The death of Sibusiso

The death of Sibusiso Khwinana has shaken me.

I didn’t know him. I’d never interviewed him. But I go to the movies every week, and Matwetwe was next. It will be weird, watching the film and knowing  its star was stabbed to death two days earlier. Murdered for a cellphone outside Sterland cinema where his face was on the screen.

Twitter doesn’t know if it was just a scuffle for the phone, or if the mugger recognised him and jealously fuelled the crime. But young black twitter is rightly ablaze with anger and despair, as are we all.

The comments also sharply remind me that as a privileged whitey I am so much less at risk, living in a neat suburb behind high walls and electric fence, with a car to get me places. I come out of my cinema at night to security guards and bright lights to the car park. There are no angry, vicious youths jostling around a taxi stop, nobody harassing me because I’m female, nobody fingering a knife.

Last week I watch a clip of two men repeatedly diving through the windows of a car paused at the traffic lights to steal whatever they could. The woman filming it from a car behind was saying “Why doesn’t anybody do anything?” She wasn't doing anything either, except filming it. I like to think if I’d been her I would have accelerated into them to break their bloody legs. I may have chickened out. It may have ended badly for me too.

Like most South Africans, I’ve deliberately inured myself to crime. I used to be English, and soon after I arrived 23 years ago I quit reading The Star’s “24 hours of crime in your suburb” and instantly felt much safer.

I live by the theory that if I’m nice to people, people will be nice to me. It works, mostly, except my house was burgled twice in a month. That made me realise that my version of ‘I have nothing worth stealing’ still represents clothes, shoes and bedding that someone else didn’t have.

Now the murder of Sibusiso has shaken me again. But what can we do?

It’s a serious question – what can we do, the vast majority of us who aren’t activists, policemen or politicians, doctors, nurses or teachers whose actions have a direct impact. What can we ordinary people do? Because sure as hell we have to do something.

I’m a journalist, but not the heroic crime-busting, corruption-exposing variety. (But there’s something we can do – support their work by funding the Daily Maverick.) One job I love is writing short profiles for the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans, which highlights young people making a difference in their chosen field. Most are just doing an ordinary job, but doing it better, or they’ve doing something to improve their community. It’s wonderful to interview them and hear their passion and optimism and efforts to make South Africa a better, more talented place. Perhaps Sibusiso would have made the list this year.

And we can vote, for sure. By the time I earned the right to vote here I couldn’t support the ANC, even though their struggle had made South Africa the place I wanted to live. They were already sliding into complacency and corruption, so I voted opposition, to make sure there was one.

Now Twitter is linking Sibusiso’s death to politics. One erudite comment that leapt out like a banner was that the ANC hasn’t tackled crime because so many of the ANC are criminals themselves. Others said yeah, you diss then now but you’ll still vote ANC in May, from historic loyalty, for the t-shirt and the food parcel, or from fear that the DA represents the white bogeyman.

But voting to voice anger or despair isn’t enough either. It needs something bigger, something on a daily scale to create a national groundswell of good overpowering the bad. Standing up for what's right. Speakng out against what's wrong. Making a more active effort to be nice to each other. Like people in the movies who pull together when disaster strikes so they all survive and thrive. Even though there are always some villains who will trample you as they fend for themselves.

The decent majority needs to keep on being decent to each other, lending a hand, supporting and encouraging, trusting and helping. Not blocking each other out or turning away for fear that one of us is the bad guy.

But still that’s not enough. Like so many of us I feel impotent, frustrated, unable to do enough to play my part in fixing this beautiful country. But what, exactly, can I do?

I’ll try to figure it out as I sit in the cinema this evening. Watching Sibusiso.