Since 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has embarked upon a profound venture to reorganise South African society. The aim has been to undo injustices committed under the apartheid regime by bringing everybody under the same sovereign rule of law: ‘One law for one nation’, as the first page of the new Constitution puts it. This exceeds by far any narrow definition of a project of law and has had an impact on nearly all spheres of society. As Comaroff and Comaroff have pointed out, the project of the ANC is an attempt to ‘fashion a highly enlightened democracy’ and yet
to free itself from a legacy of Eurocentric domination: a postcolony rooted in a modernist culture of legality that seeks, explicitly if uneasily, to make space for cultural diversity (2004:189).
I approach some of these questions by way of analysing the state’s attempt to reorder civil society relations in community-based justice enforcement in the adjoining townships of Port Elizabeth. Elsewhere (Buur, 2003; 2005), I argued that the use of corporal punishment and other disciplinary devices by vigilante formations called into question both the state monopoly over legitimate violence and the state’s attempt – by institutionalising the Bill of Rights – to regulate and govern the field of justice enforcement in Port Elizabeth’s townships. The use of force by vigilante formations was justified by residents and the vigilante groups themselves, as well as sections of the police, first, by the belief that rampant, out-of-control crime threatens the lives of township residents and the well-being of their communities and, second, as a result of the alleged failure of government and state to safeguard communities against criminals because of the incapacity and corruption of the South African Police Services (SAPS). The failure by the police to deal with crime was explained by their need to adhere to the credo of human rights which was hampering their efforts. The use of force was deemed necessary as an information-extracting device and as a way of inculcating the moral values of township residents, in particular unruly younger members.
For all the celebration of horizontal fraternity (Anderson, 1990) institutionalised by the new South African Constitution and exemplified by the rights-bearing subject equal before the law, many township residents are still excluded from the most meaningful forms of compensation for not taking the law into their own hands: access to jobs (Nattrass and Seekings, 2001; Terreblanch, 2003), participation in the membership of civic consumerism (Khunou, 2002:71-73) and purchase of insurance policies (Buur, 2003). Despite such continued marginalisation, the fiction of unity is strong, as the 2004 election results show, which gave the ANC a 70 per cent national mandate – and over 90 per cent in Port Elizabeth’s townships – further underscoring the legitimacy of both the party and the state as the exclusive guarantors of collective well-being and thus emphasising what Comaroff and Comaroff described as the ‘indivisibility of nation from state’ (2004:190). While the use of vigilante force was understood to represent a critique of the regime of rights, it was also presented as a defence of the new democracy, whose justice enforcement institutions – the Community Policing Forums (CPFs) – were failing to meet township residents’ needs. The explicitly stated aim was not to undermine or challenge the new government of the ANC, but rather to assist it; informants constantly reiterated that working ‘in the name of the people’ was not posing a threat to ‘the people’s government’ of the ANC and its new institutions (Buur, 2005).
In this article, I want to take this argument further and explore in greater detail local attempts to organise societal fields such as justice enforcement through the technique of community policing that is gaining currency. In particular, I want to examine what it means when an apparently neutral or depoliticised global device for inclusion of communities in policing is inserted into the South African context with its particular history of anti-apartheid struggle. This is important, I will suggest, not only because of what takes place in the field of justice. Newly emerging social campaigns and movements contesting state policies, such as the Landless Movement, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the Sowetan Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) and the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), draw to a large extent on the popular democratic legacy of the struggle against apartheid and are confronted by official, state forms of local organisation that resemble the democratic model applied in the CPF. I will here argue that the ‘other’ of the new democratic dispensation was not only the apartheid regime and its racialised legacy; aspects of the struggle against apartheid also qualify as ‘other’: the mode of popular sovereignty – captured in the slogan ‘people’s power’ and mode of democratic organisation – the ‘people’s court’ – that brought ‘the people’ to power. We need, therefore, to outline the salient features of the ‘other’ of the democratic form of organisation and ethical being that the new legal-political order tries to promulgate. First, I will outline the formal attempts to reorder state–civil society relations through community policing that has followed the mode of popular sovereignty that materialised during the 1980s. I will then explore how past and present forms of democratic organisation play themselves out today.
