The Monday Cane — performative justice that prioritises retribution over protection

South Africa’s cycle of violence exposes the limits of punishment after the fact when prevention, policing and intervention fail beforehand. When retribution becomes the most visible response, justice risks becoming a performance rather than a system capable of protecting people and deterring violence.

Themba Dlamini is a husband, father of four, pastor and chartered accountant who loves South Africa – warts and all. He is the author of Village Boy: A Memoir of Fatherlessness, and writes to wrestle with hard truths, stir hope and help build a country in which his children can thrive.

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.

On 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.