DURBAN—Antonio Gramsci once wrote that periods of transition between historical epochs were marked by a plethora of “morbid symptoms.” This thought swims in one’s mind as one confronts daily life in today’s South Africa. “For Sale” signs proliferate through the white suburbs, for many are leaving, including not a few who fought long and hard against apartheid. They are spurred on by a murder rate which is now ten times that of the U.S.; indeed, if statistics mean anything, this is now the most violent society on earth. African squatter shacks crowd ever more massively around the cities, threatening to inundate them with a tide of suffering humanity and all the things that mass poverty means— drugs, disease, and a brutalized readiness to resort to violence. Down on the beachfront where I often walk, a pavement artist was murdered by streetchildren last week. A black friend tells me how he made the mistake of stopping at a stop sign in a Johannesburg suburb a fortnight ago (the police there actually advise one not to stop at red lights after dusk). He was set on by three armed men, wanting his car. He escaped by pure luck when a bullet ricocheted off his car and hit one of his assailants in the face. He got away with a car riddled with bullet holes but laughed at the thought that he should report the event to the police—“Why create useless paperwork?”
Mr. Johnson, a fellow in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, was a South African Rhodes Scholar. He writes on South Africa for the London Times, the London Review of Books, and The New Statesman.
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