SA's Shameful Response to the UK Riots

I have to admit being a bit ashamed, over the past week, to be a South African. For a change this has nothing to do with anything Julius Malema has said, but rather with a seemingly large section of the general population.

It appears that so many of us are taking the time to write letters to our newspapers to express our unbridled glee at the rioters tearing through London.

Ines Schumacher from Johannesburg writes to the Mail & Guardian asking: “How dangerous is the country?”

“…rioting appears to be commonplace,” Schumacher believes, “… each day a dozen people are admitted to hospital… buildings are burning down left, right and centre…”

The tone of this correspondence isn’t hysterical, merely spiteful.

What disturbed and perturbed me was Schumacher then remarks that because of Britain’s pre-Fifa reports on how dangerous South Africa was “what’s the harm in poking a bit of fun at them now?”

What’s the harm in “poking fun” at violence and bloodshed? Must have been high times in the Schumacher household when Anders Behring Breivik blew away dozens of youngsters in Norway, or maybe in 2008 the family spent a weekend in Alexandra to watch our own people necklacing foreigners.

The letter is glib and insensitive and petty, and I must admit that Schumacher’s attempts at humour were lost on me.

Similarly, in the Cape Argus SMS column, readers spewed nothing but clichéd vitriol: “…how the chickens come home to roost…”, “…the grass is not greener on the other side…”; and my personal favourite: “…it looks like they may taste their own medicine…”

The writers seemed to be educated, if not eloquent, at least to the most average standards acceptable, and yet they were actively encouraging our media to childishly ‘get back’ at the UK media.

They want our journos to write about how dangerous it is to visit Britain, and question their ability to hold next year’s Olympics.

I might be wrong, but I doubt that the holders of these sentiments live in houses without thick burglar bars, electric fences or 24-hour Armed Response protection. Funny, because that’s how the majority of Brits live.

In fact, it’s embarrassing that an English community’s response to the killing of a member of that community is pretty much the equivalent of a normal South African council workers’ wage dispute – shops are destroyed and robbed and people are hurt.

The difference is that this happens at least once a month in South Africa as opposed to once in a blue moon in the United Kingdom. And in the UK over a thousand people are arrested because of it compared to the handful of arrests in good ol’ SA.

I imagined that South Africans, because of our violent past and violent present, would have shown some empathy towards those affected by this disorder, but instead all we can show is a ‘tit-for-tat’ mentality and gross insensitivity.