Hammanskraal: A reminder of our humanity

Reports started to come in by midday about clashes in one of the informal settlements, and shortly afterwards it was confirmed... two people had died. 

The two men worked for a private security company which assisted the Red Ants in what can now only be called a botched eviction effort. They were brutally beaten and one, according to the community, was burnt alive. For a few hours social media was flooded with horrific images of one man's burning body lying in the dust, the other circled by a pool of his own blood.

A few hours later KwaZulu-Natal Premier Senzo Mchunu was recalled, everything Hammanskraal related was moved to the back of our minds, and we shifted our focus onto yet another breaking story. 

That's the problem with our short-lived, news attention span. We almost never fully understand or process what just happened and we don't really grasp the cause, the hurt, and the aftermath. 

This unfortunately happens fairly often with protests or unrest - especially when they happen regularly. We feel it very rarely directly affects us. We feel terribly sad or angry for the few minutes the images are flashed on our TV screens or described over the radio, and then promptly forget about it by the end of the bulletin. 

Sadly, I think I understand why we do it. There is so much violence, struggle, and devastation in this world, that if we had to take it all in we wouldn't be able to cope. It would all just be too overwhelming, and we would have to crawl into the fetal position in the corner of a room and cry ourselves to sleep every night. 

We as media also do it, daily. We have to, for our sanity. But this form of self-preservation cannot always be the right approach. 

We have become so removed and unattached that a man can be set alight in the middle of a street, a person can be attacked or raped in plain view, and we just continue walking. 

Sometimes we need to cut that wound open and expose ourselves to the bare bone beneath it. Sometimes we just need to take it all in.

We should care about what happened in Hammanskraal even if we have never been there, and we should care about what happens in places like Alexandra and Vuwani because it speaks to our humanity. Violence and destruction cannot have become so commonplace that we become completely numb to it, and in the process forget the human beings involved and affected by it. 

I wonder how people, ordinary everyday people, can just stand by as someone is beaten or burnt to death... and then I ask myself what I would have done - what I have done - in situations like that. 

Work, fear, and even complacency prevent us from reaching out and helping that person, but that is not good enough. We have to try harder. We have to be better. I have to be better so that I can remember to be human in these difficult times.

Written by Maryke Vermaak, JacarandaFM News journalist