The depoliticised form of the Community Policing Forum
In an attempt to regulate the relationship between the state and the wider public, the ANC-led government established Community Policing Forums (CPFs) in 1995. The CPFs had been anticipated from at least 1991, but they were officially introduced through the Interim Constitution (CRSA Section 221, Act 200 of 1993), which allowed for a network of community policing forums to be established at police-station level throughout the country. Only eighteen months into the term of the Government of National Unity, CPFs were legislated through the South African Police Service Act of 1995 (SAPS Act 68 of 1995) and they remain part of law in terms of the final Constitution of 1996 (CRSA Act 106 of 1996). The reform of the South African Police Force (SAPF), symbolically renamed South African Police Service (SAPS), was crucial as an attempt to bolster its legitimacy facing a more than sceptical public, which remembered the role of the police in the torture and quelling of internal resistance to the apartheid regime. Integral to this was the 1996 National Crime Prevention Strategy’s (NCPS) explicit aim of capitalising on ‘the participation of civil society in mobilising and sustaining crime prevention initiatives’ (Dixon, 2000:14). Earlier draft documents had opened the way for incorporating and recognising organised civic formations emerging from the struggle against apartheid, often referred to as ‘alternative and autonomous, non-state systems of ordering’ (Schärf and Nina, 2001). Instead of cooperation between the state system and non-state forms of ordering systems, the role of community participation is limited to working in partnership with the state police on the mutual identification of and solution of local problems (Section 18(1) SAPS Act 68 of 1995). Initially, CPF's were to work closely with the police through the designated community police officer, whom each police station is required by law to appoint. However, during the first years of implementation the CPFs functioned primarily as a civilian check on police negligence of abuse of power. The relationship with the police structures therefore often became strained, with little active participation by CPFs in de facto crime prevention and agenda setting, which as Dixon has illustrated became ‘skewed in favour of the state, its agents and institutions’ (2000:14).
Despite this, considerable energy was put into the formation and education of CPFs. Members of CPFs are formally, democratically elected at an Annual General Meeting (AGM) by the communities adjoining a police station. A CPF comprises a chairperson, vice-chairperson, secretary and treasurer. Various portfolios for youth, crime prevention, schools, gender and business are either identified at the AGM or appointed subsequently by the board. The CPF and each sub-committee elect their own chairperson, secretary and so on, and they work according to the stipulations laid down in the CPF constitution; thus mirroring the various tiers of government and the ANC itself, both in organisation and in adherence to constitutionalism. CPF participation rests on basic standards of democratic behaviour that emphasise accountability and equality. Such behaviour would disregard specific racial, ethnic and social, class mores as the basis for democratic organisation which should be hierarchically encompassed under the constitution. Furthermore, the rules laid down in the CPF constitution must be respected and participants are accountable to the forum. Most CPFs have an office with a phone in the police station and ideally hold daily meetings with the Community Policing Officer to synchronise police activities with the work of the CPF. While CPFs have access to limited funding and may receive training in human rights and strategic crime prevention, few resources are generally used on concrete activities. From the beginning, the relevant legislation stipulated that a CPF form safety and security structures (popularly known as S&S) to work under its jurisdiction. In Port Elizabeth, S&S structures first became a concrete reality after 2000 (Buur, 2003). Made up of locally elected or appointed members, S&S structures are organised around the lowest level of local governance: the ward. S&S members may serve on CPF sub-committees and may receive human rights sensitivity training.
