This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had the harrowing tale of mob vigilantism that targeted the wrong person in Diepsloot, one of Johannesburg’s townships. The story captures many of the issues that envelop South Africa today — issues of crime and punishment and vigilantism; of victims and poverty and despair; of hopelessness and hope and chaos; of the awful legacies of apartheid and the shortcomings of the post-apartheid era; of journalists and police and politicians.
In the end a crowd killed a man. The members of the mob, some of them anyway, honestly believed that they were tackling crime because those whose job it is to tackle crime had not served them well. But that too is part of the tragedy. An innocent man died at the hands of victims of many, many guilty men, thus making them complicit too in a seemingly endless cycle of crime and recrimination.