How many more must die before we call it what it is? The spate of mass shootings in SA is becoming an agonising occurrence that doesn’t seem to trigger public outrage and outcry. One has to wonder if the reason behind the nonchalant attitude towards the slaughter is not because the victims are Africans.
This year alone, Gauteng was rocked by another mass shooting, which left six people dead when gunmen opened fire on a bus travelling towards Lesotho near Meyerton. Six passengers (four women and two men) were killed and 18 others were hospitalised. Three suspects were arrested, reports say.
The Gauteng shootings happened in February 2026, two months after the December 2025 slaughter when 12 people were massacred in a tavern in Saulsville, near Tshwane. Another nine were butchered in a shebeen in Bekkersdal and 10 were wounded.
In 2024, 18 people were gunned down in their homes in Lusikisiki and six more in Qumbu in the Eastern Cape. Seven were slaughtered in a Gauteng informal settlement called Mokokotlong, including a three-year-old who never got to grow up.
All this happened in September and October 2024. When reports came out, there were no screaming or bold news headlines. Everyone heard or read about the tragic incidents, sighed and went on with their business. When 18 people are wiped out in a village and it barely shifts the news cycle, you know the bar has shifted.
Numbers and statistics
Reports come as numbers and statistics – cold facts. They seldom speak to the real people behind the numbers because they are too numerous to profile, I suppose. But the reality is that these aren’t just numbers – these are human beings. They’re families who won’t sit together ever again. Children who won’t hear their parents’ voices and parents who will mourn them for the rest of their lives. Good neighbours who died for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it keeps happening because the number of mass shootings in 2024 wasn’t a wake-up call.
Another murder statistic in a country that has become numb to the slaughter of its own citizens. South Africa lost 26 232 people at the hands of murderers in 2024, which means 70 a day. Every day, someone was killed.
Police say the numbers went down because between April and September, 63 people were killed daily. Yes, you got it right; nothing to celebrate there. The murder rate in this country is scary. It sits at 45 per 100 000 – one of the highest in the world.
Illegal shebeens, illegal guns
Most of it happens in places that should be safe. Shebeens, where people go to unwind, have become killing fields. Soweto and Pietermaritzburg: 20 dead, 15 injured, both in illegal taverns. But even homesteads in the Eastern Cape aren’t safe. The gunmen came there too. The mass shootings demonstrate that black lives matter less because they are not isolated events. Police shut down 12 000 shebeens and arrested 18 000 people between April and September 2025. Arrests went up but the killing didn’t stop.
The shebeens are illegal and the guns are illegal. We have laws that sound good and strict on paper but firearms remain the leading cause of death after road accidents. How many more mothers, fathers and children have to die before the slaughter stops being “another shooting” and starts being treated like the crisis it is? If one digs deeper, there is a realisation that most of those killed are Africans and the mass shootings are happening in areas where they live, bar the Cape Flats where many coloured people also lose their lives through gang-related mass shootings.
South Africa recorded more than 80 mass shootings incidents in 2024 and the South African Police Service recorded seven mass shooting incidents (defined as five or more victims per event) in just the first quarter of 2025. That number alone, although going down, tells you this is no longer rare; it has become a pattern.
How does it become normal?
The numbers raise a simple question: When massacres happen every few weeks and more than 60 people are killed each day, how does it become normal? The data shows the scale, the locations and the method. What’s missing is a clear response that matches the scale of the problem. The answer is that it has become normal because black lives don’t matter.
South Africa is not at war in the conventional sense, however, for millions of its citizens, it feels like living under siege. It can’t be business as usual.
- Botha is a gun violence survivor and a secretariat member of the Global Coalition for WHO Action on Gun Violence.
- How many more must die before we call it what it is.
- The spate of mass shootings in SA is becoming an agonising occurrence that doesn’t seem to trigger public outrage and outcry.
- One has to wonder if the reason behind the nonchalant attitude towards the slaughter is not because the victims are Africans.
- This year alone, Gauteng was rocked by another mass shooting, which left six people dead when gunmen opened fire on a bus travelling towards Lesotho near Meyerton.
- Six passengers (four women and two men) were killed and 18 others were hospitalised.