Even though non-state popular justice self-regulation has continued to play a crucial role in local justice enforcement up through the mid-1990s and to the present – often in conflict with the state initiative – the CPF is the most visible expression of the South African state’s community policing policy. It became the main instrument for the state (and the ANC) to domesticate and to defuse potential antagonisms in the justice field. While local extra-state justice enforcement structures proliferated in the townships of New Brighton and Kwazakele outside Port Elizabeth after 1999 (see Buur, 2003; Buur and Jensen, 2004; 2005), the New Brighton CPF could claim that it initiatives taking care of justice enforcement, the CPF was the only initiative that had official approval. They could, with certainty, assert that every project related to crime fighting ought to be conducting its work in the name of the CPF and be regulated by its constitution. Other structures had local community support, but they also ran the danger of being classified a priori as anti-ANC because of their unofficial status. The CPF can, as such, be interpreted as an attempt to contain the energies of ‘the people’s power’ in state and dominant party practices – what we with Canetti (1988) can understand as a move from ‘open’ to ‘closed’ masses – through the use of ‘governmental communitarianism’ (Delanty, 2003:87; Rose, 1999). This can clearly be seen as a positive, structured and coordinated attempt to mobilise and harness active democratic participation and self-management in justice enforcement alongside the police services. In this sense, the CPF can be seen as an attempt to accomplish a form of democratic socialisation by capturing township residents in participatory forums that in a variety of ways compel citizens to act according to standards of democratic behaviour played out under conditions regulated by a more or less well defined set of democratic procedures. Considering the extremely violent history of democratic nation-state formation in South Africa, this is, after all, no small matter.
However, and this is often overlooked in the present celebration of ‘participation’, it also implies the imposition of a potentially proactive model of policing on (underdeveloped) countries which, some would claim, lack the democratic history that underpins the CPFs’ role in long established democracies (see in particularly Bayley, 1995:91). The introduction of CPFs has, quite legitimately, been seen as an imposition of ‘Anglo-American state-police-centred policing’ (Dixon, 2000:15), part of the enforcement of a particular form of liberal democracy with no or little relevance to the South African experience, which is guided primarily by a need for social stability while pursuing economic growth, rather than community priorities (Brogden, 2004). It has even been suggested that it forms part of ‘a new colonialism’ (Dixon, 2000:8; Brogden and Shearing 1993:95), mainly governed by the requirements of ‘overseas aid’ (Brogden, 1996:225). As is well documented (see Brodgen and Shearing, 1993; Brogden, 2004; Dixon, 2000), the emergence of CPFs during the South African political transition forms part of wider systems of globalised governmental change in which the community and its representatives become the spaces that order the interface between citizens-subjects and global institutions (see also Rose, 1999; Garland, 2001). As I have illustrated, the South African CPF model includes the use of a spatial matrix based on the local governance unit of the ward for ascendancy, which is more often than not at odds with the organising basis of non-state formations in the field of justice (see Buur, 2005). The CPF can also be seen as a formal redrawing of the space for governance between the authority of state on the one hand, and the liberty of rights-bearing, autonomous, individual subject-citizens of the nation on the other, as Rose has pointed out (1999:167). One can debate, however, to what extent it is solely autonomous individuals that are produced and not individuals conditioned by political allegiance to the ruling party.
While this particular form of redrawing extrapolates certain representatives of the community and transports them into the apparently neutral or depoliticised space of the police station, it also encourages and harnesses a particular form of political subjectivity in the South African case, whose ‘other’ must be outlined in some detail to explain why CPF in South Africa was an appealing model for reordering state-society relations. This point has never really featured in the various rigorous critiques of the CPF model; these tend to conclude with the argument that what is needed is a greater reliance on ‘bottom-up’ and localised modes of justice enforcement based on ‘what works’ (Brodgen, 2004:649). In the South African case, ‘what works’ comes with a particular history, one on which the ANC, for a number of reasons, did not want to base its new democracy.
