South Africa has undergone enormous changes since the democratic transition from apartheid in 1994. The political transition has been perceived as a political ‘miracle’, generating a non-racial dispensation in which the humanity and dignity of all South Africans is protected – at least formally – through a constitutional form of democracy based on the values of human rights. Everyone is now subject to the same sovereign rule of law – ‘One law for One nation’ as the first page of the 1996 Constitution puts it. Since 1994, Parliament has passed more than 789 new pieces of legislation ‘aimed at reconfiguring South African society’ (former Speaker of Parliament, Frene Ginwala, quoted in Madlala, 2004). With its emphasis on ‘One law’, the South African Constitution can be seen as an attempt to codify, fix and attain closure with regard to the multiple, overlapping domains of law and moral systems that had evolved, both as part of and in resistance to the colonial and apartheid eras. The new South African Constitution is built on human rights as the ‘cornerstone of democracy’ (Constitution Chapter 2, 7, 1). As well as mediating and regulating the vertical relationship between state and society – the usual position of rights – human rights must also be applied horizontally between citizens. This dominance in the new dispensation means that human rights are not only the foundation of the legal and political order, but also – in theory at least – the core value regulating social relationships.
The attempt to establish a new social foundation by and through human rights can be analysed as an attempt to propagate a new social imaginary, one that appears in official and popular discourses, public spectacles and ritualised events such as the Constitutional Assembly and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (see Buur, 2001). Perceived in this way, human rights go well beyond their legal and institutional intent: as a social imaginary, they function to reconcile the slippage between demands for formal representation, equity and accountability on the one hand, and the constant, often unfulfilled, undoing of the apartheid legacy on the other. In the underdetermined sense used here, human rights is enacted in the social and political spheres, but is never lastingly or abidingly instantiated. As a powerful imaginary, human rights allow for the positive and negative normative and moral evaluation of laws, public discourses and practices. The influence of human rights is, as Harris (1996:5) has pointed out,
the idea of Human Rights has a universal remit and transcendent value which makes it a viable basis for political claims, and for criticising particular states.
I agree, but I will suggest that we need to take this further and explore how adherence to human rights as the society's new founding value and rights interpolation as a social imaginary can trigger strong and surprising responses. Since 1994, ‘crime’ has become the single most important preoccupation of South Africans of all race and class groups. Crime became a catchword used to explain everything that has gone wrong with the country since 1994. In the confusing and highly ambivalent post-apartheid landscape, the ANC inherited, as Terreblanche (2003) has convincingly illustrated, a contradictory legacy that included both the most developed economy in Africa and major socio-economic problems. The hope of ‘a better life’ that the ANC had promised as part of the political transition has become impossible to reach for very large groups of the new polity, as the socio-economic transformation that democratisation implied became a jobless growth economy with large enclaves surviving on a burgeoning informal economy (Bourgouin, 2007).
The ANC government has built more than a million township households, provided water for well over nine million people and given access to electricity for millions of households by redirecting social spending previously allocated to ‘whites’ and ‘poor coloureds’. The flip-side of these achievements is the fact that the black underclass or ‘lumpenproletariat’ (Terreblanche, 2003) is still confined to the townships or the former homelands on the fringes of the booming cities of opportunities. Here the socio-economic conditions have deteriorated so that the population simply cannot pay for the new services. As a former Azapo struggle organiser formulated it:
I have generated a R6,000 bill for water and garbage and I cannot pay. First they [the municipality] cut electricity, then the telephone and now they have notified me that they will take my house from me … sell it. Where do they expect me and my family to live? Is this what we fought for? If they could just give us jobs so we could live a decent life, not just sitting here and waiting for something to happen, doing nothing, just waiting (Interview, New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 2001).
As is often the case when it is politically difficult to do something about global forces, a common enemy, easily recognisable and readily available becomes the scapegoat. In many and sometimes surprising ways, crime and/or the criminal has come to stand in not only for increases in violent deaths, rapes and robberies, but also for teenage pregnancies, unemployment, the breakdown of social cohesion resulting from the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the lack of development funds and investments, and so forth. The concept is therefore profoundly polyvalent – able to give a name to local grievances and problems of order and disorder, and to link them with broader issues. Paradoxically, however, the concept of human rights has become attached to crime, not as a safeguard for victims, with the state as the guarantor of security, but rather as fuel for criminal behaviour.
