OPINION | Loss and death over the festive season

You know, there are many ways to measure social progress: literacy, infant mortality rates, nutrition, poverty, inequality and gender matters are some of the official ways we track how well we are doing as a society.
These indicators tell us about the quality of human life in our society where the history of oppression has been a history of the degradation and devaluing of human life.
Of course there are other less obvious, but equally important ways to measure how far we have come, things that describe how far we progressing in our social culture.
For me it has been about looking at how many people in my family or community make it through the December holidays alive.
Growing up, I remember, there was a time when December, also known as festive season, was anything but festive. It was a time when people would be sure to settle old scores but seeking violent revenge against people they felt had wronged them.
It was not uncommon in the villages I grew up in to hear some young angry person, usually a young man, proclaim that when December comes around they would beat up or stab someone they were angry with.
The reason they waited for December is because it is when everybody is definitely back home, it is when people are likely to be drinking want only and also walking around at night from festivities. People would then confront each other with old grudges and disputes on the streets and have literal fights.
The whole point was to make sure that the other person did not cross over into the New Year without having ‘been dealt with’.
It is tragic that even though the Christmas season is supposed to be a time of enjoyment and fun, in the South African culture, it has also been associated with death in many black communities.
In fact, the idea that Christmas festive season had to take people with it, through death, was very normal in the places I grew up in the 1980s.
We would wait to see if anyone who had been openly targeted made into past the New Year.
I look back on that today and it horrifies me how normal it was. But this death culture was tied up in the general culture of the devaluing of black life in South Africa.
The high rate of road accidents over the festive season continues to be a reminder of the culture of recklessness and vulnerability that accompanies holidays in South Africa.
I remember, in fact, Christmas Day floods in 1995 in Pietermaritzburg where many people lost their lives; I cannot forget the sight of the churning mud brown river water pouring through the village.
It was really as if Christmas for black South Africans, has always been fated to be a kind of Russian roulette where you must expect to be visited by death.
As a result, I remain very paranoid about the Christmas period. I pray and worry about all my friends. I want to tell them to stay inside the house and be safe.
Already the road deaths in this season have reportedly hit 800. This is just insane. Yet when you see the kind of driving on our roads, it is no surprise.
The most aggressive drivers I have encountered were not in Gauteng or even on the N4 to Mpumalanga and Mozambique, which I know very well.
No, the worst drivers are on the N2 down the Garden Route to the Western Cape. I always experience aggressive men who pull zap signs at me, trying to force me into the yellow because I stick to the speed limit!
Putting aside the reckless road driving, I am just happy that the culture of festive season vendettas is now gone.
For me, this is a small marker of social calmness that may mean that somewhere, we are healing our hurt society bit by bit.
Nomalanga Mkhize’s column ‘On reflection’ will resume in its usual Tuesday slot on January 8...

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