Local justice enforcement & political contestation1
In South Africa, local justice enforcement has been intimately related to the changing meaning of vigilantism (Buur, 2003; Buur and Jensen, 2004). Until the mid-1980s, the concept of vigilantism was generally used in the same vein as categories like ‘popular justice’ or ‘informal policing’, which referred to ordering activities that were undertaken outside the ambit of the apartheid state (Bundy, 2000). The term ‘captured manifestations of social ordering’ related to the maintenance of peace and order, some of which had a ‘conservative’ bent, addressing issues related to rapid urbanisation such as generational, class and gender conflict and emphasising the moral codes of African culture and tradition; others had either a ‘para-military’ component or a ‘progressive’ attitude to social cohesion, addressing, for instance, civic issues (Seekings, 2001:85-86). In the 1980s, the concept came to denote two different things. Most importantly, it came to denote ‘reactionary’ tendencies in the black populations and to refer specifically to conservative vigilante groupings that fought violently against anti-apartheid components in the struggle in black townships and homelands, more often than not secretly backed by the apartheid regime. As Hayson has shown (1989:2-7), this shift coincided with a more structured infusion of modern counter-insurgency warfare in South Africa after 1985, with emphasis on ‘low intensity conflict management’ with its roots in military theories emerging from the French general Andre Beaufre and the American colonel J. J. McCuen. The logic of these theories was institutionalised by the apartheid regime from the mid-1980s, first in its ‘total strategy’ and later in its Joint Management System approach, which dissolved conventional boundaries between military and civil society and focused on ‘winning hearts and minds’ (known as WHAM). An integral facet was the emergence of the regime’s hidden hand or ‘third force’ which involved ‘the clandestine creation of surrogate armed forces [which] appear to emerge spontaneously from the “people“ themselves’ (Ibid. p. 3). It is in this context that ‘concerned residents’ groups’ or, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 1998) calls them, ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary vigilantes’, emerged in townships around South Africa. It is generally agreed that the apartheid state was involved in fuelling violence through what famously became known as ‘third force activities’ run by secret and extra-judicial security force units. Nonetheless, as the TRC made clear, not all vigilante activity was a product of state engineering:
Intolerant actions and coercive campaigns of the UDF 2 and its adherents mobilised genuine disaffection and anger amongst black residents, forming the basis for retaliatory actions by so-called ‘vigilantes’ (TRC, Vol. 2, 1998:302).
The hope was that, along with taking the best from struggles for equality within the Western legal system – for gender, youth, women and gay rights, for example – the ideas behind ‘people’s power’, its courts based on its ‘own structures of legality’ (Nina, 1992:3), would be carried over into the future liberated state, where notions of popular participation would prevail. Some commentators argue that, up to mid1986, in the six to seven months when they functioned in an optimal manner, the ‘people’s courts’ were relatively well organised and politically disciplined (Nina, 1992; Mayekiso, 1996; Seekings, 2001). However, with the declaration of various states of emergency from 1986 onwards, the killing, imprisonment or exile of most UDF township leaders and the counter-insurgency strategies of the apartheid regime, the picture became far more chaotic and contingent. People’s Courts sometimes meted out severe punishments – the infamous ‘necklace’5 being the most notorious – for crime and for other forms of behaviour considered deviant by township activists. Mob toyi-toying (an ‘amble-stepped’ quasi-military dance) became associated with the enforcement of the ANC/UDF’s ungovernability strategy in township schools and streets, as did the ‘harassment’ of political opponents. Harassment took various interlinked forms: gatherings in front of the houses of people classified as enemies, which were then attacked or burned down; the burning of people classified as enemies (the infamous askaris),6 the building of burning tyre barricades and so on.
‘Conservative’ and ‘struggle’ vigilantes are described separately above, but their development and intensification were simultaneous and intertwined. Channelling dissatisfaction against the regime in an attempt to gain control over the uncontrollable masses created its own uncontrollability, manifest both as outbursts of extreme violence and as potent circulating fears of hidden evil forces using opponents of the UDF to undermine the democratic revolution – fears that persisted throughout the 1990s and well into the new millennium (a subject to which we will return below).