Recent studies of vigilantism in South Africa have suggested that it has emerged as a result of soaring crime rates and the state's failure to enforce its own laws (Schärf & Nina, 2001; Tshehla, 2005). Many analysts of non-state forms of ordering argue that, in its benevolent form, vigilantism is stimulated by the state's incapacity to police and secure citizens’ rights for them (Dixon & Johns, 2001). Underpinning this is the view that the ‘new social contract’, according to which township residents relinquish their monopoly on violence in exchange for state protection, has not been honoured by the state. If only the state would get it right, there would be no problem. The problem seen from mainstream perspectives on vigilantism is that the law has not been applied either consistently or coherently.
The argument I pursue here, conversely, is that vigilantism is not an implicit critique of the application of the law, but of the moral and ethical foundations of the law itself. Vigilantism seeks to provide an alternative moral and ethical framework around crime and particularly, as emphasised in this article, around the control of women and youth, thus challenging the foundation of human rights and the state's monopoly on violence by inflicting corporal punishment. In South Africa vigilantism can be seen as a response to – and thus a site of struggle and negotiation over – the attempt to enshrine human rights as an all-encompassing foundational value, where many township dwellers see vigilantes as their protection against crime. My argument is that rights as the constitutive idea of the rule over territory and people, actuated through a formal language of law as the dominant horizon for political authority and imagination, run counter to de facto configurations of sovereignty both within and beyond the state. The re-emergence of vigilantism is therefore a criticism of and a comment on human rights as much as it is an expression of the country's people and a measure of its values. If this is the case, then we need to qualify Abrahams’ (1998) powerful suggestion that vigilantism is both implicitly and explicitly a particular form of criticism of state failure.
For the residents of Kwazakele township on the outskirts of the industrial town of Port Elizabeth, the institutionalisation of human rights is at the heart of the erosion of social cohesion and its associated rises in crime levels. Human rights are spoken about in Kwazakele as something new, strange and alien, an interruption whose introduction is closely associated with the dawn of democracy and its failure to deliver on its promises. The government's concern for equity and the post-apartheid establishment of a rights-based rule of law, with rights for children, youth and women, is seen as the root cause of an apparent erosion of the socio-cultural order and mechanisms of control. Pushing this contention further, I will argue that the very legitimacy of vigilante formations within the township is based on the fact that they are dealing with the issues that the state is felt to be undermining.
I begin by introducing an ethnographic case study of a vigilante group from a section of Kwazakele township known as D-Man, which has become incorporated as an official Safety and Security (S&S) structure under the Community Policing Forum (CPF).1 The case provides an opportunity to analyse the category of crime in an era in which human rights constitute the new democracy's founding values. I suggest that fighting crime relates to wider questions of the perceived need for discipline and corporal punishment in response to the erosion of social authority. This is followed by a presentation of the emergence of the vigilante group and its subsequent incorporation into the local CPF, with the aim of illustrating various styles of vigilantism in South Africa and the history on which they draw. Finally, I analyse the legacy of vigilantism in South African townships.
Crime, Discipline & the Erosion of Authority
The dissemination of information about human rights, which was important for the promotion, circulation and institutionalisation of equality and the establishment of a rights-based rule of law after apartheid, has led township residents to believe that crime has one common source. It is believed that the granting of legal entitlements to women, children and young people has sweepingly condoned misbehaviour, so that the police and the courts now protect rather than punish people who flaunt social norms and established hierarchies as they please. Misbehaviour can be boiled down to a view that ‘these rights have gone too far’, where young people as a broad category are believed to have the constitutionally sanctioned right to behave as they please: human rights have become ‘my right to do as I please’.
In practice, for township dwellers in Kwazakele there is no clear distinction between criminal and civil law-breaking: civil law-breaking is itself considered a symptom of crime or social disorder. At the core of most crime is the need to reassert or reorder ‘social relations expressed in practices of identification’ (van Beek, 2001:527). By this I mean relationally constituted forms of identification such as gender and generational hierarchies, which are construed differently according to the law of the township than in the ideology of individual rights which assumes that, in a hierarchy of legal forms, individual rights overrule other forms of law. One of the profound problems is that many of these ‘fluctuating forms’ of identity identification (Buur, 2007) have come under considerable pressure in the new South Africa, which makes it difficult not only for ‘uncles’ or ‘brothers’ but also for ‘fathers’ to play a meaningful role in many households as the social regulatory authority – a role they have been used to playing and are, by and large, expected to continue to perform. As a means of regaining their position of authority, specifically parental authority in the case discussed below, corporal punishment is seen as not just important, but, I suggest, indispensable. In the following, I consider a case from a S&S structure in Kwazakele that highlights the problems that human rights are perceived to cause, intertwined with the struggle of fathers to fill the role they are expected to perform within the household.
