South Africa Must Stop Romanticising Violence

South Africa needs a new political culture; one that stops confusing militancy with courage. One that stops treating revolutionary nostalgia as a substitute for competence.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

South Africa has a violence problem. Not only in the obvious sense that crime is rampant, but communities are also unsafe, and people live behind walls, alarms, and private security. We also have a deeper political violence problem: too much of our public culture treats illegitimate violence as authentic, righteous, revolutionary, or inevitable.

This is one of the great stumbling blocks to progress.

A society cannot be free, prosperous, or peaceful if violence is treated as a legitimate shortcut whenever institutions fail, voters disappoint, courts are inconvenient, employers refuse demands, police are distrusted, or political factions need leverage. Once violence is romanticised, it does not remain safely contained within revolutionary songs, party mythology, or protest theatre; it leaks into everyday life.

It becomes the burning of infrastructure during protest. It becomes intimidation on campuses. It becomes the destruction of businesses during unrest. It becomes mob justice. It becomes political assassinations. It becomes the idea that a crowd, a faction, a union, a party branch, or a self-appointed community committee has the right to punish, coerce, threaten, or destroy.

And once that idea takes root, the rule of law dies by a thousand exceptions.

The “struggle”

The ANC bears much of the blame for this culture. It has spent decades mythologising its own role in the armed struggle, presenting violence as the sacred forge in which liberation was supposedly won while simultaneously celebrating Mandela’s peaceful transition.

The result has been a political tradition in which moral authority is often claimed not through competence, honesty, persuasion, or delivery, but through proximity to “struggle” credentials.

This history has always been more complicated than the party admits.

Apartheid was defeated by many forces: internal resistance, international pressure, economic strain, civil society, churches, trade unions, business pressure, civic organisation, negotiation, reform, and the moral bankruptcy of the system itself. Armed struggle was part of the story, but it was not the whole story, and certainly not the heroic fantasy often sold at rallies and commemorations.

Anthea Jeffery’s People’s War challenges the sanitised version of struggle history in which ANC-aligned violence is treated as incidental, defensive, or morally purified by the end of apartheid. Her central argument is that from the mid-1980s, the ANC and its allies pursued a “people’s war” that relied not only on resistance to the apartheid state, but on intimidation, coercion, political violence, and the weakening of rivals in black communities.

That is an uncomfortable argument; it should be engaged with seriously precisely because it disrupts the fairy tale.

The ANC’s mythology needs violence to appear noble and central. Without it, many struggle credentials lose their mystique. The party must pretend that history was made primarily by cadres with weapons, not by millions of ordinary people, institutions, negotiators, workers, dissidents, voters, and communities who helped make apartheid unworkable and unsustainable.

This matters because nations learn from the stories they tell about themselves.

If the story is that freedom was won through constitutionalism, courage, civil society, negotiation, moral argument, and institutional reform, then the lesson is that society progresses through persuasion and lawful change.

If the story is that freedom was won by revolutionary violence, then the lesson is that violence is not a last resort or a tragedy; it is a credential.

That lesson has been absorbed widely.

Violent protests

South African politics has an unhealthy tolerance for “the people” taking matters into their own hands. Protesters burn roads, destroy property, shut down schools, intimidate workers, and attack public infrastructure, then politicians and commentators rush to explain that this is what happens when people are angry. Anger becomes an excuse. Desperation becomes a defence. Lawlessness becomes a language.

But violence does not become legitimate because it is performed by the poor, the angry, the oppressed, or the politically fashionable.

A person who burns a clinic, school, train, library, truck, or shop does not strike a blow against injustice. He attacks his neighbours. He destroys the very things poor communities need most. He makes development harder, investment riskier, jobs scarcer, and ordinary life more dangerous.

This is the great lie of violent protest: it pretends to be the voice of the marginalised while often deepening their marginalisation.

Marikana remains one of the clearest warnings of what happens when labour militancy, political opportunism, institutional distrust, union rivalry, and state force collide. The massacre itself was a catastrophic failure of policing and leadership. But the broader context also exposed a culture in which intimidation, escalation, factional conflict, and violence had already poisoned the space in which negotiation should have occurred.

