1
used to do the rounds. Nowadays, given the
high-
est murder rate in the world, this should be
modifi ed
slightly to read, “adapt die”. For the endemic
so-
and 
cial violence in South Africa is probably incurable.
Optimists think that violent crime can be
solved through better policing, more effi cient courts and
more secure prisons. Even assuming that such improve- 
ments were possible under conditions of hard-core 
affi rmative action, it must be admitted that
criminal
justice treats the symptom and not the cause
of
social
violence. The Department of Correctional Services, for one, has lost 496 out of 500 former
Deputy
Di-
rectors since 1994, representing most of the
intellec- tual capital in the department. Newcomers may
learn
their job properly, or they may not, but they
have
to
be fl own to overseas countries to fi nd out
how
prisons
work as most of those previously involved in
manag-
ing our prisons are no longer there.  South Africa used to have a problem of
political
violence. It was not as bad as elsewhere in
Africa,
but
for some reason elicited hysterical international con- demnation. However, actors in political violence
are mostly driven by some sort of creed or belief system.  Whether such a person is a communist, an
anarchist,
a neo-Nazi or an ethnic or religious guerilla
fi ghter, he is usually amenable to persuasion or compromise. 
Even a group of Muslim suicide bombers might
de-
clare peace if they were given a territory in
which
to
set up an Islamic theocracy, governed only by them- selves and not subject to any outside infl uence.
In the same way, South Africa’s so-called
liberation movements who were at one time fanatically con- 
vinced of the need for violent and bloody
revolution, laid down arms and bombs upon being told that F.W. 
de Klerk would surrender power unconditionally. 
Solving political violence is often intractable, but
not
impossible. 
Not so social violence. Endemic crime, the
break-
down of the social fabric, a sense of drift
regarding
norms of good conduct, point to a far deeper
problem.
The freedom fi ghter or urban terrorist is
ultimately
rational, despite a value system that normal
society
ADAPT AND DIE
SOUTH AFRICA’S NEW MOTTO
Dan Roodt
might fi
nd idiosyncratic. 
But what is “normal society”? It is only
total of behaviours prevalent in any given society  any given time. The Aztecs, infamously, practised daily human sacrifi ce to appease their sun     might revolt many of us today, but to them 
tirely normal. South Africa currently sacrifi ces     87 humans per day to violent crime, or 32 
year. Those are only the ones who actually die. 
of others are injured, maimed, traumatised, robbed, raped, burgled and so on.
In any suburb today an entire history of hijackings, and other violent events can be written, only the locals were narcissistic enough to 
their own history worth recording for posterity.   the other hand, social violence lacks the charm grandeur of political violence as it is usually   mitted in the interest of some glamorous cause national liberation or world revolution but simply acquire some hapless person’s BMW or rape his because she happened to be inside.
However, some time ago a Johannesburg newspa per engaged in chronicling some local history suburbs of Westdene and Lakefi eld in Benoni. every resident had a story to tell, an entire mayhem. Mr. John Gee miraculously survived a through the eye, but now feels traumatised. His says, “One lives in fear in one’s own home. 
not sleep. One prays for protection, yet only   fears come.”
But who are the authors of South Africa’s   olence? Even asking this question presents one 
a sense of discomfort, because most violent 
in South Africa are young black men between 
of 16 and 36. As one surgeon who had stitched     er at least three child rape victims, two of   infants, said recently, “Probably white men commit such acts too; it is just that no-one in South  come across such a case.”
Of course, it would be preposterous to say 
young black men are prone to violence. Judging    our daily experiences in crime-torn South Africa, ever, a sub-section of that population, large enough cause more havoc than even a well-equipped
www.praag.org
D
uring the time of National Party reforms in the seventies and eighties, the cliché “adapt or die” 

2
army of a few thousand men, has taken up
practices
such as heists, hold-ups, murders, sexual violence
ex-
acted upon women and children, and so on. Explanations for such deviancy are manifold.
The
ubiquitous answer of it being due to apartheid
might
have been satisfying if other African societies
never
subject to group areas and a homeland system
did
not
display similar traits. The Congo, Liberia, Sierra
Leo- ne come to mind. There is a whole nature/nurture
de-
bate around black violence, except that no adherent
of
the “nature” side would publicly admit to being
one,
for fear of being branded a racist. Even though
main-
stream American cancer research has conclusively shown that black men have higher levels of
testoster-
one than their white counterparts, few would
hazard the notion that this might be linked to their
greater
propensity for violent crime. 
America has a gargantuan prison population
of
two million, over half of which consists of
African- Americans. This is despite their minority status in
the USA, comprising only 12% of an overall population 
amounting to 290 million. South Africa could
neither
afford nor succeed, given the dire state of our
criminal
justice system, in jailing a similar number
of
black
male offenders. Currently, only 10% of murderers
in
South Africa get arrested and only 6% are
convicted. Any murderer therefore has a 94% chance of
getting
away with it. 