Case Study: Working around Rights
The case had been brought to the attention of the S&S structure by the mother of a young girl at the age of 16; it implicates the daughter's father and her young boyfriend. All of them have been subpoenaed to appear at the office.
There is a knock on the S&S office door, and a well-dressed young man in his early twenties enters with a teenage girl. A man of around sixty is told to wait outside the door. He looks angry and carries a wooden walking-stick with a spherical head (a knopkierie). The two members of the S&S have already explained to me that this case is related to family matters and therefore they should not be dealing with it according to the constitution of the S&S structure. The young girl has been sleeping over at the young man's house and her father, the man told to wait outside the door, has found out and is now angry and wants to punish her. The girl's mother has brought the case to the S&S behind the father's back, because she fears what the father might do; his bad temper is well-known. The two S&S members begin by chatting with the young man and having a good laugh because, they explain to me, the young girl has not kept her misbehaviour hidden from her father. Hence, she has offended the honour of her family.
They then call the father in, respectfully: ‘Baba, please come in’. The father enters the office, leaving the mother, who has now arrived, outside the door. The father is very angry. He explains in a low but forceful voice that the daughter jumps out of the window at night and sleeps at her boyfriend's place. Furthermore, she is not attending school regularly. The father is worried about her education and about her getting pregnant. The young girl is asked to explain. She is visibly nervous, rubbing her hands together, but after a short while she says that she has the right to do as she wants, and that her father has no right to beat her – the law says so. She insists that she is old enough to decide for herself. Daughter and father then enter into a lengthy and heated discussion. On top of the father's anger towards the daughter, he is also angry with his wife because he has to sit here and explain these family matters to the two young men.
The case then takes a dramatic turn. The father suddenly holds the walking-stick upside down so that the wooden ball is pointing downwards. Abruptly, he gets to his feet, swings the walking-stick against his daughter with his right hand and, in the same movement, pulls out a flick-knife from the back of his trousers with his left hand. But the two S&S members must have sensed what might happen, because they place themselves strategically on either side of the father and manage to prevent him from hitting his daughter with the stick or from using the flick-knife by grabbing both of his arms. They disarm him and tell him to sit down and be calm. They shake their heads in disbelief and smile at me as if to say, ‘We are in control’.
The S&S members tell the father that they understand his need to discipline his family, but he must use other means than the stick and the knife. They make it clear to him that they will have to call the police if he uses the stick or the knife, and that would mean yet another family in the township without a man in the house. They explain that he can use a sjambok (originally a herding whip of dried animal hide, but nowadays made of plastic and used primarily for purposes such as the young men suggest) to discipline his daughter or alternatively can give her duties to perform in the house as a form of punishment and discipline, but that it is not a solution to kick her out of the house (next to death, this is considered the worst possible punishment), as she would end up on the streets as a prostitute. After a while, the father promises not to hurt his family and he leaves the office with his daughter. The mother enters the office and tells the two members of the S&S that she is worried because she is sure he will punish them when they get home. The S&S members tell her to come back immediately if further problems arise. Then the young man is told to be more careful in the future. But he insists that he has done nothing wrong; it was the young girl who wanted to stay over in his shack, not he who persuaded her to do so. They all laugh and he leaves.
Not ten minutes pass before the mother is back at the office, completely distraught and shouting: ‘He is going to kill us all!’ The S&S members race out of the office and jump into my car. We drive to the family's house, roughly one kilometre away. Outside the house, a crowd has gathered. In the front yard, suitcases, blankets and clothes are lying everywhere. The young woman stands in the nearby field with others who turn out to be her sisters and their small children. The father stands in the front yard, holding the stick in front of him. He looks as if what happens around him does not matter. When we arrive, he starts crying. He gives the mother a harsh look, shaking his head and saying: ‘Once again, you interfere’. He continues crying and asks, ‘What can I do?’ and ‘What kind of family is this?’
