see url:
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-07-15-cleanupsa-picking-ourselves-up-south-africans-show-solidarity-and-community-spirit-in-aftermath-of-public-violence/
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This past week not only revealed to us the vulgarity and the violence
of a disastrous scheme to destabilise the country, but also the capacity
for solidarity and community in the face of a total collapse of law and
order.
In the startling spool of images and footage to emerge from convulsions
of violence and looting that have taken place in parts of KZN and
Gauteng and which spread after the imprisonment of former president
Jacob Zuma, many have stood out.
But one in particular begs for a moment of pause.
It is a still taken from footage captured by BBC videographer and
producer Thuthuka Zondi of two-year-old Melokhule Manyoni in freefall —
dressed in a nappy and red hoodie — from the second floor and then the
roof overhang of a burning Durban building.
The child was saved when she was caught in a human safety net made up of
the strong, collective, outstretched arms of strangers.
“All I could do was trust complete strangers,” the child’s mother,
Naledi Manyoni, told the BBC afterwards.
In many ways, South Africans have been dropped, steadily and slowly.
Dropped from a great height by a government and a ruling party crippled
by the Zuma kleptocracy, performative nationism and factionalism and
into the arms of strangers and each other.
And while at first terror and fear gripped those who found themselves
caught up in extraordinary scenes of apparent mayhem, it soon dawned —
in that moment — that they, we, were on our own.
In the lacuna, many were killed, many lost everything.
The death toll so far is at least 72, with many businesses, already in
the grip of a Covid-19 economic disaster, obliterated in the frenzy.
Then images began to emerge of people shot dead along roadsides, of
armed, speeding residents hunting down suspected looters.
As the regions were gripped by unprecedented displays of lawlessness
together with attacks on transport routes and infrastructure and egged
on in real time by agitators on the ground and on social media, we knew
there was something different to the quality of this violence.
There was something very “five minutes to midnight” about it. It
threatened to turn KwaZulu-Natal into a Kingdom of Ash.
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