For 26 years into democracy, the relationship of the state police to the black poor people has been an ambiguous one in SA.
Ambiguous in a sense that we never know in our communities if the police are in our midst to protect us or to maintain order or just to instill fear, torture and killing.
Of course, there are many cases where the police have acted in an honorable way in arresting criminals but there are also many instances where they bullied and humiliated us.
What is going on? It seems there's a structured state police perception when they deal with the black body. At least under the colonial and apartheid order, the black oppressed knew their life status as "delinquents" in the eyes of the racial regime that treated the black body with violence, aggression, punishment and discipline.
In the period under a democratic government, we have come to witness almost a similar behaviour of state police brutality but this time around it is led by a human figure in front, with a black face.
There's been a rise of brutal police enforcement and killings under the post-apartheid government, and most of these acts have been inflicted on the black poor - who are still being ill-treated, more even, by those who look like them.
According to a research paper by David Bruce on police brutality in SA in the period 1994-1997, members of SAPS faced "256 charges of murder, 125 charges of culpable homicide, 630 charges of attempted murder, 1,119 charges of assault with intent to do grievously bodily harm, [and] 3,564 charges of common assault ."
But of course, many cases were not reported.
As Bruce further notes "during the three-year period April 1997 - March 2000, 2,174 people died as a result of police action or in police custody in South Africa. The number of people who died as a result of police action was 1,548 while 626 people died in custody."
In the early 2000s we saw the rise of similar cases leading to the killing of Andries Tatane by police on April 13 2011 during a service delivery protest and the killing of Marikana miners by police on August 16 2012 for protesting for a pay raise of R12,500. In terms of media reports, 34 black miners were killed and 78 severely injured.
Since the enforcement of the nationwide lockdown on March 26 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced measures to curb the spread of the virus by enacting the Disaster Management Act.
Among other things, he directed the SA National Defence Force be deployed to support the SAPS in ensuring the lockdown measures. The soldiers and police were deployed all over SA; we felt their presence in the townships and in the informal settlements where the majority of us, the black poor, live.
In the way in they employed the pandemic policing measures they beat some of us, some were humiliated and forced to do push-ups and some taken to jail by force.
We wondered whether those who live in posh suburbs are being treated like us. We heard about our son and brother Collins Khoza who was killed by soldiers after they found a single beer in his home in Alexandra township and we heard about Sibusiso Amos who was killed in his home in Vosloorus.
We witnessed and heard about many things that happened to those who look like us under a police presence in our communities. All of this in the midst of the pandemic already killing us in the black ghetto. To pose Ayi Kwei Armah's sarcastic question: Why are we so blest?
*Zono is with the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.
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