The two S&S members suggest that they go into the house. The father does not want to enter with the other members of the family, but after a while he agrees and we enter the house, followed by the mother and the daughters with their crying children. Inside, the S&S members start talking to the father in deep Xhosa (rural Xhosa, mainly spoken by elders), and calling him by his clan name. They explain later that by doing so, they are showing him respect. In the following half an hour, they explain that he has done ‘the right thing’ by punishing and disciplining his daughters, but that the means he used were not right, because he could end up in jail if he is not careful. During this exchange, the father says that his other daughters got pregnant and then didn't get an education. He hoped things would be different with the youngest daughter. He keeps saying, ‘What kind of family is this?’ The S&S members explain again and again that he can use a sjambok or order his daughter and wife to wash the whole house to discipline them, but he cannot use his knife and stick because that could kill them. As we leave, the S&S members give some harsh words to the daughter for not respecting her father.
Fear of the Law & the Need for Discipline
This case offers numerous themes for discussion. Here, I restrict myself to briefly considering a few aspects related to the above discussion of human rights and the polyvalent understanding of crime. The father's main concerns are respect for his family from the wider community and respect for his position as the male patriarch from within the family. The way this is dealt with is less to question whether the daughter should be disciplined at all, but rather to consider how. In doing so, the young men from the S&S and the father are promoting a moral code around the control of women that in theory is shared by all the men. Yet, the young members of the S&S and the boyfriend joke about the sexual relationship. For the young men, the issue is not whether the young woman has been sleeping with the man, but the fact that she has been stupid enough not to keep it hidden. This could point to the negotiation of generational conflicts and an attitude towards crime. Let us deal with these issues one by one.
For the father, his position as the male patriarch of the family is intimately linked to the fear of his daughter dishonouring the family, becoming pregnant, not receiving an education, and consequently being one more burden for a family with too many young women with children already. In a situation where few men can take their place at the table as the ‘breadwinner’, the usual position of authority, the father's legitimacy has been eroded. While the oldest male in a household is still expected to take this position at the table, its sources of legitimacy (employment, marriage, unchallenged respect and a public face of control) can no longer be sustained. The residual anchor of this position of authority has been lost. The men in the S&S structure understood this well. Except for one out of the eight making up the core group, they all lived with their mothers and took the position of absent fathers. They were all unemployed except one, living off their mothers’ small salaries (mainly from domestic work) or pensions, small amounts that fed their sisters, themselves and their children. Without jobs, they were not able to build their own homes and lived instead in backyard shacks. Nor were they able to pay a lobola (bride price) for the women they have ‘broken the breast’ of (the local term for impregnating a young woman). The S&S members renamed the position at the end of the table ‘the place of the woman’, which they had to assume as the recipients of food, with nothing to show after another day of waiting for a job to come their way. One important reason for acting as crime-fighters was that at least they earned a little money, receiving a few rands for opening a case and earning 20 per cent of money-lending cases, and they could also, with some dignity and legitimacy, assert themselves as males disciplining the youngsters.
They therefore understood the situation of the man in the household, struggling to assert himself, but the situation they shared as men had clear generational differences. While their interaction with the older man was disempowering for him, it enabled the young men of the S&S to carve out a space where they could perform male roles, acquire status and respect from the community and assert generational hierarchies vis-à-vis its younger members, while also readjusting their relationship to older men. The S&S members constantly contradicted the language of the state that invoked rights in order to prohibit corporal punishment, but at the same time they accepted it. As they explained, when you are in a situation such as the old man faces,
you easily lose control and become too harsh. That's why we tried to calm him down; if we had not done that he would have killed the girl. There is nothing you can do; children can run to the police nowadays. In the old days, we feared them (both the fathers and the police). You have to discipline in the right way. If you don't do that, there will be just one more family without a man to bring bread to the house.
Although in an awkward manner, they have seized the new language of rights to claim status and authority, in doing so playing with and perhaps even undermining the power and status ascribed to the older, respected generation. This interpretation is supported by the fact that, contrary to what one might expect given the male bias in the S&S, many of the cases brought to its attention came from old and middle-aged women, and ranged from money-lending disputes and problems with discipline in the household to theft and domestic violence. Men called on the S&S only when the issue at stake was theft, which they could not deal with themselves.
