This story of the ghastly township violence in South Africa against real or suspected lesbians – ‘corrective rape’ – has drawn a lot of attention.

The ferocity and brutality of Simelane’s murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the sprawling township.

Her mother, Mally Simelane, said she always feared for her daughter’s safety but never imagined her life would be taken in such a way.

"I’m scared of these people … She was a sweet lady, she never fought with anyone, but why would they kill her like this? She was stabbed, 25 holes in her. The whole body, even under the feet."

South Africa has a unique combination of wonderful people and natural assets, and quite amazing violence.

How many people do readers know personally who either have died in car crashes or were murdered?

In my professional and personal life I have known former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic who was assassinated in 2003. And that’s about it.

Apart from when I was in South Africa, where in four years I knew about 14 people killed on the roads or murdered. This is a formidable statistical spike.

The obvious argument is that ‘apartheid’ is to blame for everything bad which happens in South Africa – its poisonous legacy must last for decades.

Yet there is more to it than that. The way the anti-apartheid struggle evolved in the 1980s away from the tough, radical but thoughtful self-disciplines of the Black Consciousness Movement (Steve Biko et al) into explicit Marxist ANC/SACP-sponsored revolutionary terror aimed primarily at fellow Africans (not ‘whites’) is in my view a central factor.

Which is why I am delighted that when one types South Africa peaceful transition into Google, this comes up near the top of page one.

South Africa did not have a Peaceful Transition.

It had a Really Violent Transition which still continues, in large part of course because of the callous racist degradation that apartheid imposed on that country’s majority for so long.

In part too because of a vile culture of the-means-justify-any-ends necklacing, crucifictions and other nameless horrors which went on in the townships in the 1980s, as the ANC/SACP tried to wipe out opposition by whipping up psychotic violence among children and teenagers. Twenty years on, look what these people are doing now. 

And also, interestingly, because progressive establishments there and more widely have not wanted to accept that South Africa has a powerful traditionalist un-European African tradition with its own norms of exotic violence, which if anything was isolated from modernity by powerful walls apartheid erected.

I recall a top Black Consciousness activist telling me in 1991 that a big post-apartheid philosophical problem would be how to deal with authentic African values in that country (witchcraft etc) which had flourished well away from modernising urban eyes and which were quite incompatible with a ‘modern’ democratic state.

Such subtleties have not featured much among the multi-racial ANC elite who took over the government and who (albeit uneasily in some cases) indeed pronounced the unique moral rectitude of the full package of modern ‘European’ urban rainbow liberal values (gay rights etc), with scant regard for more traditional ‘African’ sensibilities.

Thus these new horrors.

And some bafflement? Is it OK to condemn such behaviour out of hand? Or does that give legitimacy to racist Westernist ideas of cultural supremacy?

We think that what people get up to in bed is their private matter. But what if other societies do not?

Does that make us ‘better’? Who are we to be ‘judgemental’?

A vile mess.

From top to bottom.