If by some miracle all serious criminals in
the coun- try had to be caught and imprisoned, the prison popula- 
tion would surely treble or quadruple from the
present
200 000, which is already high by world
standards. Not only is such an improvement inconceivable
un- der current conditions, but it would also be politically  unpopular with the ruling ANC who would
be
incar-
cerating large numbers of young black males
who are
mostly its own supporters at the polls. Few
whites, if
any, commit violent crime and there are only
3 900
of
them in prison, mostly for white-collar offences  as fraud or insider trading on the stock exchange
All that remains in the world’s most violent    is precisely to adapt and die. Twice as many Africans of all races now die of murder than accidents - even though the road accident rate the highest in the world, surpassing that of Crime extends to trade in driver’s licences, so large number of drivers use so-called “bought es”, hardly a contribution to road safety.
There are some people naive enough to think “something can be done about crime” in South 
rica, mostly opposition politicians who dream   diverting funds from arms procurement to policing,  but this would be futile. There are already three 
as many private security personnel as state-employed policemen, and even they do not succeed in 
ing what has become Africa’s only peacetime 
fi eld.
“I killed them because they were white.” These mous words were spoken last year by William  na, who participated in one of the most incidents in which the entire family of Mr. Rawstorne was wiped out, consisting of his fi baby, as well as his own mother. Even this 
of an entire family would not have made     were it not for the fact that one year-old executed on her very fi rst birthday with a head. Needless to say, the two adult women raped before being killed. Both William Kekana his accomplice, Charles Fido Baloyi, fell into high-risk group of young black (and Coloured) who commit almost all violent crime in the
South Africa actually has a Minister of Safety Security, which to some might seem like an 
ple of absurd humour. His Excellency Mr.   Nqakula, whose offi cial résumé proudly states  was once “a waiter and wine steward”, has 
ised himself by euphemistically stating that there no real crime problem in South Africa, except   was “a little on the high side”.
All in all, South Africa has got remarkably 
its new-found status as the crime capital of the The high-rise districts of Hillbrow and Berea hannesburg have been offi cially designated by  pol as having the highest murder rate in the  that is, 600 people per 100 000 population 
per annum. Consider for a moment that such represents 12 times the rate found in inner-city toes in the United States, often seen as no-go many Americans.
One British immigrant to South Africa who survived three car hijackings, refuses to emigrate,

3
stating that he is now accustomed to having Kalach- nikovs pointed at him from point-blank range. Eve- ryone knows a relative or friend who has been killed   or at least subjected to some form of violent crime,  and no South African can remotely imagine a society where people do not live behind razor wire, electrifi ed fences, high walls, burglar bars and similar decorative props.
Outsiders might fi nd our lifestyle bizarre, but many pundits in South Africa consider our society to be  much more “normal” now than at any time in the past, which was tarnished by ethnic separation albeit with- out the present large-scale violence. At the height of segregation and apartheid under Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa was almost as peaceful as Switzerland    but she was immoral. Today we are the apotheosis of racial morality and political correctness, yet as vio- lent as the Congo or Liberia. Surprisingly, however,   our economy continues to function amid the carnage. No economist has ever studied this as far as
I
know,
but not only is crime our biggest industry
- bigger than gold-mining or manufacturing - it also stimulates consumption as stolen goods are replaced; it is a
boon to the insurance and security industries and ultimately 
makes surgeons and undertakers rich. The government 
earns billions of rands in Value-Added Tax on
stolent
goods being replaced with new ones. So crime
pays.
News about killings or shoot-outs no longer elicits
the slightest surprise. It is part of our daily existence, and 
one assumes the lethal risks attending to something 
as simple as going shopping or driving to
work.
My
wife, for example, has twice been to the local
shop- ping centre where in the one instance a shoot-out was 
taking place in the parking area so that she
had to hide between the cars with our 18 month-old son
in her
arms; in the second case an armed robbery
had
just
taken place with the robbers casually strolling
by
with
their guns and their loot. 
Everyone knows someone who has been killed,
raped or maimed. Just this week, the wife of a
friend and former literary editor of Die Burger, François 
Smith, was stabbed to death with a screwdriver
in
their home in Wellington, near Cape Town. Her
mur- derer was a 16-year-old squatter camp resident whose 
race was omitted by the press but presumably
few,
if any whites, reside in his particular squatter
camp
which is dedicated to black Africans. Lisbé
Smuts-
Smith was a well-known academic and head
of the
Afrikaans literature department at the University
of
Cape Town. Just two weeks ago, another UCT
aca-
demic, mathematician Brian Hahn, was attacked
by a former student, dr. Maleafi sha Steve Tladi (35). Hahn 
died in hospital a week later, while Tladi was released
on bail of R500 (about $80). 
