On homicide and race in South Africa

We fret over violence in South Africa, but it is both far better, and far wore, depending on who you are in society. Yet for those who are doing well, the situation is fragile.

One of the more interesting theorists of violence in society is James Gilligan, a former prison psychologist. His core theory is that propensity to violence is caused by humiliation, and most often triggered by acts of disrespect. Disrespect, after all, is what predominantly triggers prison violence, whether at the individual level or collectively, between gangs. One of the main humiliations he outlines, particularly for men, is unemployment. Feeling useful to society is extremely important.

His most interesting insight though, is that violence can be directed outward to society, or inward upon oneself, depending on whom one blames for one’s actions and circumstances. Inwardly-direccted violent tendencies result in nihilistic risk-taking behaviour and drug abuse, but also in suicide.

Now, South Africa scores extraordinarily high on both dimensions. Excluding tiny little countries with less than a million inhabitants, South Africa and Lesotho have the highest combined homicide and suicide rates in the world. I exclude the tiny territories because of a statistical rule called the “rule of small numbers” – tiny sample sizes lead to wildly outlying results – the counties in the US with the highest and lowest rates of heart disease (as one of the most-used pedagogic examples), are all low-density rural midwestern areas. Same with every other measure. To measure the condition of a whole society, you need to look at the whole society. The figures in this table are just from the latest figures you can find on Wikipedia, so of coure they aren’t all from the same year, but it gives a fairly good picture:

The overall trend for the 20th century is well-known – rapid urbanisation and population growth during the 20th century produced the same effect seen elsewhere (rising rates), but the homicide rate dramatically spiked during the People’s War, a civil war waged by the ANC on rival liberation movements and government employees which became an indiscriminate bloodbath, and which officially claimed at least 20 000 lives from 1979-1993:

Now, that said, we white people live in an actually rather safe environment. We do very little violence to one another, and have, due to our tendency to live alongside one another, and our relatively elevated income levels providing the wherewithal for private security, we actually manage to have a homicide victimisation rate of just 3/100k (likely less, actually, since this if the figure for men, and men are far more likely to be victims of lethal violence).

This is according to an epidemiological study released in the British Medical journal in 2023, which studies data from 2017. This is admittedly some time ago, and came at the bottom of the curve you see in the above graph, but there are no more recent studies into this question (aside from a similar study by the same team published around the same time). It studies only male homicide victims, but it is worth remarking here that men are 85% of the victims, so we can scale the male rates by 0.177 to get the female stats:

Adjusting these for the rise in homicide over the past 8 years (41% increase) gets you a total of just over 4/100k for white men and roughly 43/100k for black men.

This is an interesting study for a number of reasons, not least of which is that South Africa’s police have ceased to release race-based crime statistics since 2003, after the report on farm murders commissioned in 1999, which found that despite being a mere 5% of the rural population at the time, whites were over 60% of the homicide victims. The government response at the time was to disband the kommando system, cut the number of police stations in half, and hide stats on race and crime.

So an epidemiological study like this one is invaluable. If you want to understand their methodology, they took it looks like this.

But the big takeaway here is that we are really not doing that badly. But it also tells us we are vulnerable – consider what an impact the forced redesign of our cities will do for those who have managed to escape the cycle of violence, and what a loss of property rights and the gradual erosion of employment opportunities mean for the ability to keep oneself out of harm’s way. Without halting the downward spiral of South Africa, not just whites, but the upper tranches of the non-white population will gradually be sucked into the meat grinder too.

This places the importance of self-defence and self-determination at a premium.