A week ago, a story went viral on social media about a woman who was set on fire at a Spar supermarket in Musina in Limpopo. The 40-year-old Zimbabwean mother of two had come to SA earlier this month in a desperate search for employment opportunities, which are almost non-existent in Zimbabwe.
Over the past two decades, the Zimbabwean economy has been in free-fall. Millions of people are unemployed, and most of those who are employed are doing precarious work. The inflation rate sits at an astounding 837.53% – the highest in the world. Ravages of acute hunger have also hit the country. The United Nations World Food Programme has indicated that by the end of the year, the number of food-insecure people in Zimbabwe will be 8.6m.
The woman, who is not named in any article, came to SA to escape this devastating reality and to feed her children, whose father died many years ago. But in desperation, she ended up stealing food worth R25 at Spar and was caught by two employees. They assaulted the woman, and then proceeded to douse her with spirits before setting her on fire. She sustained burn wounds to several parts of her body including her vagina. Spar apologised and suspended the employees.
Many people were appalled by this story, though there were some whose humanity is so eroded that they sought to place blame on the woman. They argued that she is a criminal and needs to be punished. It is unthinkable to me that people would want this woman to be punished for stealing food out of sheer desperation, especially because none of these people are arguing that a system held together by gross inequalities and structural violence is the root cause of her act of desperation.
In a normal society, we would be asking ourselves what conditions make a mother do something this desperate, but we are uninterested in that, because in SA our solution to problems is to burn people. She is not the first. We have burnt young boys for stealing. I witnessed one such incident a few years ago in Soweto and wrote about it in my bestselling book Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation (2014).
We burnt those boys because they were nyaope addicts, and even as they were terrorising communities with crime, we never sought better alternatives. We establish street committees to hunt down and kill such young boys, but do not have the same energies for committees aimed at assisting them beat their addiction, which is often an outlet for their lives of suffering.
We have burnt old women whom we accused of witchcraft. People’s grandmothers have been burnt in this country, their homes razed to their foundations by communities whose socioeconomic problems they have decided are the result of witchcraft rather than a systematic crisis of inequality and poverty.
We have burnt foreign nationals, claiming that they are taking our jobs and bringing crime in our country. Who can forget the shocking image of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a Mozambican national who was beaten, stabbed, and set alight in Ramaphosa informal settlement a few years ago? It haunts me to this day.
In SA we are always burning people – but not just anyone. You can commit the most heinous crimes, but if you are white or have money, we will not burn you, because we prefer to burn only poor black people whose lives to us, mean nothing. They simply do not matter.
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