Twelve souls extinguished, not in some distant war zone but on the streets of Johannesburg, the economic engine of a continent. As police launch a manhunt for the perpetrators of this mass shooting, I am reminded of Tacitus’s remark about the Roman Empire’s savage frontiers: “They make a desert and call it peace.” South Africa’s present peace is a fragile thing, a façade over a festering rot.
This massacre is not an anomaly; it is the logical endpoint of a society that has lost its moral compass, where the state’s monopoly on violence has become a laughing stock. The Rainbow Nation is rusting. The looted factories, the broken streetlights, the private security forces that outnumber the police.
This is a return to the Wild East, a Hobbesian nightmare where life is nasty, brutish, and short for those caught in the crossfire. Politicians will wring their hands. They will call for calm.
They will blame illegal firearms, or poverty, or systemic inequality. But they will not name the true culprit: a culture of impunity, a tragic flaccidity in governance, and a collective failure to confront the hard truths about social decay. The victims were not statistics.
They were flesh and blood, mothers, fathers, breadwinners. But in a country where mass killings are met more with weariness than outrage, has the value of a single life been so debased? Let us not pretend this is some inexplicable act of madness.
This is the fruit of a tree poisoned by decades of mismanagement, corruption, and a soft underbelly of entitlement. The manhunt may catch the shooters. But what will catch the sickness?
