Violence without a face: Brutality knows no race

There is an oft-repeated narrative – and compelling to those uttering it – that white people, especially farmers and those in rural areas, are being brutally tortured and murdered simply because they are white.

And, no, the narrators proclaim, we are not calling this a “white genocide”, but it is a targeted racial killing.

A brutal killing challenges perceptions

What to make, then, of three white farmers jailed for life for beating a black passerby to death?

And, after the beating, they impugned his dignity by wrapping his corpse in plastic bags before being caught at a police roadblock, on their way to toss the body onto a rubbish dump.

Violence beyond race

Is this evidence of a white-on-black genocide? No. It is evidence that South Africans – of all racial hues – can be brutal and can kill senselessly.

If only that gives the peddlers of horror pause for thought, then Dumisani Phakathi will not have died in vain.

Remember his name. Remember, too, his murderers: Jaco Wessels Kemp, Louise Coetzee and Gert Frederik van der Westhuizen.

And while you’re doing that, never forget: in SA, heartless violence does not have a white face, nor a black face. It has the face of all of us.