On a warm evening last December, Reason Khumalo was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping in Johannesburg when he noticed two apparently drunk strangers weaving towards him.
He did not think much of it: it was a public holiday and the streets in the inner-city Hillbrow district were busy with cheerful crowds. “The next thing I knew, one of them drew a gun and everybody just scattered,” the 45-year-old Uber driver recalled, his voice still shaking months later.
Only after he had been running for a while did Khumalo look down and realise his shirt was soaked in blood. “I’ve been shot” was his last thought before collapsing.
Khumalo, who woke from a coma in hospital days later, narrowly avoided joining almost 27,000 South Africans murdered last year – a toll that has received renewed global scrutiny in recent months.
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Since taking office, Donald Trump has fixated on a false narrative that white South African farmers are the victims of a “genocide”, using a bruising Oval Office meeting with president Cyril Ramaphosa in May to reiterate the discredited claim.
Violent crime has become one of the biggest issues in post-apartheid South Africa, fuelling a vicious cycle that the World Bank says costs the economy at least 10 per cent of GDP annually. Law-breaking has seeped into much of South African society, from organised crime to petty looting; political assassinations to extortion rackets.
But contrary to the US president’s “genocide” contention, it blights the daily lives of all South Africans.
The reality is that three-quarters of homicide victims in the country – which at 45 per 100,000 citizens has one of the world’s highest murder rates – are, like Khumalo, black or mixed-heritage men, who self-refer as “coloured”, living in low-income areas. South Africa is also afflicted by one of the highest global rates of femicide.
[ Debunking Trump’s claims: Is there any evidence of white genocide in South Africa? ]
After taking office in 2019, Ramaphosa vowed that violent crime would be “halved, if not eliminated” in a decade, only for murder rates to rise since then.
Public anger with the ANC’s broken promises, including its pledge to curb crime, led to the party losing its parliamentary majority in elections last year, the first time since white rule ended three decades ago.
Guy Lamb, a criminologist at Stellenbosch University, said the Trump administration’s obsession with the killing of white farmers – who make up a sliver of overall murder victims – risked “distracting” authorities from taking the steps needed to tackle the broader epidemic.
“It means that government has to devote political and financial resources to respond because of the hype ... rather than devoting that to, say, a black woman murdered and raped in a poor area,” he said.
Every year South Africans read the statistics that tell us 20,000 black men have been murdered and they shrug their shoulders
The crime crisis gripping South Africa traces its roots in part to apartheid, when the state wielded its might to brutally suppress the non-white population, with the murder rate peaking at around 70 per 100,000 as the government cracked down on pro-democracy movements.
The murder rate dropped to its lowest-ever level once democracy began in 1994, only to climb again from 2011 as the economy stagnated and rampant corruption weakened the state’s capacity to respond. Today, just one in 10 perpetrators of serious crime are caught or convicted.
“Every year South Africans read the statistics that effectively tell us that 20,000 or so black men have been murdered and they shrug their shoulders,” said David Bruce, a consultant on police research at the city of Pretoria’s Institute of Security Studies.
The long trail of bodies has become one of the biggest blots of Ramaphosa’s tenure.
In his first term, the South African president was hampered by infighting within the ANC following the ousting of his predecessor Jacob Zuma, a former intelligence chief whose allies were deeply embedded in the criminal justice and state security apparatus.
Police, prosecutors and financial watchdogs were all weakened in the so-called capture and looting of the state that became South Africa’s biggest-ever corruption scandal before Zuma resigned in 2018.
The Scorpions – a widely respected specialised unit that investigated and prosecuted serious crimes, including corruption and organised crime – was disbanded.
“If you cut off the knees of your most elite crime-fighting units because they were too effective at going after high-profile criminals and targets, that trickles down to lower levels,” said Ziyanda Stuurman, an analyst at Africa Practice, who is also a policing consultant.
Top officials in policing, the criminal justice system and National Prosecuting Authority have remained toothless following policy indecision under Ramaphosa. Illegally owned small arms have also proliferated.
A national crime prevention plan, aimed primarily at bringing down violent crime and gender-based violence, was drawn up in 2022, but “there hasn’t been budgetary or political impetus behind this plan”, Lamb said.
[ Trump’s evidence of South Africa ‘white genocide’ contains images from DR Congo ]
He said a failure to reform the apartheid-era police had exacerbated the problem. “During the apartheid era policing was quite aggressive, focusing on poor areas and had a strong racial connotation,” he said. “Those practices and strategies have continued into the current years.”
The ANC-led national unity government that was elected last year said “strengthening law-enforcement agencies to address crime, corruption and gender-based violence” would be one of its priorities. The coalition’s Democratic Alliance Party has since introduced a Bill to set up an anti-corruption commission to investigate and prosecute “serious corruption and high-level organised crime”.
The issue of violent crime against white Afrikaner farmers in post-apartheid South Africa has become a flashpoint in part by tapping into similar narratives among the far right in the US.
In South Africa there were 32 murders on farms last year, including of black and white people, said the Transvaal Agricultural Union, a private agricultural group. The figure accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of the total homicides, with most of those killed in rural crimes black farm workers and security guards.
But analysts say the outsized focus on crimes against white farmers highlights more broadly the way in which the social contract is fraying between the state and its citizens, who feel their basic right to safety is under threat.
Afrikaner-rights lobbyists “tap into the feeling of ‘you are being targeted’,” said Stuurman.
“They give a bogus reason,” she said. “But if we’re all feeling unsafe and distrustful of each other, then it’s human nature to ... gravitate towards somebody who recognises that anger and vulnerability.”
For those whose lives have been blighted by violent crime, the sense of insecurity cuts across the board.
Khumalo, the Uber driver who was shot, has since stopped working and he barely leaves his house, fearful because he has not heard back from the police despite repeatedly following up.
“At the end of the day, black or white or whatever colour,” he said, “as a South African you just want to be able to leave your home and return safely without worrying you’re going to die.” – The Financial Times
