Men with Guns

Julius Malema and the politics of the gun

Last week more than fifty people were murdered in Cape Town, most of them shot. A child was killed in crossfire and another is in hospital in a critical condition. Tomorrow Julius Malema will appear in court to be sentenced following his conviction last year for firing a pistol and then a rifle from the stage at a rally in Mdantsane in 2018. The legal issues are not complicated, but the recklessness of a politician firing guns as political theatre extends beyond the fact that every bullet fired upwards must come down. The political questions about the militarisation of political symbolism – which is more fully developed in Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) than Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – require discussion.

The romance of the guerrilla is seductive, but what does it mean to evoke it now, and to celebrate the gun 30 years after it ceased to be politically necessary as an offensive tool, in a society in which guns do so much damage – primarily to the constituency Malema claims to represent?

We have one of the highest murder rates in the world, sitting just below Jamaica and Ecuador and just above Haiti. There is nothing inevitable about this. The murder rate declined for close to two decades after apartheid, and other countries with very high murder rates have achieved rapid declines. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa’s left government, first elected in 2007, reduced the murder rate by 63.5%. From 2017, under right-wing governments that reversed social programmes and pursued IMF-backed austerity, it surged to nearly eight times its level at the end of Correa’s term. After declining steadily from1994, our murder rate began to rise in 2012 and has continued to escalate.

The annual homicide report issued in 2024 recorded 27,494 murders, an average of 76 a day with a murder rate of 45 per 100,000 people. Most of the people who are murdered, around 87%, are men, mostly young men killed in public by other men. Women are mostly killed in private spaces by their intimate partners.

Murders are spatially concentrated in particular neighbourhoods in cities in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. These neighbourhoods are often shack settlements or other impoverished areas largely abandoned by the state. Most murders are over weekends and at night, closely tracking patterns of heavy drinking, and frequently close to bars and clubs that sell alcohol into the small hours. Studies based on mortuary data consistently find high levels of alcohol in victims and perpetrators.

Many men feel that their masculinity is not securely held and requires continual performance and defence. While this can be true of men from all social backgrounds, it can be intensified when unemployment makes it impossible for men to find or sustain a path into socially recognised forms of adulthood. For some men, the gun functions as a way to externalise potency, extending the body’s capacity to exert power. It can become a prop in the performance of masculinity and a tool to win respect and exert control.

Guns are the leading cause of death in the murders of both men and women, and their availability significantly increases the risk of death. Conflicts that might otherwise result in injury are far more likely to end in death when a gun is part of the equation of conflict.

The idea, often advanced by the white right, that licensed guns secure safety is not true. As Nechama Brodie shows in Femicide in South Africa:

The majority of women who are murdered in South Africa are killed by their intimate partners. More than 80 per cent of intimate femicide victims are killed by a firearm injury, mostly from a single gunshot to the head or face. Most of them are killed in their own homes. In three-quarters of these cases, the perpetrator is a legal firearm owner using a licensed weapon.

For women the presence of a licensed firearm in the home materially raises the risk of murder. Women in homes with men who carry guns at work – police officers, soldiers and security guards – are at particular risk.

Along with extreme levels of interpersonal violence, we also have high and growing violence by organised criminal networks. There is significant criminal penetration of the state, government and political parties, particularly at local level, and brazen extortion rackets are metastasising with alarming velocity. There are now regular assassinations, including the murders of auditors and lawyers, as well as political killings that, while sometimes targeting grassroots activists, are primarily driven by competition for access to positions and patronage within and between political parties.

In this milieu, militarised political culture can function to enable and legitimate this kind of violence. Aspects of the symbolic repertoire of the armed struggle for national liberation can be twisted into legitimation for violent political contestation and repression in the present. Anyone familiar with the latter writings of Frantz Fanon would not find this grim situation wholly surprising.

Lessons from Jamaica

We tend to exceptionalise our problems, often seeing them only in terms of moral failure rather than also taking their historical and structural aspects seriously. This can be compounded when our media assumes, as it often does, that the West is the only meaningful point of comparison. Comparative analysis with a wider range of countries can be a useful way to move beyond moralism.

Jamaica is one of very few countries in the world that consistently has a higher murder rate than South Africa. As in South Africa, most murders are committed with guns, and men are generally murdered in public space and women in the private space of the home. Orlando Patterson’s investigation into violence in Jamaica in The Confounding Island opens lines of thought that illuminate our own situation.

He begins with an apparent paradox. It is widely assumed that democracy is a route to peace but while Jamaica is a stable democracy it has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

His explanation for the problem begins with slavery, an institutionalised form of unspeakably brutal violence in which authority was openly and ritually exercised through force. He writes that ‘The belief that all forms of discipline and persuasion ultimately rest on force had nearly two centuries to develop and become ingrained.’ This belief persisted through emancipation, becoming what he calls a cultural schema – a historically formed pattern through which people interpret situations and decide how to act.