That is the pattern: Informal violence invites more informal violence. Threats invite counter-threats. Intimidation invites armed response. Mobs invite crackdowns. When lawful institutions lose legitimacy, people do not enter some noble state of democratic purity. They form factions. They seek protection. They punish enemies. They follow those most willing to escalate.

Mob justice

Vigilantism follows the same logic.

South Africans often understand why mob justice happens. Police fail. Courts are slow. Criminals terrorise communities. People feel abandoned. In many places, the state’s absence is not an abstraction. It is the daily experience of calling for help and receiving none.

But understanding vigilantism is not the same as excusing it.

Karl Kemp’s Why We Kill: Mob Justice and the New Vigilantism in South Africa gives this crisis a horrifying scale. According to Kemp, at least 1,894 of South Africa’s roughly 27,000 recorded murders in 2022 were attributed to mob justice and vigilantism; around 7% of the total. That was reportedly more than double the figure from five years earlier. In the first nine months of 2023, another 1,472 mob justice deaths had already been registered.

These are not marginal incidents. They are evidence of a society in which lawful authority has retreated and informal violence has stepped into the gap. The danger is that vigilantism does not restore order. It creates a rival, brutal, arbitrary order of its own.

Mob justice is not justice. It is rage with an audience. It is punishment without evidence, procedure, rights, restraint, or accountability. It may begin with frustration at real crime, but it soon becomes its own form of criminality. It teaches communities that the answer to fear is collective brutality rather than lawful order. It empowers the loudest, angriest, and most reckless people in the street.

It also makes innocent people vulnerable. A rumour becomes a sentence. Suspicion becomes proof. A crowd becomes judge, jury, and executioner. No civilised society can tolerate this and remain civilised.

Support for terror

The same moral confusion appears in how parts of South Africa’s left speak about terrorism and revolutionary violence abroad. The language changes depending on whether the victims are politically convenient. If violence can be described as anti-colonial, anti-Western, anti-capitalist, or anti-imperialist, then too many activists suddenly discover nuance. They condemn “all violence” in the abstract, then spend the rest of their time explaining why one side’s violence is really resistance.

This is cowardice disguised as sophistication.

The deliberate targeting of civilians is not ennobled by a slogan. Terrorism does not become liberation because its perpetrators use the right vocabulary. There is no progressive version of murdering innocents. There is no decolonial exemption from basic morality.

A free society depends on a simple principle: political goals must be pursued through persuasion, law, elections, courts, civil society, peaceful protest, and voluntary association. The moment violence becomes a legitimate tool of politics, the weakest suffer first.

The poor cannot outgun militias. Small businesses cannot survive riots. Workers cannot negotiate honestly under intimidation. Communities cannot prosper under mob rule. Investors do not build where threats are treated as politics. Children do not learn in schools that can be burned whenever activists demand attention.

Illegitimate violence is not a path to justice - it is a tax on civilisation.

South Africa’s state often fails. Police abuse exists. Corruption corrodes institutions. Courts can be slow. Bureaucrats can be arrogant. People have every right to protest, organise, strike, criticise, resist unlawful authority, and demand better.

But the line must be clear.

Peaceful protest is legitimate. Violence against people, property, and public infrastructure is not. Civil disobedience may sometimes be morally defensible. Mob coercion is not. Self-defence may be necessary. Vigilantism is not justice. A constitutional democracy can tolerate anger, dissent, insult, disruption, and fierce opposition. It cannot survive the normalisation of political violence.

South Africa needs a new political culture; one that stops confusing militancy with courage. One that stops treating revolutionary nostalgia as a substitute for competence. One that stops excusing mobs because the police are useless. One that stops romanticising violence when it wears the colours of a favoured cause.

The work of civilisation is not glamorous. It is slower than a burning barricade and less dramatic than a struggle song. It means building credible police, functioning courts, honest municipalities, secure property rights, peaceful politics, and a culture that respects the individual against the mob.

That is what progress requires.

Not the clenched fist. Not the petrol bomb. Not the crowd chanting for punishment. Not the politician invoking violence to hide failure.

South Africa will not be saved by worshipping illegitimate violence. It will be saved when we finally stop mistaking violence for justice, and start rebuilding the lawful order that makes justice possible.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a senior associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.