3: A Short History Of Mob Justice
She dies amongst the lush tall green grass and the trash of an unclaimed urban pathway winding cramped between two buildings, her last breath choking out bloody through split lips and sobs of, ”I didn't take it, please, het nie gevang, he' nie.” A theory had surfaced that she was there when the phone went missing and it gained life, became a surety. Her whole life for a phone theft theoretical.
They whooped and celebrated, the mob one organism as they bought her here to beat her to death in the thirst for justice. There was no point in calling the police. She limps to her death, gurgling finality. Unsure.
What to make of it. I am watching a man die in the dust surrounded by a ring of people, a ring of fire around his body, arms shoved down with a tire, melting.
“Impimpi,” they chant. We are watching a man die. It is just before what we now refer to as liberation. Young and new to this kind of death, I am unsure how to think of it. A journalist, a South African who has been living in exile, recently returned, explains it to me in the back of an SABC shuttle to the suburbs. Or perhaps this is an amalgamation of conversations over that period, my mind trying to find some kind of pattern in all this.
Bourne from a desperate mistrust of authority, under the umbrella of a new dispensation being crafted by the former oppressor and the designated liberator, it was hard to know who had collaborated with who. Who was collaborating with who. Who would punish those who enriched themselves by collaborating with the boers, the police, the oppressors. We must trust the boers says the designated liberator. As the iron hand of oppression they could not be trusted. This person worked with the boer, or perhaps some other growing power, and must face justice. They cannot turn to the police, who he might have been working with. Justice crafted in uncertainty, made concrete in fire, by death.
These explanations gave no certainty. It was hard to see the sense in any of it; a young life burnt away, discarded in the side scrub of an open patch of dust, to satisfy a yearning for justice, any justice.
Stealing solar panels from the roofs of bundled homes while the residents sleep lulled by hot baths, long hard days, trudging home to this dry, dried out extension of a township on the outskirts of this always a little windy city, the dust sifting in through the cracks in the badly built two room not even houses.
Here beyond the slow shifting slag of the golden mine dumps he is finally caught by the predictability of his modus operandi. There simply isn't enough out here to continue to steal, not indefinitely, not even for a few months. Not enough people, income, opportunity.
He exhausts the houses, the blocks of flats, street by street, row by row, block by block until he returns to the places that have been refitted. The police are called by those up and waiting for his return. The police do not arrive. They can't trust the police to take action. He will only bribe them anyway. An outpouring of frustration, for the injustice of daily existence. The police cannot be trusted. Those who want more than everyone else must be punished.
And he is chained on a long rope to the back of a car and dragged until his clothes and skin are shreds and he has gone beyond sorry, sorry will not save him, he has gone beyond pain, when he is dragged down a street one street away from his mother's shack and she comes running screaming for them to stop and they stop and they tell her to make sure he does not do it again. Mob justiced.
And he spends many hours waiting in the long queue at the hospital for some attention, with the dust drifting in through the ceiling, time and him of no consequence in the underfunded machine of care running over capacity.
The streets here seem to go on forever, wide and generous with big wasted dust choked dry grass mangy dog yards, endless houses small and dwarfed by the sky and time and waiting for work, or for someone to get home from work, or waiting to escape the no lessons of school, or waiting for someone to maybe bring some money for bread or something to break the long silences.
Children, old people, middle aged, the broken wander the streets aimlessly calling out “Otherwise?” to each other. A contraction of, “How are you otherwise?” here it simply means, tell me anything but bad news. There is a merchant on every block, a lolly lounge is never more than five minutes away. The thin opportunity of school is left early for the brotherhood of the number. A place to swap bravados and hope. The comfort of escape. A lolly lounge is never more than five minutes away.
She just needs a little more out of this life, and is walking up the wide street, otherwising as she goes, focusing on her phone, whatsapping for any thin opportunity to earn a living. She needs to pay off this phone. She can't afford data to check her emails. Social data plan only. Endless streams of motivational tiktoks. She is walking towards asking a friend if maybe they can help her with maize meal for tonight's dinner.
Her phone is snatched out of her hand running a young boy maybe he's fourteen and he wants a little more meth, distance, life, and he's shirtless, tattoos muscling in the dry hot sun, dust from his feet.
“Vimba!” she cries..
“Vimba!” echoes behind him as he runs. “My whole life is on that phone,” she screams as the mob forms, “Vimba” they chant. Those tattoos, the number on the base of his neck. They will not save him now.
Vimba!
He is cornered in an open field, surrounded by the husks of old phones and tornados of plastic bags and dust. The mob is an octopus of fury. Not that he has ever seen an octopus, or even been to the ocean, or a swimming pool. His dry open empty life, his lack, beaten out of him.
Her recovered phone is broken irreparable in the struggle and a young boy's penis is cut off and while he bleeds to death, they carry the slow emptying out of his body, and dump it half hidden, the slow sifting of the mine dump dusting over the husk of this life.