We were discussing this the other day and wondering if it would reach these heights. TIME Magazine’s weekly covers have long shown the world’s topic du jour and this week is no different.

According to news.com.au:

From “man to superman to gunman”, is how the cover of this week’s magazine portrays the double-amputee Olympic sprinter, who has been charged with murder over the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at his Pretoria home on Valentine’s Day.

The article uses the Pistorius story – which has gripped the world’s attention for two weeks – as a jumping point to examining South Africa’s culture of violence.

It also comes as a senior MP leapt into the violence debate, saying Steenkamp would be alive today if Pistorius had not kept a gun in his home.

South Africa’s Women’s Minister Lulu Xingwana is now calling for stricter gun controls across South Africa.
But as the Time cover story, headlined Oscar Pistorius and South Africa’s culture of violence, makes clear, that will be easier said than done.

[more here]

It goes on:

The article describes the romance between Pistorius and Steenkamp – who started dating after they met in November – and how they spent an idyllic holiday in Cape Town in January before juxtaposing those images with the squalor and violence of South Africa’s shantytowns.

The country was “once a model of racial reconciliation” but is now a place where murder and rape are “pervasive and persistent”, Time says.

Cape Town’s beautiful, affluent centre is just the “salubrious end of the wide spectrum that describes South Africa’s culture and its defining national trait: aside from the Seychelles, the Comoros Islands and Namibia, South Africa is the most inequitable country on earth”.

In 2011 the UN Office for Drugs and Crime found that South Africa had the 10th highest murder rate in the world. Rape is endemic. Two separate surveys of the rural Eastern Cape found that 27.6per cent of men admitted to being rapists and 46.3 per cent of victims were under 16, 22.9 per cent under 11 and 9.4per cent under 6 – figures that accorded with the high proportion of attacks that occurred within families.

“What really distinguishes South Africa from its peers in this league of violence is not how the violence rises with inequality nor its sexual nature – both typical of places with high crime -but its pervasiveness and persistence,” Time says.

Citing mistrust of corrupt police and mistreatment, Time argues that South Africans cannot rely on the state for protection so they are forced to cope with crime essentially on their own and, over time, that has shaped the nation.
That mistrust was brutally illustrated by the torture of a Mozambican taxi driver who was handcuffed to the back of a police van and dragged along a road after a dispute with police over parking. The assault was caught on video. The man later died in a police cell.

Time also makes the connection between Afrikaans settlers behind barbed wire fighting off the natives 200 years ago and the gated communities like Silver Woods where Pistorius lived. Where he shot and killed Steenkamp because, as he claims, he thought she was an intruder.

[more here]

These are difficult times.

READ THE FULL TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE HERE