The ambivalence of ‘the people’
We know that the State used its considerable resources to wage a war against some of its citizens. We know that torture, deception, murder and death squads came to be the order of the day. We know that the liberation movements were not paragons of virtue and were often responsible for egging people on to behave in ways that were uncontrollable. We know that we may, given the present crime rate, be reaping the harvest of the campaigns to make the country ungovernable (Tutu quoted in TRC, 1998 :17).
We accept political and moral responsibility. We cannot say these people have nothing to do with us. We organised them; we led them. When we were taken into prisons, they were left without leadership and many of them, angry even at our arrest, did things which were irrational (TRC, Vol. 5, 1998 :383).
The exchanges between the TRC and the ANC/UDF were notoriously ambiguous: ANC and former UDF leaders tried to maintain that the unrest formed part of its strategic intervention, while at the same time they had to acknowledge that ‘the people’ and various formations acting in their name did things that were deeply disturbing and outside the movement’s control. Simply to say that the youth acted on their own would have been to reject key elements of the internal struggle. Ambivalence arises because, in order to keep political face with their constituency, ANC and UDF leaders needed to appropriate a domain of the struggle against apartheid that they never fully controlled, while simultaneously they had to distance themselves from it to maintain their stance on human rights in the eyes of the international community (Buur, 2001). The images and fears of mob justice that troubled the political class in the apartheid state as well as the leadership of the ANC are not necessarily over, as Desmond Tutu’s, TRC Chairperson, explains. What I want to draw from this short summary is that, during the struggle of the 1980s, when sovereignty was entrusted to the people, they became a scandal and an embarrassment for their leaders. The ‘people’ therefore could not be the agent for the development of the future society. When one takes into account the ANC’s socialist exile past, it is clear that the state and party would have to take the role of directing societal transformation: ‘Formally, it is a state based on a democratic constitution, a state which is obliged to serve the aspirations of the majority’ (ANC Strategies and Tactics, 1997). However, the emergence of a ‘truly democratic state’ depended on the transformation of the old machinery and such transformation had clear Jacobin overtones: ‘the location of the motive forces of the revolution at the helm of the state, as the classes and strata which wield real power’ (Ibid.) could only be the ANC (see also Jensen, 2001).
Given that history, along with current political mobilisation in the name of ‘the people’, democratic consolidation and the challenges to it can be analysed by examining the relationship between ‘the people’ and the guardians of the people, and how that relationship is organised. As a first approximation, it is worth considering Agamben’s answer to the question, ‘What is a People?’ (2000:28). According to him, the Western political concept of ‘people’ is inherently ambiguous because ‘what we call people was actually not a unitary subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the People as a whole and as an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and a fragmentary multiplicity of the needy and excluded bodies’ (2000:30). The double nature of the concept of ‘people’ as that which already is and that which has yet to be realised – the citizen and the poor, underprivileged and excluded subject aspiring to become a citizen – fits well with the idea of ‘achieving people’s power’ of the 1980s and with the ANC’s present democratic project, since its aim is the merger of people and People. Agamben traces the attempts to stitch up this constitutive fracture in Western political history where its subject has, in different contexts, taken different forms but has always functioned as the ‘pure source of identity and yet has to be redefined and purify itself continuously according to exclusion, language, blood, and territory. It is what has in its opposite pole the very essence that itself lacks; the realisation therefore coincides with its own abolition’ (2000:31). The question is then: is the ANC’s attempt through the CPF to create order and to organise the justice field through a set of practices and institutions underpinning a democratic liberal political model capable of doing so in a manner that allows for pluralism. The specificity of modern democracy is exactly that it recognises and legitimises conflict over ideas about how society should be organised. Allowing for fierce contest over such ideas and over the right to defend such ideas is never questioned.