Despite these differences, however, they all agreed on the need for discipline. Their question was, rather, how, with rights as the founding values, could they do what was needed and expected? I suggest that at the core of this view is the legal and discursive intolerance of corporal punishment, locally referred to as patha-patha, which literally means slapping or cuffing. Given the concern for rights, primary authority figures – parents, teachers, males and the police – are believed to have lost the main means of instilling discipline and punishment. The excessive use of force and physical discipline associated with vigilantism cannot therefore be attributed only to the exceptionally high levels of crime and the state's failure to deal with it. Rather, the prevalence of corporal punishment resonates and merges with everyday practices and with strongly held ideas concerning the evolution of human beings, that is, beings who can distinguish between ‘right and wrong’ and for whom, in turn, the production of authority has an increasing importance. The great irony here is that the new laws prohibiting the use of corporal punishment are seen as one of the causes of the breakdown of the social fabric.
The wider socio-cultural universe, in giving legitimacy to the use of corporal punishment, is intimately related to the perception of socialisation, the essence of which is: ‘How can you know what is right or wrong, if you have not been beaten?’ There is a profound belief that ‘If you put the iron in the fire, the iron will be strong’, a reference to the physical body and the psyche. The need to feel pain is a recurring explanation whenever one asks parents about physical discipline and how to teach proper behaviour. Discipline is nearly always directed at the future in the form of ‘prevention’, ‘change of behaviour’ and ‘learning the right way’. In the past (except between the mid-1980s and early 1990s), when parents could not handle their children, they would go to the police, who, as a source of authority, would take care of discipline by using the sjambok, the main symbol of authority. A self-respecting household would have a sjambok behind the door, and men would walk the streets publicly displaying that symbol of authority, just as, to the pride of their parents, children would play with smaller sjamboks in the street, acting out roles they knew well.
Today, many of these disciplinary measures are curtailed by the prevailing rights discourse. In the context of this contradiction between the wider socio-economic transformation and more traditional methods of socialisation and asserting authority, parents who can no longer physically discipline youngsters turn to structures such as the S&S and to vigilante formations more generally, just as for decades they used to turn to the police in the townships. This was particularly the case with grandparents who were no longer able to exercise disciplinary power over the grandchildren for whom they were responsible. The enforcement of tradition by both the old man with the stick with regard to his relationship with his family and the members of the S&S with reference to the use of ‘deep Xhosa’ to bolster his self-esteem should not be understood solely as a return to conservative or traditional ways of being. Rather, what is at stake are current modes of coping with uncertainties.
Legal restrictions on corporal punishment and the fear of accusations of domestic violence have driven parents and caretakers to invoke local law enforcers who know how to discipline in a manner that does not make the punishment visible (see Buur, 2005). My argument is that there are practical reasons structuring the formation of individuals and collective identities, where modern and traditional components may overlap and imitate one another, or differentiate themselves, or support and at times converge, according to their articulation. The result is the production of local ways of being-a-person, of articulating a moral community that cannot be captured by the sources and means available to the formal authorities.
This, of course, resonates with the fact that universal norms, rights and ‘rights talk’ are not blindly adopted but, as Wilson (1997) has suggested, must be recognised as a site of struggle and contest, where powerful configurations of socio-cultural hierarchies are constantly being challenged and locally reworked. This is particularly the case when universal and detached norms begin to materialise and extend their reach and promises into everyday life. While the young men generally saw the principles of human rights in the Constitution as well-intended, not least in light of the experience of the 1980s, they were nonetheless adamant that rights created more problems than they solved and that the Constitution should be changed. They argued that children, youngsters and women ‘used rights’ to legitimise behaviour that, in the township, was considered socially reprehensible and unlawful, such as disrespect for the authorities, drinking, engaging in sex and drugs, the disrespectful display of sexual bodies and disregard for social obligations. When such behaviour could no longer be punished physically, it was felt, it would spin out of control. In this view, rights had simply become the concrete embodiment of everything that had gone wrong.
