MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Police brutality in SA targets black bodies

I was a final year undergraduate student at Rhodes University when the #FeesMustFall protests started in 2016. Across the country, universities were deploying armed private security and South African Police Service (SAPS) officers to break up student gatherings.

They would hurl teargas at our gatherings to disperse us, and when that didn’t work, rubber bullets would be fired at us. In some cases, in the midst of the confusion and the overwhelming stench of teargas choking us, students were hunted down like prey and arrested.

Eventually, we realised something: the best way to protect students against the rubber bullets was to have white students standing at the front and on the sides, encircling us for protection. More often than not, the strategy worked.

Law enforcement officers who were very casual with unleashing violence on black students behaved differently when confronted by white students. They were less aggressive and treated them with a dignity that was never accorded to us. And so, to survive the brutality that the police were meting out on us, we resorted to using White bodies as a shield.

I was reminded of this a week ago when I watched the horrific video of the police’s Presidential Protection Service assigned to deputy president Paul Mashatile, assaulting two helpless motorists in the middle of the N1 highway in Gauteng. On the video, one man can be seen lying motionless on the side of the road while heavily armed officers kick him repeatedly.

The other motorist is seen sitting on the tar covering his face as kicks rain down on him. When the officers are satisfied they have inflicted sufficient damage, they can be seen returning to their vehicles, brandishing firearms, and driving away hurriedly. In the aftermath of the brutality, the man who had been lying motionless remains in the same state.

Though no explanation has been provided for why unarmed civilians were subjected to that level of violence, two things are evident. Firstly, the fact that the deputy president was not in the convoy at the time of the incident indicates that whatever those two men did had not posed a security threat to his life.

As such, the force used by his security detail was unnecessary. Secondly, the people against whom this force was used are young Black men. This second issue is important because it’s not an isolated case, but a pattern of Black people being targets of police brutality.

In 2011, Andries Tatane was shot and killed by police officers during a service delivery protest in Ficksburg in the Free State. Just a year later, 34 miners, all of them black, were killed by the police as they protested for a living wage at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana. Autopsies would later reveal that many of them had been shot In the back.

In 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bulelani Qholani was dragged naked out of his shack in Khayelitsha by law enforcement. In the video, he can be seen wrestling with the officers before he manages  to return to his shack, after which they can be seen tearing the structure down. In the same year, Nathaniel Julies, a teenager with Down’s Syndrome, was brutally shot and murdered as he walked to a tuckshop in Eldorado Park.

At the height of the pandemic, police and the army brutalised people, particularly in townships. Collin Khoza, a man from Alexandra, was killed after being assaulted by law enforcement. Ten other people would be killed during this period – all of them black. These are only some of the cases we know of – many others did not make the headlines.

Poorly trained South African police have made black people, particularly black men, a target of their brutality. And they do so with impunity. In the few cases where they’re prosecuted, they’re acquitted even when overwhelming evidence of their guilt is presented, such as in the murder of Khoza. This communicates the message that black lives don’t matter.

And it’s a chilling message in a democratic dispensation.