Democratic form & exclusion
In the following, I will consider to what extent the CPF model, as a depoliticised and neutral form of democratic participation, shapes inclusion and exclusion. In particular I want to explore what can be termed the internal limit for participation in the CPF. As I have already suggested, the formation of CPFs is marked by normative and ethical prescriptions defining a good citizen by particular qualities: equity allowing for community participation and accountability to the constitution. While these ethical standards form part of basic democratic behaviour and as such are used broadly to characterise democratic participation in different contexts, I will suggest that they become adapted and appropriated in specific contexts that not only capture residents in participatory forums but produce such forums’ by foreclosing the options for participation in the field of justice enforcement. Furthermore, opponents to the CPF become recast as untenable people, who cannot be included in democratic forums.
The vice chairperson of the CPF for New Brighton police station, on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, indicated how the normative-ethical nexus is understood in the work of local justice:
In a nutshell, this structure of the CPF is for no political purposes at all […] we want people who are committed, to ensure that they do represent the interests and aspirations of the community, not to represent their party political interests (interview, March 2001).
We always do accept all people, but the problem is that we must make sure that there is an element of accountability. Where would an individual account? What if a particular person having joined as an individual, happens to misbehave, how are you going to deal with that particular person? (vice-chair, March 2001).
Where did the representatives come from? As it was explained to me, the representatives formally electing the CPF came from different political organisations, church groups, civic, business and sport associations. In reality, hardly any organisations participated, other than members of the ANC tri-party alliance (ANC, SACP and COSATU), the ANC Women’s League, the ANC Youth League and so on. One PAC representative was present, as were two members of a well-known church who were also members of the ANC, but they were not included in the various caucuses where decisions were taken. As the local councillor described it, the type of democratic organisation the government/ANC pursues with regard to the CPF includes ‘people [who] are coming straight from their organisation: AZAPO is supposed to have a representative, the PAC is supposed to have a representative, ANC, South African Communist Party, Women’s League or whoever, they must be part of the CPF’. Individuals attempting to participate in the AGM or members of autonomous non-state justice enforcement groups (usually firm ANC members but not delegated by the ANC or its alliance members), were either turned away or excluded from participating in the election of the CPF or its various sub-committees.
Like an election in this scenario, the concept of accountability also needs to be understood in context. To be accountable to the people of the township did not mean accountability directly to ‘the people’ or the community they represented as such, but rather to the organisations that presumably represented them. If there were problems with an individual representative, the organisation that had sent the person to the AGM/CPF was the sanctioning body responsible for discipline if this person ‘stepped out of order’. Here people who do not belong to any known formal group cannot participate. Although the CPF operates within a liberal democratic tradition and attempts to be inclusive, in practice it became operationalised according to exclusive categorisations and generalised profiles of representative groups or populations. In this case, the groups are based on formal political organisations, to which democratic rights are allocated.
Unknown forces among Us
The CPF obsession with the screening of possible members operating outside the party-political domain dominated by the ANC is fuelled by the recollection of ‘old struggle/friend and enemy’ schemes. In Port Elizabeth, such memories circulated around the ‘conservative’ group AmaAfrica.8 That this was more than fifteen years after the last clashes between UDF and AZAPO supporters that tore Port Elizabeth’s townships apart in the 1980s, somehow did not diminish the attraction of the past as an explanation for present signs of dissidence. When the vigilante group Amadlozi emerged in 1999 in New Brighton, attracting a large following by 2001 (as I have described elsewhere, Buur, 2003; Jensen and Buur, 2004; Buur, 2005), it was interpreted through the lens of the past; this became abundantly clear the first time I interviewed the councillor from the ward where Amadlozi held its quasi-court sessions:
When we formed the UDF, we also got other organisations which were used by white people, you know. Organisations like AZAPO, they were fighting against the UDF […] People were killed like flies at that time. If you check [the historical material] you will find that everybody was dying and they were using other people against other people by telling their minds to change [make activists into Askaris through torture], so they could use AmaAfrica. We still have those people between us.