The case presented above illustrates how the everyday work of vigilante formations can be concerned with reordering relationally construed forms of identification. They therefore compete with the state for formal control over criminal cases to only a limited extent. As the above case highlights, what they do falls somewhere between criminal and civil codes of law. It is only by going beyond the spectacular emphasis on solving criminal cases – an angle often sustained by the vigilante formation's founding myths concerning murder, theft and rape – that the moral and ethical domain, so intimately related to the imposition of rights in South Africa, is revealed. While the D-Man S&S structure has certainly dealt with crimes that the police should have taken care of, they are not the only types of crime it has undertaken to deal with. But, as the case also illustrates, the reordering of relationally construed forms of identification has brought the S&S structure into conflict with rights as the new foundational values. Here, the S&S structure carved out a space where de facto sovereignty – such as the right to protect or to kill – was performed in the name of protecting the community against crime. Next I will discuss how this space was enabled in the first instance.
The Founding Myth: From Disorder to Order
The founding myth surrounding the events that brought crime to a halt in Kwazakele township in 2000 is a tale about former Amabuthos – the Young Lions of the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front, warriors from 1980s township struggles – who awoke from their slumber to protect and save the community, yet again, fromdanger. The myth tells of excessively violent acts committed by a group of young, armed criminals, many of whom had served prison sentences and were part of the prison gangs known as the 26th, 27th and 28th that terrorised Kwazakele in 1999. One particular incident from that year is telling. A group of criminals broke into an elderly couple's house, stole everything – television and radio, cutlery, videos, clothes – and shot the old woman dead when she tried to prevent them from raping her daughter. In the community's eyes, the police were too busy chasing black thieves in Port Elizabeth's white suburbs to bother about an elderly black couple's belongings in the township. The ‘politicians are just doing Talk Shops, talking about rights, economy and crime here and there and what they wanted to do, everybody was just sitting and waiting’ as it was explained.
To confront the criminals, a group of old men called a group of trusted former Young Lions – most of them unemployed. They decided that ‘enough was enough when even their womenfolk were no longer safe’. If this could happen to their neighbours, it could also happen to their own families. They felt that they could not remain passive, waiting for the police to react. The Lions managed to track down one of the criminals, although he was armed. After forcing him to reveal the identity of his accomplices, they managed within a week to capture the whole group, except for the leader, whom they apprehended three months later. To the community's great dissatisfaction, the criminals were released from prison a week later and continued their activities. The police did not like the Lions’ methods and tried to arrest some of the members. A group of elders (all men), led by a prominent ANC member, a former Robben Island prison mate of Mandela himself, called a public meeting at the local primary school in order to prevent the arrest of the Lions, which threatened to rob the community of its protectors. At that meeting, twelve of the most trusted young men were elected as the community's Concerned Residents Against Crime.
The myth presents an instructive lesson of how a township – forgotten except at election times, as the Lions often pointed out, and existing in the shadow of the city of Port Elizabeth – becomes lawless and morally corrupt. While people in the city have a well-functioning police force to draw on, as I was told again and again, along with ambulances that arrive within minutes and private security paid to fend off crime, township residents can rely only on themselves. As in the 1980s, the Lions must sacrifice their own needs for the sake of a greater cause: from defending the community against apartheid and the township's internal political enemies to a defence against ‘the onslaught of crime’. This founding myth is not unrelated to the actual history of the crime fighters, nor does it differ significantly from the foundational myths of similar crime-fighting structures that emerged at around the same time in other parts of Kwazakele and adjacent townships such as New Brighton, or elsewhere in South Africa.
What the Lions did not mention in their tale, but was clearly remembered by the police and local ANC officials, was that the Lions of 1999 were extremely violent. Initial events in 1999 involved an ‘orgy of violence that had spun out of control’, according to the members’ own description. The first criminal they captured was tortured severely for five consecutive days in the most gruesome manner: ‘It was bad. I think in the end his mother could not recognise him if she had seen him. He was a gangster and really tough’ (Interview, 2001).
On the sixth morning, the police arrived in a Casspir (an armoured vehicle developed by the apartheid military). Somebody had reported what was going on, and the police freed the criminal. When they wanted to arrest some of the Lions for breaking the law and for public violence, a crowd of several hundred local people surrounded the police:
we became a mob; it was really wild. The police had to call for assistance, and a helicopter circled the area: it was like in the old days, with people singing and toyi-toying.2 When they tried to arrest some of us, the community liberated us and threw stones at them, and they retreated to the Casspir. People were really angry: Why do they come here? Why did they protect the criminals and not the community? It is us who are the victims, not the criminals.