One of the ways in which this cultural schema is transferred through generations is via the family. Patterson argues that ‘Tragically’, the ‘valorization of corporal punishment under slavery’ has been ‘culturally perpetuated in child-rearing practices’ and that children raised with corporal punishment can learn that force is a legitimate basis of authority and an acceptable means of resolving conflict.

This point will be controversial with many South Africans, but global experience shows that regular physical punishment in childhood is associated with higher levels of violence later in life. Children who are beaten are more likely to learn that force is an acceptable way to assert authority and resolve conflict, and less likely to develop the capacity to manage anger. South African research shows that men who experienced harsh punishment or abuse as children are significantly more likely to perpetrate violence as adults, including against intimate partners. The effect is stronger when combined with stress, neglect or instability in the home.

Patterson also argues that social conditions in Jamaica mean that families are often under intense strain and children are frequently raised in environments where emotional needs are not fully met and there is little communication about feelings. Frustration and anger are not processed, and the capacity to resolve conflict without violence is weakened.

But the experiences of countries like Ecuador and, in a less dramatic way, South Africa between 1994 and 2012 show, high murder rates resulting from the intersection of histories of trauma and difficult social conditions are not destiny. Politics matters.

Patterson’s examination of the state in Jamaica concludes that it is a ‘hybrid’ political order – an order that has moved beyond autocracy and offers significant freedoms but has not developed credible and present institutions. He argues that these kinds of regimes are particularly vulnerable to high rates of violence, often higher than fully authoritarian states. The problem is that the state is neither authoritarian enough to suppress violence through pervasive coercion nor institutionally strong enough to effectively regulate conflict under democratic conditions.

Life-affirming institutions

It’s often argued that reducing our devastatingly high murder rate requires dealing with systemic police corruption, regulating alcohol and removing unlicensed guns from society. More progressive analysis also understands the need to address social issues, and in particular mass structural unemployment, which sits at around 60% for young people.

We must, of course, reform a systemically corrupt and violent police force and recognise and deal with pervasive alcohol abuse as an urgent health crisis. A 2018 study shows that just under half of the 5.3 million firearms in civilian hands were unlicensed and a strategy to remove these weapons from circulation, and to prevent corrupt police officers from selling them back into circulation, is essential. We also need to create viable paths into a dignified adult life for young people.

Impoverishment and unemployment need to be understood and responded to as existential crises, crises that require bold action. We need to reduce the pressures on families with measures like income support, rural and urban land reform, subsidised public transport and public housing. Public health care should include high quality psychosocial support.

We need to think beyond all this though. Given that women are regularly killed with licensed weapons, we must, while being mindful of the realities of our situation, work to reduce the number of guns, whether licensed or not, and to reduce the presence of guns in both public spaces and private homes. We must also work to build morally credible and socially effective institutions, most urgently in areas largely abandoned by the state.

More intimate shifts in what Patterson calls our cultural schema are also important. Some of these, such as the need to stop beating our children and to come to understand the performance of hypermasculinity as a socially dangerous form of compensation for wounded masculinity, will meet resistance.

If Patterson’s analysis of ‘hybrid’ political orders is accepted and understood to apply to our own society there are, in political terms, only two viable routes out of the crisis: abandon democracy in favour of an effective systemic authoritarianism or sustain democracy, and realise some of its promise, by building what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘life-affirming institutions’.

We do not have any party on the ballot committed to building either an effective systemic authoritarianism or life-affirming institutions. In electoral politics the most significant challenge to the current order comes from a growing authoritarian populism that festers across a range of parties, and appears in its most dangerous form in the MKP, with its personality cult, predatory authoritarianism, ethnic chauvinism, social conservatism, militarised posture and xenophobic street thuggery.

Across a range of parties, this authoritarian populism scapegoats migrants for our problems and frames violence within society as a problem to be answered by state violence, setting aside the social, cultural, economic and institutional work required, while relishing the idea of sending in the police, and often the army too.

Scapegoating migrants for our problems can only worsen them by legitimating more violence – from the state and within society – and deflecting our attention away from our real problems. Encouraging more aggressive policing, or deploying the army to the streets, can only escalate the crisis.

The police are often captured by powerful forces and figures, including at the local level, and are consistently violent. Each year hundreds of deaths are recorded at the hands of the police. In the 2023-24 reporting year, 577 people died as a result of police action and 212 died in police custody. Few people who suffer abuses at the hands of the police report complaints, but even so, assault cases have climbed from around 3,500 in 2016 to over 5,000 in the 2023-2024 year. In the same year, 110 cases of rape by police officers were recorded. Torture is common, and people are beaten during interrogations, suffocated with plastic bags and subjected to electric shocks. In the last reporting year 273 claims of torture were made. These abuses are concentrated in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, and in poorer neighbourhoods where residents have the least access to legal protection and the elite public sphere.

