Ian Hanson and Phumzile Tyulu from activist group Ndifuna Ukwazi. Hanson says that in reality every day people are being beaten by vigilante mobs. Credit: Melany Bendix/IPS

By Melany Bendix
CAPE TOWN, Mar 11 2014 (IPS)

Margaret Feke* got off a taxi in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town, South Africa, carrying a package of new clothes for her son who was due to leave for his traditional initiation into manhood in the Transkei the following day. 

The clothes, which according to custom her son would wear once he completed his initiation, had cost 180 dollars. Feke, who earns 15 dollars a day as a domestic worker, had been paying for the new outfit in instalments and had just made the final payment after receiving her Christmas bonus in December.

Within minutes of getting off the taxi, a group of young men attacked her from behind, bludgeoning her arms with heavy sticks so that she would drop the package and her handbag. They grabbed her goods and fled, leaving the stunned 46-year-old sprawled in the middle of the road.“People in general aren’t in support of this violence, but they are fighting back the only way they know how." -- Ian Hanson from activist group Ndifuna Ukwazi

“I felt like my heart would die,” the single mother of three told IPS. “For six months I paid and paid for those clothes. My son was leaving the next day, I had no more money, I didn’t know what to do. I just sat there and cried.”

A neighbour advised her not to bother going to the police but to rather “call the community” to find and punish the culprits.

“That night they found those boys — one of them was even wearing my son’s initiation jacket. They took them to a field and beat them,” she recalled.

The field Feke refers to has been dubbed the “Field of Death” in Khayelitsha, where vigilante “justice” is often meted out by members of the community.

Two years ago in March 2012 it was the site of a triple murder when three men accused of robbery were “necklaced” — a gruesome practice used to kill suspected police informers during the anti-apartheid struggle. It involves placing car tyres around the victim’s neck, dousing them with petrol and setting them alight. Photos of the vigilante necklacing were captured on the mobile phones of some of the 1,000-strong mob and circulated online, sending shockwaves through the rest of South Africa.

But shocking as they may be, vigilante killings in South African townships are nothing new. A 2009/2010 study conducted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation reported that an average of two vigilante killings took place in the country every day.

Khayelitsha — the country’s most murderous area, according to South African Police Service (SAPS) statistics — accounts for far more of its fair share of this statistic.

At least 78 people — or an average of five per month — were killed by angry mobs in Khayelitsha between April 2011 and June 2012, according to an August 2012 SAPS Task Team Report.

SAPS spokesperson Solomon Makagale failed to comment on the vigilante attacks in Khayelitsha.

But activists on the ground told IPS that they are certain mob attacks have increased over the past year.

“The reality is that every day people are being beaten by vigilante mobs. And the fact is that people are murdered for the very same crimes they are beaten up for, even crimes as ‘small’ as stealing a mobile phone,” Ian Hanson from activist group Ndifuna Ukwazi, who collected affidavits from residents for the Commission of Enquiry into Policing in Khayeltisha, told IPS.

The independent commission was established in 2011 by Western Cape Premier Helen Zille after a group of civil society organisations submitted a formal complaint that Khayelitsha was in crisis due to inept, dysfunctional and corrupt policing. The commission is expected to present its findings in June.

Phumzile Tyulu, a former Khayelitsha resident and a Ndifuna Ukwazi member who worked with Hanson to collect affidavits for the commission, told IPS that vigilantism has become endemic in the sprawling township.

“People are poor, very poor, so to be robbed of your mobile phone, or the only R20 [two dollars] you have, is very serious,” he said.

“The police don’t help. The courts don’t help. Even if the perpetrator is caught red-handed, he’ll be on the streets the next week. The community sees this and they’re tired of it. They have lost all faith in the entire criminal justice system, but the police in particular. The result is that it is now normal for people to turn to the community when a crime is committed, not the police.”

His views are backed up by a Community Perception Survey into Policing in Khayelitsha, ordered by the Commission of Enquiry, which was finalised in late February.

Close to one-fourth of residents surveyed said the police “did nothing” when they reported crime. And a majority of Khayelitsha’s half a million residents live in a perpetual state of fear, with many saying they do not feel safe in their own community.

“Vigilantism is a response to this constant victimisation in their own community,” Hanson said.

“People in general aren’t in support of this violence, but they are fighting back the only way they know how,” he added.

Almost a quarter of Khayeltisha residents view vigilantism as justified, and say mob justice is more effective than police intervention.

Feke agrees. “After they beat those boys, they confessed and they took the community to a shack where my things were. I got all my son’s clothes back, and my handbag with my phone still in it. If I had gone to the police that would never have happened, never.”

But there are also cases of families who have been devastated by vigilantism.

“There are a lot of cases of mistaken identity,” Tyulu explained. “And there are cases where someone has a grievance with someone and so they lie to the community and say the other guy has robbed him. There is no ‘fair hearing’; the only interrogation that takes place is during the beating itself. Suspects are beaten until they confess, whether they are guilty of the crime of not.”

*Name changed on request.

Residents of the country’s sprawling, seaside capital, Freetown, often prefer to administer summary justice than to rely on an inefficient judicial system. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tommy Trenchard
FREETOWN, Jan 16 2013 (IPS)

On a steamy, starless night in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, a teenager runs desperately down a potholed street before being violently brought to the ground by a bystander. As word spreads that a thief has been caught, young men come running from all directions.