Two years ago Louw Rabie, a brilliant albeit
sive geologist and brother of author Jan Rabie,  beaten to death with a fence pole by two 
men to whom he had lent some money a 
lier. Police in the small Cape town of Montagu 
ily caught his murderers because they happened  have drinking money during the week, taken from home. He was 80 years old, but in good health reputed to have been one of the most brilliant    gists and intellectuals this country has ever     writing copiously throughout his life but disdaining publication and public esteem. Africans with their tradition are fond of saying that “when an old     dies, a library burns down”. What strikes me  relentless killings of educated whites, is that the  inals are indeed “burning down the libraries”    country and physically exterminating the intellectual class, much like Pol Pot did in Cambodia. The 
are celebrating youth, dance, colour, being black exuberant - as opposed to the quiet studiousness middle-aged and elderly whites, the bearers of    edge and understanding. Are these learned whites   are being killed in exuberant, paradisiacal outbreaks of violence simply the remnants of a civilisation 
is being eradicated in the name of decolonisation?   No government spokesman has ever condemned killings; so we may assume that the present completely indifferent to them, where such killings not enjoy their tacit support.Around our local 
in the past week there have been two car 
well as one murder. It is not really considered exceptionally violent area. Most of this is not    ported in the press, because there really is not   space and ordinary crime is no longer newsworthy needs some further sadistic element to make the

4
page, such as babies getting killed or raped, or elderly farmers being tortured to death. Farming in South Africa is now arguably the most
danger- ous profession in the world with more than 1600 
farmers murdered since 1994, often in macabre 
and dehumanising ways.
To the outside world, white South Africans
are congenitally evil. If our murderers and rapists 
had been white and their victims black,
Europe
or the United States would long ago have
sent an
expeditionary force to put a stop to it. At
present,
news of white suffering in South Africa
hardly
inspires a yawn in Western capitals. This
is why a recent article in The Despatch, detaling
the
rape of a dog by three black men, gave
me
some
hope that a chord will be struck somewhere
in
the coolly indifferent breasts of our fellow-West- erners. Even if the lives of Louw Rabie,
Brian
Hahn, Lisbé Smuts-Smith, Kayla Rawstorne
and
tens of thousands of others are of no
value
to
them, perhaps they will take pity on the
mongrel bitch in Grahamstown that was recently raped
by
three black men. Or perhaps two black
men,
as
the third one protested his innocence upon
being
dragged out of the shack by screaming,
“I
came
here to relieve myself. These two were raping
the dog when I arrived!” Cruelty to humans, espe- 
cially white humans, is today a normal feature
of our society, just like human sacrifi ce used to be 
in the culture of the Aztecs. Cruelty to
animals, or non-consensual sex with dogs, may still evoke 
some sympathy, not only locally, but also
inter- nationally. I therefore feel sorry for Masganda 
- the name of the dog concerned - who
was res-
cued with a bleeding vagina and in need
of
vet-
erinary attention, but perhaps this lowly creature of uncertain lineage could become a martyr
for
our cause in alerting opinion-makers and
politi-
cal leaders of our plight. 
Cycling has become a popular sport in
South
Africa. However, its practitioners regularly
get
shot at by gangs of black youths in
the
street,
so that many of them carry guns and
knives
for
self-defence on their bicycles. Members of
the
Johannesburg mountain-bike club were out- raged a while ago when two cyclists, Scott
and
Lloyd Griffi th, were charged with murder
after an armed battle with their four black assailants, 
one of whom succumbed to his wounds.Most
of
the time, however, whites are helpless victims
of
crime. The government has recently passed
a
new
gun law which makes it diffi cult, if not
impossi-
ble, to own a fi re-arm. They have also 
rural commandos of military reservists entrusted with crime-prevention in the country, without  any police units replacing them. Occasionally the newspapers carry stories of crime victims suc- cessfully defending themselves against attacks, offering armed resistance. As a result of the    gun law, this will soon end and we shall 
be able to hide or fl ee from our assailants fending oneself against a marauding robber or rapist might be a manifestation of racism, and therefore frowned upon as being a kind of “right wing” response.
Being robbed of one’s vehicle or household belongings is now considered quite normal, and often people ascribe escaping with their lives  their own astuteness, such as being friendly to robber, helping him load the effects into a 
cle, not looking him in the face so as not to   nise him afterwards, et cetera. A friend of mine Kempton Park kept up a reasonable conversation with the thieves emptying his house, tied up as was with a gun pointed at him. He survived, though his elderly mother was badly roughed   and had to be hospitalised. In other instances, course, people are not so lucky and they become just another murder statistic. Then they simply adapt and die.
* 
The fi rst draft of this article was submitted
the BritishSpectator, who turned it down about a year ago. I have now updated it with references more recent incidents. Probably no mainstream newspaper in South Africa will publish it, be   cause it refers to the race and gender of  criminals, which is taboo here as elsewhere in Western world. As George Orwell said, however, “during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act”.
In the interest of drawing attention to the 
chy that exists in South Africa, the author quali    fi es his copyright on this article and invites   ryone to post it on his or her website, copy 
mail it to friends and mailing lists, translate it other languages and to distribute it far and 
The only condition is that no element of the 
cle must be changed or censored.A PDF-version    of the article which can be printed out, photocop ied and distributed otherwise than on the internet, is available for download on the home page www.praag.org.
Dan Roodt is an Afrikaner author and activist