The Power of Naming: 'Senseless Violence' and Violent Law in post-apartheid South Africa (original) (raw)
Related papers
This article aims to clarify the relationship between state authority, vigilantism and penal power. I ask how shifting political contexts shape the construction of the 'vigilante' and the legitimation (or not) of vigilante violence. Based on a historical analysis of how the terms 'vigilante', 'vigilantism' and 'mob justice' are used in mainstream discourse in South Africa the article tracks the political transformations that took place in the South African state in the late 1970s, the mid-1980s and post-1994. I use the term 'precarious penality' to describe penality on the periphery—both geographically, in marginalized poor black townships—and symbolically, to denote spaces where the boundaries between what is 'state' and what is not are blurred. Spaces of 'precarious penality' pose specific problems for the liberal principles of due process and human rights that are enshrined in the South African Constitution but often distorted in practice.
“These violent delights have violent ends”: good subjects of everyday South African violence
Acta Academic, 2020
While the deaths of Mlungisi Nxumalo and Lucky Sefali barely registered in the media and public consciousness, they can be read as an exemplar of South African violence. Te more closely we examine this incident, the more difcult it becomes to distinguish between those fghting for justice, and those undermining it. Te imagined boundaries between law-abiding citizen and criminal become unclear, as does the distinction between the use of force to protect citizens, and the use of violence to damage the social fabric. Tis leads to a critique of the conventional attributions of criminality and ideas about effective criminal justice, and instead reframes the problem of violence as one of the constructions of certain kinds of subjects, persons for whom the normalised exercise of various forms of unrecognised or legitimated violence is part of the texture of everyday life.
Rejecting Rights: Vigilantim And Violence In Post-Apartheid South Africa
African Affairs, 2015
Academic and policy interest in the emergence, development, and efficacy of rights has increased substantially over the last twenty years. One particular effect that scholars have recently identified is the connection between the spread of rights across the globe and large-scale reductions in violence. While the expansion of rights may enable reductions in violence, the evidence in this article suggests the opposite may also be true. Drawing on ethnographic research on vigilantism in South Africa, a country deeply invested in the twentieth century rights revolution, the article shows how vigilantes have used the state's expanding rights regime to justify violence. Specifically, it examines the growth and spread of what was at one time South Africa's largest vigilante group, Mapogo a Mathamaga. Mapogo first emerged shortly after the country's transition to democracy and rapidly grew as its leadership preached a gospel that rejected rights, claiming that rights enabled crime and allowed immorality to proliferate. By assaulting suspected criminals, Mapogo's members claim that they are correcting the criminal, the post-apartheid state, and the flawed rights regime on which it is based, an outcome which the existing literature on rights and violence has difficulty explaining.
Violence as a form of communication : making sense of violence in South Africa
African Journal on Conflict Resolution, 2013
This article explores the meaning of violence in South African society against the backdrop of its violent past. Using a perspective suggested by H.W. van de Merwe** and Sue Williams in an article in 1987 – understanding violence as a form of communication – the article seeks to analyse how the persistence and scale of violence can be understood as a legacy of our past. This approach can also help foster spaces for more constructive engagement with those who resort to violence in the face of the society’s failure to provide effective channels for more constructive communication.
VIOLENCE IS NOT A CRIME: The impact of ‘acceptable’ violence on South African society
South African Crime Quarterly
In his book, A Country at War with Itself, Antony Altbeker has highlighted that the extraordinary and distressing feature of crime in South Africa is not how common it is, but how violent. This analysis moves on from that point, arguing that rather than focusing on violent crime as a specific type of criminality, we should examine violence as a separate category that sometimes overlaps with crime and sometimes does not. This shift in focus reveals that it is not South African crime that is so violent, but South African society in general. It shows that many of these forms of violence are both legal and socially acceptable. This includes violence in childrearing, intimate relationships, education, sport, film and television, establishing social identities, and political negotiation, to name but a few significant areas. An examination of these popular and accepted forms of violence provides a revealing analysis of how these patterns are reproduced socially and psychologically, explain...