Within a minute the narrow street is packed, and the boy, still protesting his innocence, receives the first of a hail of blows that will continue unabated for about forty minutes.

With sticks, bricks and rocks picked up from the dusty roadside the assailants beat, stamp on and slash at the prone figure in the dirt. “We are going to kill him,” says one man excitedly, repeatedly swinging a heavy stick into the boy’s head and neck. Blood pours from a large gash in his thigh, and he clutches his head in pain.

Eventually, stripped naked and barely able to stand, the traumatised youth is ejected by the mob, and left to his fate. “That one will die during the night,” says one man. “He is a thief,” he continued by way of explanation, “so he is a very bad man.”

Vigilante justice is rife in this West African country of nearly six million people, where an inefficient judicial system, widespread lack of trust in the police, and the legacy of self-defence groups operating during the country’s long civil war are causing civilians to take justice into their own hands.

Ten years after the end of its civil war, Sierra Leone is a peaceful country. Recent presidential elections were characterised by massive anti-violence campaigns and passed smoothly. But while general violence is widely condemned, the spontaneous beating of alleged petty criminals attracts little criticism.

Ibrahim Tommy, executive director of the Centre of Accountability and the Rule of Law (CARL), a legal NGO operating out of Freetown, links vigilantism directly to the failings of Sierra Leone’s judicial system, which struggles to hold petty criminals to account.

“What the public does is to respond to the weaknesses in the justice system, the lack of capacity…to provide justice in a reasonable period of time,” Tommy tells IPS. “So what they do is to beat the person up. As long as someone has actually had enough time and opportunity to beat up the suspect, he or she feels satisfied.”

“If we hand him over to the police, he will just be back here the next day,” says one man, during the beating of a teenager caught stealing a mobile phone.

Tommy highlights in particular the crippling delays that lead to low witness participation in court cases. “What happens is somebody is arrested, taken to the police station…the person is arraigned, but nobody comes up to testify. At that point the magistrate is left with no option but to discharge…To sustain a conviction you need witnesses.”

“People in this country do not go to the courts to serve as witnesses,” agrees Ibrahim Samura, assistant superintendent of the Sierra Leone Police.

Many are reluctant to waste their time in cases hit by massive delays. Others worry that by providing evidence they are putting themselves at risk of retribution. Even the victims themselves do not turn up in court, Samura tells IPS.

But according to Tommy, the lack of witness participation is only one of the factors behind the low conviction rate. He alleges that some criminals manage to make deals with police officers to avoid facing charges. “Most times they are detained at the police cells, and after a day or two, after the public forgets about it, they are released back into society.”

He suggests that the culture of vigilantism and “street justice” has its roots in Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, when civil defence groups rose up in response to the failure of the military to tackle the threat posed by the Revolutionary United Front rebels.

“Vigilantism really started in earnest during the war,” he says. “This is when members of the public lost faith in the defence forces and thought that they needed to do something about their own safety and security, so they tried to fill in the void that was left by the disgraceful conduct of military officers.”

Nameless victims in mass graves

Today vigilante violence is a common occurrence in Freetown. At the city’s main hospital, nurse Dura Kamara is used to treating victims of street justice. “We get them coming in at least once or twice a week,” he explains. “They are in a very serious condition. People throw acid on them, beat them up, break their bones, use machetes on them.”

But many never make it as far as the hospital. At the city morgue, attendant Alhaji Kanjeh sits in a ramshackle office decorated with withered human limbs in dusty glass cases. “It is very common, people who are caught stealing are beaten to death,” he tells IPS.

He displays a photo of a teenager who was killed by a mob after an event at the national stadium. He had tried to rob a passing motorist and had paid with his life. “We never knew his name,” says Kanjeh. Victims of vigilante justice brought in to the morgue have been as young as 15.

Thieves who die at the hands of vigilante mobs are rarely claimed or identified by relatives, who are wary of the stigma attached to criminality. “When the police come here with the body, we will enter it as ‘unknown’,” Kanjeh says. When relatives fail to turn up, the cadavers are taken away and buried anonymously in mass graves.

Owizz Koroma, the government’s chief forensic pathologist, says mob justice has become routine. He says a recent increase in cases of vigilante-justice deaths is posing challenges for his team, which is tasked with burying the bodies.

“I am really under enormous pressure as those things are not budgeted for … the burials and the fuel. It sounds disturbing but that’s what happens.”

“Mob violence is a cause of concern,” added assistant superintendent Samura. “People do not appreciate the rights of criminals.” He said the police are taking the issue seriously, and are doing their best to ensure the perpetrators are brought to justice.

They are also striving to restore faith in the justice system’s ability to hold petty criminals to account, in an attempt to dissuade the public from taking matters into their own hands. “The lack of trust (in the police and judiciary) is unfortunate,” he says.

The solution, he argues, lies in large-scale public ‘sensitisation’. “People do not know their civic responsibilities…We need to engage and educate the people,” he tells IPS.

He says the police still rely on the public to apprehend criminals, but rather than administering spontaneous mob justice, they should hand suspects over to face trial, and fulfil their civic duty by testifying in court.

But until faith in state institutions is restored, petty criminals will continue to face the unforgiving justice of the street, many ending their days as nameless victims in mass graves.