If you look how high the crime rate is in our country, you will find there is a ‘third force’ around. There are people who are used by some of the old regime to do crime, because if a criminal is caught by the community and is taken to the police, within two days you will find out that they got out of the cells. They did have guns, where did they get guns? So they are used by some of the people (interview with local Councillor, 2001).
One should not overlook the fact that references to the ‘use of people by evil forces and to AmaAfrika as elements fighting the UDF’, have a different twist today. It is no longer possible to point out with the same certainty the exact identity of the evil or hidden forces. As democracy becomes more consolidated, the answer to the question ‘who exactly should be blamed for violence and crime in townships?’ has become homeless. The recycling of the ‘third force’ narrative in the context of present-day crime and police responses to it plays partly on popular perceptions and readily available images of inadequate police transformation. More specifically, it plays on the perception that the police opposed the transformation of the new South Africa and were actively trying to destabilise it through the use of certain (black) elements (in this case township criminals who rob, kill and rape). To draw on the image of secret apartheid agencies or ‘networks of the past’ as the ANC often do when no other explanations can be used (see for example ANC 1996) is easy because the negotiated political settlement ensured the jobs of many former apartheid officials in the new state apparatus. Although fear of the Amadlozi was not only related to ‘third force’, the indication is important because of the semantic universe it draws on that, seen from the viewpoint of the dominant party, is more or less the same as being anti-state or anti-ANC. In other words, what the revocation of the ‘third force’ narrative does whenever it is used is to delegitimise, a priori, any claims that communities or opposing organisations may have.
From adversary to enemy of the state & party
The abstract but still fairly concrete interpretive lens of ‘evil forces of the past’ and ‘used’ vigilantes is powerful. I will suggest that it moves activities by competing forms of justice enforcement and individuals challenging the CPF into the domain of the untenable. From being merely ‘unaccountable’ and therefore in need of order and democratic socialisation achievable by capturing and containing township residents in participatory forums to coerce and compel them to act according to standards of democratic behaviour, these groups and organisations are moved into the category of ‘combatants’ because they create dissidence. If indeed the central category of democratic engagement is the adversary, as Mouffe (2002:9) suggests – the ‘opponent with whom we share a common allegiance to the democratic principle of ‘liberty and equality for all’ while disagreeing about its interpretation [but without questioning] opponents’ right to fight for the victory of their position’ – then the account of the CPF in New Brighton reveals some serious flaws in the particular manner in which the liberal model is appropriated. Even though the interpretive lens is shaped by the past, it is equally about the present and the fear of the emergence of political opposition to the ANC.
As the vice chairperson phrased it,
[when] vigilantism [comes] into the community, it will explore weaknesses that are there within the community and capitalise on those weaknesses, trying to embrace and associate itself with the community and thereafter reflect its true colours (vice chairperson of CPF 2001).
Because of Amadlozi’s popularity and extensive following (see Buur, 2003; 2005), even with the disapproval of the established structures and ANC leaders in New Brighton, hundreds of people continued to come to their meetings. Local officials and state functionaries feared that a viable political opponent would emerge challenging the ANC’s control. What the councillor and the vice chairperson feared, I will suggest, was that the sovereign will of the people represented by the ANC would be challenged by a group or formation over which it apparently had no control. This, of course, says a lot about how local ANC cadres perceive politics and democratic contestation. More importantly, however, it points to the deeply political nature of issues related to crime and apparently ‘neutral’ forms of governance in South Africa, constituting arenas for the playing out of a range of struggles not obviously related to specific justice enforcement. Here, the classification of crime prevention and community participation makes a difference; any hint of ‘third force’ activities and ‘vigilantism’ and the wider domain of associated violence and past political struggles associated with such concepts a priori undermines any claims to legitimacy – placing potential adversaries in the enemy camp.
