American expat Patrick McGroarty was covering the Oscar Pistorius trial in Pretoria when his home in Johannesburg got burgled. They came back for more the next month. Around the same time, robbers killed the South African national team’s goalie — leading the nation to wonder “why South Africans take from each other, and why these desperate assailants are so quick to kill.”
In this discussion of “South Africans,” McGroarty brings up the touchy subject of race exactly once:
Though the murder rate has fallen by more than half since the end of white minority rule in 1994, the number of people killed in South Africa each year still ranks among the highest in the world.
McGroarty’s family moved into an apartment complex with 24-hour security.
Murder rate has fallen by more than half since the end of apartheid. Hmm how much is the denominator changing a factor? The population has increased +35% since ’94.
The murder rate has fallen by half since minority rule? That seems unlikely.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s South African black townships were in a de facto state of civil war between the xhosa-dominated African National Congress paramilitary gangs and the zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party.
The end of apartheid and the opening of sinecures in the civil service for members of these black parties ended this conflict, so murder rates fell down.
Yeah, how they construct this statistic is they take the murder rate from the first year of ANC rule (starting in APR 1994, which is when ANC won its first election) and compare it with the rate claimed by ANC in 2011 (66.9 vs 31.9). They leave you to infer that there was a super-high murder rate during apartheid and that the ANC rainbow government has made good consistent progress on bringing it down, but actual apartheid-era numbers are not included. Technically correct and also super misleading, they don’t tell you the whole story.
Meanwhile the middle class has moved into gated communities and now employs armed private security with response times of 2-3 minutes.
Source: Wikipedia article on crime in South Africa.
Yes, the murder rate today in SA is significantly higher than it has been throughout most of South African history under Apartheid. Check this PDF out to get the true picture.