THE murder of Emmanuel Sithole in Alexandra, Johannesburg, has the danger of offering us the simplicity we desperately crave whenever beloved SA threatens to fall apart. There are four suspects — Mthinta Bhengu, Sifundo Mzimela, Sizwe Mngomezulu and Ayanda Sibiya — all between the ages of 18 and 22, controversially displayed on the front pages of a Sunday newspaper for all to see. There is a victim with a name. There will be a court case that could redeem us all should the suspects be pronounced guilty.But we should resist the temptation to reduce the past few weeks of violence to an issue of criminality. Prejudice has a long history in SA; in fact, the very foundations of the country were principled on state-sanctioned prejudice. Racial and other classifications forced South Africans to find exceptionalism in their identity in a scramble for better positions. In its darkest days, the state controlled who people could love and be intimate with.In 1994, we called ourselves the Rainbo...
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