complex than she could ever acknowledge, but nevertheless, in a sense, right.

So now I wonder, what does that make me? Wrong? How, I wonder, are my smug political certainties, forged during the anti-apartheid struggle of the '70s and '80s, going to accommodate the violent reality of post-apartheid South Africa? And if my mother and I could ever talk about this, what would I say?

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