After this incident the group continued, spurred on by community demands to find the remaining criminals, and by the sense of protection they gave the community. After a visit to the girlfriend of the man they had interrogated so brutally, they managed to get the names and addresses of the rest of his group. Large groups of young men and women had then shown up at their houses and hiding places to ‘apprehend them’. In some cases hundreds arrived at a house, and if the alleged criminals did not come out by themselves, the mob would break down the doors and ‘raid the house’. If their families intervened, they were told to leave or risk being stoned and petrol-bombed. When captured, the suspected criminals were severely beaten until they talked, providing enough information for the Lions to locate some of the stolen goods. But it did not stop there.
Over the following months, the Lions continued their ‘work'3 and left a trail of beaten-up young men and, in many cases, schoolgirls too. Mere suspicion was enough to unleash their wrath in excessive violence. A young man carrying a bag of goods might be a sign of criminal activity. The Lions would then try to find out if they could get a reward for handing back stolen goods and/or take the goods themselves as ‘a salary’ for good work. Because the young male criminals were considered ‘generic criminals’ (Buur, 2003:34), the indiscriminate use of violence was automatically justified. Parents and grandparents began to hand over their school-age sons and daughters for disciplining, usually by sjambok. The use of violence, however, eventually had costs for the community. Not only were many innocent young men beaten, but the Lions also began to get involved in disputes between neighbours, brawls between both married and unmarried couples and domestic quarrels, where no clear generic criminal or enemy was available to justify the use of violence. Once hailed as the saviours of the township for their vigorous action against crime and for revitalising the declining spirit of the township community, the Lions came to be seen as part of the problem, preying on the vulnerability of the community for whose good they claimed to be working.
Bringing Disorder under Control
In this context of predation and vulnerability, the former Robben Island prisoner intervened, giving shape to what had been a purely ad hoc and disorganised arrangement so far, which had become a threat to the community and to the ANC itself. For him, the issues of control and discipline were linked to a correct understanding of ‘direct democracy’ or ‘popular democracy’ inspired by the battles of township dwellers against the apartheid state during the 1980s. In contrast to visions of direct democracy that were vulnerable to manipulation by charismatic leaders and Amabuthos who in many instances took control due to their sheer numbers and persistence, proper community action involved the masses taking control of their own lives (see Seekings, 2001) by creating a parallel authority that ‘was seen as part of a process of organising the future society’ (Nina, 1995:7) – a process that linked them to the ANC. This implied a shift away from the people as sovereign (community residents, including the Young Lions as a loosely-organised multitude), to the ANC as sovereign, with the leaders of the ANC standing in for the general will.
As the case discussed previously shows, in the reformed ‘vigilante’ structure that then developed, the young men (s)elected to take care of crime in the community were all trusted, card-carrying members of the ANC and the ANC Youth League. Calling the community together was more in the nature of a symbolic gesture to confirm and approve the initiative and the leadership's handling of the issue. Selecting ANC members ensured a measure of accountability and control over the crime fighters, because if they should step out of line and become abusive to the community/ANC, the Lions would be accountable to the organisations that had (s)elected them. To fall out with the ANC in Kwazakele would have had dire consequences, because it was through the ANC councillor that scarce, low-income jobs were distributed, and through ANC party networks that one got on shortlists for formal jobs in local and provincial governments. As I was often reminded, ‘without the party you are nothing, you don't mess with the giants’.4
The rules laid down for their work in the community were simple: do not deal with complaints about well-established money-lenders because it is their business, i.e. of the money-lenders they all relied on! Do not deal with family affairs (between couples) except when it is younger members of the household who are terrorising their parents or grandparents. Also, be as harsh with the criminals as is necessary to make them speak, but do it discreetly so that you do not get into trouble with the police. The last rule contravenes the Constitution's insistence on respect for the right of all human beings to be free from all forms of violence (Paragraph 12(1c)). Where the Constitution protects all human beings, the law of the community obviously does not. Thus, the Constitution faced the young crime fighters with a moral dilemma: they are expected to act in ways that are forbidden, even criminalised, but which the community concerned sees as both acceptable and desirable within the moral code of the township. As such, the relationship between the formal law and the moral codes of the local township was ambiguous.