Conclusion
This essay outlines the reordering of the relationship between the state and civil society in the justice field which the new government of the ANC began after 1994 through the creation of Community Policing Forums. Drawing on fieldwork from Port Elizabeth’s townships, I have suggested that the constitutive fracture in the concept of ‘the people’ can be a useful way of approaching the reordering process. This is the case not only because the struggle against apartheid was fought in the name of ‘the people’ but also because acting in the name of, and for ‘the people’, points both at the source of identity and at what has not yet been achieved. The implication is that the CPF can be approached from the perspective of governmental sovereignty where ‘the people’ can be defined as the constitutive category of the sovereign political structure. I pointed out that, in the 1990s, apartheid-era fears of a ‘third force’ converged with contemporary fears of vigilantism, threatening the already uneasy transformation towards democracy. Like social movements, autonomous non-state justice enforcement in present-day South Africa draws to a large extent – and often in unwitting and contradictory fashion – upon an array of past symbols and concrete activities of ‘people’s power’. In invoking these associations, members of non-state formations – such as concerned residents’ groups, all modelled on past forms of sovereign organisation – exercise their partisanship of the new nation-state in a way that is at odds with or defies correct organisational practice and behaviour according to the new legal-political project. These formations become an embarrassing presence that must be abolished, but that also legitimise the plethora of legislation, the foundational values of human rights and the attempts to organise civil society.
While some sections of the struggle constituency hoped that the democratic form of ‘people’s power’ from the 1980s would become the basis for democracy in the new South Africa, I have suggested that, because of the excesses of ‘the people’s’ actions during the 1980s, this was not to be. Instead, the CPF represents a positive and productive attempt to mobilise, enrol and harness active participation and self-management in justice enforcement in a structured and coordinated fashion. The party and state intended to achieve democratic socialisation through the capture of residents in participatory forums that would compel them to act according to basic standards of democratic behaviour such as accountability, equality and respect. I suggested that the formal or ideal model of the CPF did not require any particular entrance fee. All that counted was that residents behaved according to the standards of ethical behaviour in the public domain which, at least in principle, is open to all, as individuals or groups. In other words, the institution of the CPF was, in concept, indifferent to political or other forms of persuasion. As my analysis unfolded, however, it became clear that this ideally apoliticised model for participation was far from indifferent to residents’ socio-political world or to the salient properties of the past re-emerging in different shapes as fears of ‘hidden forces’ and as practices modelled on past modes of democratic participation. Exploring the internal frontier for participation in local justice enforcement, I suggested that this was marked by the exclusion of those residents who did not belong to the political party; more specifically, of those who were not affiliated to organised formations belonging to the tri-party alliance of the ANC. The nexus on which the legitimacy of the CPF rests can thus be said to be less direct or popular participation by the general population and more adherence to a particular kind of proceduralism founded on representative constitutional democratic behaviour, along with threats posed by dissidents. Formations that do not conform to the particular model with which the CPF works become illegitimate.
Exploring further the fears feeding this appropriation of the ideally neutral form of ethical participation and political subjectivity, it became clear that it was not only informed by fear of the ‘unruliness of mob justice’ of the 1980s, but also by the wider semantic universe of ‘third forces’, ‘concerned residents’ or merely opposition to the ANC. The decoding of apparently innocent signs as opposition to the CPF, such as the release of captured criminals by the police or criminals, made all opposition illegitimate. I suggest that for local CPF and ANC leaders the double-sided danger that vigilantism represents both historically and currently – ‘counter-revolutionary’ reactionary forces and uncontrollable youth – has to a large extent structured the attitude of local state representatives to local justice enforcement. It is therefore worth exploring further how this vernacular semantic universe contributes to the radicalisation of opposition, which allows and justifies the state in employing far more drastic measures against its opponents.