All this is just business as usual. Our previous experience of a special operation with the army and the police working together was even worse. The army was deployed to support the police to enforce the Covid lockdown in March 2020. By early April, eight people had been killed by the security forces, including two in police custody. By late April, nine people had been killed, and by late May, officials confirmed that at least eleven people, all of them black men of modest means, had been killed. There were also widespread reports of public humiliation, beatings and sexual violence by both soldiers and police.

Popular democratic power

There are moments in history in which armed struggle is entirely necessary. The guns that defeated the apartheid military in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 were essential tools – offensive and defensive – in an emancipatory struggle. But, as Fanon shows in the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, violence always has a cost. It needs to be contained as soon as it is no longer necessary and the damage done to the people who participated in it acknowledged.

Today no political party is proscribed or subject to armed repression. The armed and despotic local ward councillors and traditional authorities that, in some parts of the country, think that they have a right to decide who can call and hold meetings do not need to be met with offensive violence.

There is nothing in the stated goals of any political party, including the EFF that cannot be achieved by building a popular movement in support of these goals and winning an election, independently or with allied forces. There is no reason for any political party or movement to adopt a militarised posture or to perform any claim to power that rests on the theatrical display of weapons, a practice that can only add to the symbolic potency of the gun, and normalise violence within society and politics.

Justifying a claim to power in the present on the grounds of a role in the armed resistance of the past, or a claim to affiliate with it, does not open the political space to think creatively about our current challenges, including the need for social repair. But it can, as Fanon warns us, and Zanu-PF shows us, provide cover for authoritarian and predatory forms of politics in the present.

Moreover, the militarised political posture in the EFF, and its more developed form in the MKP, are masculinist projects in which leaders issue commands to followers treated as forces to be directed rather than people to be invited into collective democratic processes. This diminishes popular agency, narrows the space for deliberation, concentrates power in leaders, and reinforces patriarchy. It demands uncritical faith in leaders and can only result in a politics of command that substitutes leaders for the people, and authoritarian structures for democratic forms of popular power.

The politics of the present does not have to repeat the practices of the past or draw its legitimacy from them. Reinvention and rethinking are essential. Nonetheless, we would do well to recall that, alongside the armed struggle, the politics of the past included the intellectual work of the Black Consciousness Movement and the mass democratic politics of the trade union movement and the United Democratic Front.

We would also do well to note that, while the social crisis has worsened in South Africa, progress on social issues, including reducing violence, in other countries has been driven by democratic political projects, supported to varying degrees by trade unions and popular democratic movements – including Brazil under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, where poverty more than halved between 2003 and 2012; Bolivia under Evo Morales, where poverty fell by around 42 per cent; and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, where poverty fell by around half between 1999 and 2012.

In Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s presidency was severely constrained by US pressure and twice overthrown by coups, the first, in 1991, endorsed by the US and the second, in 2004, directly carried out by the US. Despite this, his governments raised the minimum wage against intense resistance, disbanded the army, and affirmed the dignity of the poor and their equal right and capacity to be political actors in the shaping of public life. As Peter Hallward explains in his important book Damming the Flood Aristide’s approach was

affirmative and egalitarian, based on the self-evident but explosive principle that tout moun se moun. Everyone counts as one, every person is endowed with the same essential dignity … The only agent or actor adequate to the declaration tout moun se moun are the people themselves — the people united in a collective project of social transformation.

None of this means that total disarmament is required. In parts of the country it is not possible to undertake independent political projects that challenge local elites without being armed for self-defence. There are places where it is not possible to hold an open public meeting without being armed, or where leaders without armed protection are at real risk of assassination.

But there is a critical difference between clearly and visibly subordinating armed force to democratic processes and centring it as political theatre. There is a critical difference between a rally where a leader fires a gun from a stage and a political event where armed people quietly take positions on the perimeter for self-defence. There is a critical difference between a politics of popular democratic power, defended with weapons when necessary, and a politics of authoritarian command in which militarised symbolism is central and the gun is presented as a means of assertion rather than defence.

When violence is romanticised or even just normalised, it is never the most powerful people in society who are most at risk. Alongside authoritarianism, the militarisation of the political imagination can only produce more violence, directed at the most vulnerable — migrants, ethnic minorities, grassroots activists, impoverished men on the streets and women in the home. We should instead be building the collective democratic power of the oppressed with the aim of moving towards a just peace. Any political leader who fires a gun from a stage during a rally compounds the damage done, and still being done, to our society by the accumulation of violence and the central role of the gun in our contemporary crisis.

Books mentioned

Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin Books, 1976)

Nechama Brodie – Femicide in South Africa (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2020)

Orlando Patterson – The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament (Harvard University Press, 2019)

Peter Hallward – Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2007)

Thanks to Pumla Gqola for reminding me about Nechama Brodie’s important book.