Masixole Booi is a political scientist and a lecturer at Rhodes University. He is currently reading for his PhD.

Taverns are a sphere of the broader daily 'normalised' structural violence in townships. This type of violence happens on a daily basis, if not every weekend. The only difference is that the current high number of deaths happened in one day.

The deaths of 21 young black youth at Enyobeni Tavern in East London, Eastern Cape on 26 June 2022 is an unforgettable tragedy of our collective failure as a post-1994 society to restructure the colonial-apartheid spatial division and social engineering of our townships.

On 9 July, 2022 another violent tragedy happened, when 15 black people were gunned down in a tavern in Soweto -- and this was not the only incident: on the same night in Sweetwaters in Pietermaritzburg, 12 black people were shot and four died, while eight were reported to be in a critical condition in hospital.

What do these violent incidents and painful deaths of young black people tell us about the nature of taverns in post-1994 townships? Are these isolated "new" violent cases emerging in South Africa's townships?

If one wants to completely grasp the violent...