Lost: Humanity. Last seen: South Africa.

It’s been a thought-provoking week here at Daily Maverick. There’s something about nearly getting shot that makes you re-evaluate where you stand in the world.

I didn’t realise at first the danger we were in. A protest is a protest is a protest usually; if chaos breaks out, you take pictures, you write your notes, then you go home and have some wine and kick your shoes off. It was only afterwards, when a policeman crapped all over me for nearly causing a public relations nightmare by inconveniently requiring his office to explain a dead white journalist, that the message hit home.

But when my editor asked me to write the story from the perspective of what happened to us, my overwhelming response was embarrassment. People were so concerned. From the police – who I have to say were fantastic – to our families, to our colleagues, et cetera. But something didn’t add up with the experience we had had. Because where we were, in Manenberg, it was nothing. It was so much less bad than what happens there every day. It wasn’t a crisis, it was a crisis averted. When people don’t die, it’s a good day. Five minutes later, people were doing their shopping. Kids were running around again. Cool, the grenades are gone. Have you seen my ball?

This week, having lunch with Daily Maverick’s intrepid editor, he reminded me that 30,000 Iraqis had been killed in 2005 during the craziest days of war; in South Africa, nearly 20,000 people are murdered in a normal year. And most of those murders are concentrated in a handful of crowded precincts, which basically means that many of our people are effectively living in a war zone. And it’s not coming to an end. Billions of dollars are not being poured into security; the international community is not campaigning to end the carnage.

While I was letting all this marinate, I was uncomfortably aware that in a situation in which some 500 people were in danger, my life was worth more to the authorities than the other 499.

Surely someone, somewhere, has to be accountable. Or someone has to just give a shit.

But the overwhelming evidence is that the people with the power to make a difference don’t. And injustice – with its terrible twin, a lack of accountability – keeps eating away at the good we have going for us. While the funds we do have are poured into building the president the world’s kakkest pool. (Seriously, has someone pointed out to him that for the price of the pool alone he could have bought himself an entire beach house complete with fire extinguishers in every room?)

At some point, something in our country went horribly wrong, where the transition from Apartheid’s secrecy was not to transparency, but brazenness. Inequality lived on. Now, the have-nots’ suffering is not hidden in the homelands. It’s there for all to see, yet that doesn’t make a difference.

Apartheid is alive and well, and held firmly in place by the very people who fought it. Only this time the looting and casualties are in plain sight.

This brazenness is profoundly disturbing, and seems to be contagious. The first problem is that its pervasiveness has desensitised us. South Africans have a sense of humour, and it’s great that we can laugh at our troubles. But we can’t laugh our way out of trouble. Every day we compromise ourselves a little more. Because really, what is getting angry going to achieve? And secondly, if everybody else is grabbing whatever they can get, why can’t we?

It’s said that a fish rots from the head, and South Africa is way down past the gills and fins. Our number one citizen has been playing fast and loose with the rules for so long – and this culture of washing our hands clean has become so entrenched – that it may just be too late to turn back. The farce that is Nkandla has shown us this over, and over, and over. It was bad enough when the ridiculous expenditure was for a luxury estate, but wasting money on this mess? And then showing people? That’s brazenness on a whole other level.

And still the unaccountable march on. The rot trickles down. What incentive is there to strive for better when every day, the message we see on repeat is that in South Africa you have to fight dirty to get your share? Whether it’s the wealthy living in the suburbs or the fat cats living the high life in government, one thing’s for sure: those who have their privileges aren’t giving them up.

And nobody’s looking back.

In the case of ordinary citizens, you have to admit this is understandable. Why should they, when they don’t even know where their taxes are going? When it’s plain to see that the  government isn’t looking out for anyone? When justice only serves the few? It’s a little rich to expect the taxpayers to cough up more to give their fellow humans a hand up when corruption has already cost the country R700-billion.  

But those in need are waiting.

I worry for this country. I worry that all the why should I’s will add up to a terrifying, brazen, broken mass of inhumanity. I look at Nkandla, and Marikana, and I see it beginning. I look at our crime rate. I look at the eye-watering ease with which Julius Malema can face serious charges of fraud and corruption and walk out whistling, promising he’s one with the country’s workers. I look at the fact that Oscar Pistorius can take a life and spend less than a year in prison. That a paedophile can can avoid going to prison at all. That an elderly lady can be beaten black and blue in a five-to-one fight, there can be talk of a payoff proposal, and the charges can still ultimately come to nothing. Heck, even home lives are broken: there are more than a million domestic workers employed in our country and more than 50,000 of them are under the age of 15. A staggering number of them work in slavelike conditions. And then there are the rapes, murders, armed robberies that result either in no convictions or incorrect convictions, while our justice system limps along. We are killing each other either quickly or slowly; pick your poison. And we have become staggeringly good – celebrities and citizens alike – at not facing consequences.

It’s very easy to forget.

All of this has been on my mind this week. It’s murky, the connections drifting in and out of focus. The injustice that characterises our country, helped along by an impotent justice system. The casual immorality that has become so normal to us, causing barely a cynical eye roll. The lack of responsibility taken for both damaging actions and the care of each other. How, strangely, our humanity has become so invisible: a government that’s blind to its people; human beings blind to each other, on either side of that peculiar, invisible fence that continues to split the haves from the have-nots.

And for decades, there have been people sitting in that war zone, waiting for justice. Waiting for someone, somewhere to look their way, while life goes on as best it can.

The grenades are gone, have you seen my ball?

Injustice is a cancer in this country. And we’re all dying of it. It might not have attacked all of the organs yet. But cancer metastasises. Sooner or later, it’s coming for us all. DM