Conclusion
The establishment of S&S structures became the state's response from 2000 onward, when vigilantism emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the media and among law-enforcement agencies in the new South Africa. The official response centred on the challenge that vigilante organisations posed to the state and on the violence of their methods. Establishing S&S structures at ward level can therefore be seen as an attempt to enforce or establish the state's legitimacy, because vigilantism had exposed the limits of the new state's capacity to secure justice for all, as well as the limited reach of the new values of human rights. The response of state agencies was notoriously ambivalent, because vigilantism addresses issues that are pertinent to people living on the margins of the formal state apparatus, people who consistently have voted for the ANC government (see Cherry, 2000). Vigilantism was and is therefore often accepted at local levels of the state and in the communities where attempts were made to set up S&S structures. As E.P. Thompson (1971) has elegantly illustrated, the customs, rules and moral codes people use to legitimise and/or ground their actions are more often than not at odds with the rules and laws promulgated by their rulers. This was also true of human rights as one of the new founding values of the post-apartheid state. Even the statements of some national leaders regarding the primacy of the new values were fraught with bewilderment. As the late Minister of Safety and Security, Steve Tshwete, (in)famously suggested:
Criminals must know the South African state possesses the authority, moral and political, to ensure by all means, constitutional or unconstitutional, that the people of this country are not deprived of their human rights (Tshwete, [1999] 2000).
This, of course, illustrates the shallow depth of commitment to rights in many quarters of society, but the public statements of leaders did have consequences. The public discourse on crime in townships such as Kwazakele functioned as an official blueprint for action for many young as well as not so young men, who saw such statements as a carte blanche to take action against any elements they considered destructive of their way of life. Even after becoming an official state structure, the Lions continued to inflict physical punishment. The only difference was that they did it more discreetly in order not to attract the attention of the police. As a consequence, the violence that was unleashed became both more measured and more politically complex. If a vigilante formation turned official could provide stolen goods and confessions before information reached the police about possible abuses, then the violence was disregarded because it bolstered police statistics. Whether by oversight or strategic forgetting, we find state officials and their proxies transcending the simple dichotomy between state and society by engaging in sovereign practices in the grey zone between the laws and procedures that awkwardly maintain the formal sovereignty of the state, and that of alternative normative orders that protect or discipline with impunity.
A common thread in the analyses of vigilantism in South Africa is its apparent function as a privileged entry point for local understandings of political and social change more generally (Crais, 2002). The flip-side of the impressive growth experienced in South Africa after 1994 is the fact that the black underclass is still confined to the townships or the former homelands with little or no access to the opportunities offered by the new South Africa. Exacerbating the socio-economic decline is the fact that poor people are more exposed and vulnerable to crime. By far, fewer state resources are used in the poor areas than in the commercial centres and the gated middle- and upper-class residential areas on, for example, policing. It is partly within this wider framework of socio-economic deprivation that the reasons for the success of vigilantes can be found.
Vigilantism seems to gain prevalence and to emerge or radicalise in times of great social upheaval, when an anticipated future has been abruptly yanked away or is under threat. The ‘work’ of vigilante formations is a way of representing a social value by the sometimes dramatic and concrete representation of its opposite, be it images of moral decay, loss, chaos, disorder and insecurity.
This continual labour forms the basis for the production of localised forms of sovereignty and authority. This perspective on vigilantism implies that one must explore the relationship between the official forces of the law and the law of the moral community, where practices of everyday policing are constitutive of the production of moral order. Here, ambivalence arises because vigilantism addresses issues of security and the moral order that are pertinent to people living on the margins of the formal state apparatus and state law.
As shown here, local forms of sovereignty are nested within state forms of sovereignty, where they retain a domain with control over life and death. They occupy a strategic position between state institutions and local populations, a position that, seen in the longer history of colonial and post-colonial encounters, is not new and has emerged under many names – ‘indirect rule’ (Mamdani, 1996), ‘private indirect government’ (Mbembe, 2001), ‘twilight institutions’ (Lund, 2006) – and that may be less a sign of the actual weakness of the state than a particular way of incorporating segments of populations and territories, where the state never has been in total control or particularly effective. The biggest difference from earlier forms of governance, rule enforcement and institutional building is that, while different forms of sovereignty co-existed within colonial (including the apartheid regime) territories, there is little evidence to suggest an intention to govern these territories and their people as effectively and with the same commitment as the colonial homeland. From a global perspective, the language of rights seems, at least formally, to want to do things differently, perhaps because of its a priori normative starting point and its discrete move from groups and populations as the targets for registering and monitoring, to the individual self as the new sovereign subject.