The Monday Cane — performative justice that prioritises retribution over protection

Punishment that arrives after the funeral is not justice. It is ceremony. We learned this at school, and we have built a country on forgetting it.You heard Peggy-Sue before you felt her. A thin whistle as she came through the air of the woodwork room – then the crack, flat and bright across the buttocks – and then, half a second late, the sting, arriving the way thunder arrives after lightning. By the second stroke you understood that the whistle was part of the punishment. The waiting was built in.At Alston Primary, our woodwork teacher kept that cane, and the cane had a name. The name was borrowed from glory: Peggy-Sue Khumalo – Miss South Africa herself – had visited our school, and something of that shine attached itself, absurdly, to a length of stick in a woodwork room. When the cane came out, it came out like a celebrity. It had a reputation. It had, in its way, a following.One day the teacher was absent. In his unlocked drawer there was a netball, and we were boys, and the mathematics of that sentence resolved itself the way it always does. We took the ball out and we played soccer with it – the wrong game, with the wrong ball – and we played until the straps came off and the thing that had been a netball was a netball no longer.Peggy-Sue was waitingOn Monday, Peggy-Sue was waiting. We lined up, and the whistle worked its way down the line towards me, boy by boy, so that each of us was punished twice – once in the ears, and once on the skin. The ledger, as far as the school was concerned, was balanced. Discipline had been done. I have carried that Monday for more than 30 years, and it is only lately that I have understood what actually happened that week. The cane did not guard the drawer. The cane did not referee the game. The cane did not save the ball. Everything that mattered had already failed – the absence, the unlocked drawer, the game with no adult in it – and the only thing our institution knew how to supply was pain, afterwards, with a famous name.We are a Monday-cane country. And this week, the drawer stood open again.Across Ekurhuleni, the bodies of nine women have been found since mid-July – the first near the R21 in Kempton Park, the ninth, two months later, in Dawn Park. Nine as I write – a count I have had to revise twice while writing this column. All of them found one at a time – and the police have not yet established whether the deaths are even connected – whether they are hunting one man or several. We keep reaching for the words “serial killer”, as if a single monster would explain it; the other possibility is worse – that this is what our ordinary violence looks like when it washes up in one municipality. Either way, whether anything could have connected these deaths sooner, after the first, or the second, or the third, is precisely the question the investigation now has to answer. In Philippi, six boys were shot in Marcus Garvey; two of them, teenagers, died. It was the second mass shooting of young people in that community since July, when four victims between 17 and 20 were killed. And the choreography has already begun, because it never changes: the task team ordered, the visits made, the lockdown promised, a reward announced from a campaign stage, the promise that the perpetrators will feel the full might of the law. The cane is coming out, with ceremony, on Monday.Let me be careful, because I believe in consequence, and nothing in this column argues for a smaller cane. People who harm choose to harm. I am asking a different question, the one the cane’s ceremony so easily drowns out: What was supposed to happen before?Before a woman becomes a ninth victim, there was a first – and the question that matters is what happened after her. I do not know what the Kempton Park investigation will find, and I will not write its history in advance. The pattern repeatsBut across the thousands of cases already in the system, we know the menu of possible answers by heart, because the pattern repeats in courtroom after courtroom: the protection order granted and never enforced; the docket that stalls; the court date that carries over; the detective carrying more files than any human being can investigate. And this much needs no investigation at all: boys were shot in the same Philippi streets twice in three months. That alone should turn our attention from what happens after a shooting to what exists between one shooting and the next – and prevention, in the end, is somebody staying in the room. And the room is larger than the police station. Sometimes presence begins years earlier, with a father who stays or a teacher who notices. Sometimes it is a neighbour who refuses to look away, a social worker whose caseload leaves time to intervene, or a police officer who arrives before the yellow tape does. Prevention has many uniforms, but it begins with presence.This is the anatomy of the Monday cane, and it has three parts. The absence: the authority that is supposed to be present – visible policing, functioning courts, a detective service with time to detect – is not there, and everyone knows it is not there, the way every boy at Alston knew the teacher was away. The open drawer: the opportunity that absence creates, reachable by anyone willing to reach. And then the ceremony: punishment as performance, arriving after the destruction, its force measured in headlines.Peggy-Sue taught us nothing about netballs. What we learned was the rhythm of the institution: you could do what the empty room allowed, and the price would come later, in a currency you could budget for. The lesson was not that consequences did not exist. It was that supervision did not. And a justice system where barely one murder in 10 results in the police identifying and arresting a suspect is teaching that lesson on a national scale. The deterrence research is remarkably consistent on this point – it is the certainty of being caught that deters, far more than the severity of the punishment – and every parent knows it from the kitchen. A cane with a famous name, swung on Monday, deters nobody on Friday night.And when the state supplies only ceremony, people supply the rest themselves. That is where the crowd comes from – the one that gathered in Refilwe after a boy died on Spring Day, the necklace revived elsewhere, the WhatsApp group that becomes a tribunal. Mob justice is not the opposite of the Monday cane. It is its child. It is one of the things people build when they conclude that the referee is never coming back to the room, and the only part of justice left standing is the pain.Listen for the canesSo I arrive at 4 November – but by a road you may not expect. Between now and election day, listen for the canes. They will be easy to recognise: tougher bail, longer sentences, another promise of the full might of the law. Notice how much of what you are offered is Monday, and how little of it is the week before. The questions to put to anyone asking for your vote are not about the cane at all. Who will keep the teacher in the room – the visible patrol, the staffed station, the working streetlight on roads like the one where the boys were shot? Who will lock the drawer – the protection order that is actually enforced, the docket that actually moves? Who will referee the game while it is still a game – before the straps come off, before the body is found, before the crowd gathers?We took our lashes that Monday, and the school called it discipline, and the drawer stayed unlocked, and the room stayed empty. The ball was still broken. DM