South Africa: Where guns, not condoms, are commonplace at the bedside

In Soweto, even going to the emergency ward for treatment can damage your health. Thandi Ncube, a casualty nurse, describes a Saturday night at Baragwanath Hospital. "They came in here with guns and took all the money from the patients in the waiting area. Then they pointed a gun at the clerk and got him to hand over the key to the safe."

This week in New York, a United Nations conference will produce a declaration aimed at curtailing the proliferation of small arms. Ettienne Hennop, a South African researcher, said: "Everyone thinks small arms are to do with the military or with child soldiers. In my country, firearms are part of life and they are often a status symbol." Statistics show that a South African – especially if he is a black, young man – is more likely to be shot dead than he is to die in a road accident. While some recent crime figures appear to show a decline, South Africa's murder rate is on a par with Colombia's, and rising. Even as Aids-related illnesses take a mounting toll, firearms account for 30 per cent of deaths.

Small arms – a category covering weapons that can be carried and operated by one person – are ubiquitous. Bank robbers, housebreakers, car hijackers and even cellphone snatchers have them. Go to the supermarket for a litre of milk and you will pass a security guard armed with a pump-action shotgun. Walk into any bottle store and you will infinitely multiply your chances of being caught in the crossfire of an armed robbery. For the police to carry semi-automatics is routine. Handguns may be as common as condoms at South African bedsides.

Nurse Thandi and her colleagues at the biggest hospital in the southern hemisphere probably see more bullet injuries in their careers than medical professionals anywhere else in the world. A South African study recently found that 43 per cent of corpses in a Soweto morgue had a bullet in them. Firearm deaths peaked at 8pm and were two and a half times more likely on a Saturday than on the least lethal evening, Wednesday. Victims were primarily men aged 25-34 and most were shot at home.

Mr Hennop, a former policeman, now at the South African Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, said South Africa had about 4.2 million registered firearms. Government figures suggested that a further 500,000 illegal light weapons were in circulation. Worldwide, the proportion may be different – the UN estimates that half of the 500 million small arms in circulation are illicit.

"It is almost impossible to put a figure on the number of illegal weapons, especially in South Africa where guns are a part of life,'' Mr Hennop said. "Here, there is a gun culture – this is Africa, we love the outdoors, we love hunting. My father had a rifle. I grew up with a gun in the house. In the past, only whites were allowed to own guns so, when our young democracy was born, everyone from the disadvantaged communities wanted one, too.

"In Mozambique and Zimbabwe, on the other hand, the civil wars ended and strict gun control laws were put in place. So it never became attractive to own a firearm there. Weapons, especially from Mozambique where the UN did not do a good disarmament job, flooded into the South African market. It is a trend that could repeat itself if there is peace in Angola,'' he said.

Mr Hennop believes arms smuggling into South Africa is in decline, but he is not sure whether stricter border controls are to thank for the trend or whether the market has simply been saturated. At the end of apartheid, South Africa changed radically; not only was democracy translated by some into the freedom to own a gun, but international crime syndicates discovered a new market and an efficient new transit country for drugs.

At the same time, characteristically for a country that is also an arms manufacturer, the African National Congress government has compromised its own approach to gun control. On one hand, it has introduced new licensing rules that appear effective. At the same time, it has authorised sales of light weapons to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Algeria. Many observers believe that guns sold in a large shipment to Rwanda in 1998 are likely, now, to have circulated illegally back into South Africa. But the arms industry here – including Denel, which employs 11,000 people and this year turned a £20m loss into a £2.2m profit – is as untouchable as in any country.

Unusually for an arms researcher, Mr Hennop is not anti-gun. He argues that small arms will be part of South African life for a long time. "The solution is not to disarm South Africa. Amnesties do not work here because people believe that they, not the police, will do the best job of defending themselves.

"Crime figures are beginning to stabilise in South Africa and I believe they will not rise further. The police have changed their style into one of taking a much more focused approach. But the numbers of murders with firearms are still on the increase,'' he said.