Punishment, violence, and grassroots democracy in South Africa—The politics of populist punitiveness
This article discusses the apparent contradictions, and consequences, of the state's embracing of democratic 'community' based criminal justice initiatives, in tandem with long-term imprisonment, in the context of vigilantism in Khayelitsha, a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town. I argue that vigilante practices are part of a continuum of community-based crime prevention and punishment practices, where the legal and illegal are blurred, and with which the state is complicit. Looking back, from the vantage point of 2014 to the time when South Africa emerged from apartheid rule and held its first democratic elections, in April 1994, it is clear that mass democracy has had an uneasy relationship with the liberal values enshrined in the Constitution. I argue that punitive punishment is one of the consequences of the state's turn toward democratic localism and its embracing of a discourse that encourages communities to take responsibility for crime prevention. The danger of rallying 'communities' around combating crime is that it has the potential to unleash violent technologies in the quest for 'ethics' and 'morality.' As George Herbert Mead pointed out many years ago, when community members unite against an outsider, they are bonded for an intense moment in a way that masks the very real problems that tear the community apart. The ironic twist is that 'mob justice' in Khayelitsha is also a mass technology to protect private property in the context of the endemic inequality that characterizes South Africa
International Human Rights Law Review, 2022
Police brutality is a highly charged topic which has been prevalent both locally and internationally. Scholars contend that theory-based research has recently emerged to precisely explain this police behaviour. There are theorists from several schools of thought who seek to attribute causality for police violence. In this article, three of the more popular existing theories will be examined: social conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and the control balance theory. To this end, the article has three objectives. Firstly, it scrutinises the relevant theories dealing with the issue of police brutality. Secondly, it discusses the relevant domestic and international instruments that seek to address the problem of police brutality. Lastly, this article makes recommendations regarding how the system of policing in South Africa can be revamped.
Urban Violence and the textures of everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa
2012
There is a great deal of literature on crime and violence in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper examines the prevalence and impact of violence and crime at local level through a case study of two areas in Chatsworth, Westcliff and Bayview, where civic organizations have played an effective role in addressing local problems. They have mostly done so outside of official structures such as Community Policing Forums. The presence of strong individuals, mainly women, has helped the community cope with violence through forms of self-protection such as neighbourhood watches, vigilantism, and gated communities. On the negative side, these measures provide protection to limited segments of society; they may spawn new forms of violence that could undercut long-term violence prevention strategies; and it is also unreasonable to expect local communities with limited resources to fill the void created by state failure.
LESSONS FROM POST APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA FOR A VIOLENCE IMBUED PROTEST CULTURE
South Africa acquired mojoriiy rule in 1994 after 46 years under oportheid regime. This marked the birth of democratic siote built on o constitutionol democrocy. yet todoy it still beors the morks ond unheoled wounds of coloniol ero ond is struggling to shed the teg-ocy of oportheid. Protest ond collective violence continue io be o mojor sociol problem focing South Africo todoy. The violent culture con be troced from the precoloniol times ond the coloniol ero. Violence in South Africo monifests itself through different forms such os politicol, economic, sociol qnd educotionolspheres of the society. During the oportheid ero Block people used io protest ogoinst the oportheid government for ihe gross injustices perpetroted ogoinst them. The block mosses protested ogoinst the corrying of posses ond chonge in curriculum system which resulted in the deoths of student s in 1g7 6 soweto uprising. In the post-oportheid South Africo, most notoble ocis of collective violent demonstro-tions con be highlighted by the Morikono strikes which resulted in the deoth of mony people. More so, the world witnessed with horror the 2oo8 ond 20l5 xenophobic ottocks which resulted in the deoth of 69 people ond mony more injuries on fellow humons. Violence demonstrotions results in ihe loss of life ond destruction of property worthy of millions. The sociol collision theory will be used to exploin the origin of the culture of violence in South Africo. This orticle gives on onolysis of the vorious forms in which protest ond collective violence occur ond losily this desktop reseorch provides vorious interventions which con oe used to prevent or stop the culture of violence in South Africo.
Postcolonial Violence: Narrating South Africa, May 2008
Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern …, 2010
The violent attacks on immigrants in May and June 2008 laid bare some of the contradictions of the South African postcolony. Focusing on the vigorous public debate which arose in the aftermath of violence, this essay explores a moment of interpretive crisis in which the privileged stories of the nation were unexpectedly unravelled. From there, it moves to a discussion of the political investments at stake in the government's choice of the crime story as dominant interpretive scheme, giving particular emphasis to what this revealed about national myth-making, the production of consensus and modalities of power in the postcolonial state.