Suren Pillay |
With
their pangas and
machetes mixed with ethnic regalia, the striking mine workers at
Marikana have become spectacularised. It is a stark reminder that the
mine worker, a modern subject of capitalism, in these parts of the
world is also the product of a colonial encounter.
Many of us
are trying to make sense of the massacre at Marikana through the
obvious dire economic conditions, wage rates and inequality that
these workers face. We must however also try to make sense of it
through the lineages of law, order and the new configurations of
politics emerging in post-apartheid South Africa.
The violence of modern South Africa, whether in its political or criminal forms and the way it is being responded to, reveals the effects of a post-apartheid state increasingly relying on law, order and administration, and less on the guiding anti-colonial and democratic idealism of its founding political and moral vision.
A few years
ago, when I was doing research on criminal violence at the Human
Sciences Research Council of South Africa, we decided to visit Bogota
in Colombia to learn more about the innovative policies that two
successive mayors introduced there, which seemed to have effective
and dramatic results in lowering crime rates.
During the
trip, we also visited Sao Paolo and Rio in Brazil. In Bogota, we met
the former mayor, Antanas Mockus, and learnt about an approach which
emphasised less force and punishment.
In the
Brazilian favelas, we witnessed the opposite - the militarisation of
war on gangs which themselves act like military organisations.
What we heard
and saw in Bogota encouraged us to think differently about
criminality and violence. Mayor Mockus, a former university president
and philosophy professor, had argued that in countries of the South,
like Colombia, the most effective and sustainable transformation
required to reduce violence, would be to produce a self-regulating
citizen who chose to act in a particular way not out of fear, but out
of shame, or more precisely, social shaming.
Where
Rio was relying on militarised policing, Bogota was hiring creative
artists and drama students from local universities as key members of
its crime fighting operations. What seemed like slightly eccentric
and unrealistic ideas, turned out to be just the opposite, as
reflected in declining levels of aggression and homicide during the
periods in which these policies were allowed to come to maturity.
Zero
tolerance policing
We decided to
invite the former mayor of Bogota, Antanas Mockus, to visit South
Africa and facilitated meetings between him and policymakers working
on crime. In meetings in Cape Town and Johannesburg, his ideas were
met with much enthusiasm and interest. But habits are difficult to
change.
It is
therefore with alarm that one can track an increasing reliance on the
punitive aspects of the law in order to alter practices deemed
inappropriate to civic and communal life in post-apartheid South
Africa.
In the city
of Cape Town where I live, where the Democratic Alliance is in power,
the administration is drawing more and more on the discredited policy
of zero tolerance policing which emerges from the United States. It
is an approach widely associated with the criminalisation of racial
minorities like African-Americans and Latinos, who make up the bulk
of the offenders in US jails.
Rather than
criminalise a minority, when that kind of thinking is transferred to
South Africa, we end up criminalising the majority. Mostly
alarmingly, the Premier of the Western Cape renewed a call last
heeded under the State of Emergency of the 1980s, for military troops
to be sent into townships, this time to deal with gangsterism.
We have to be
concerned with the proliferation of punitive actions to transform
social behaviour. Should these be the guiding ethos of a new form of
citizenship we want to cultivate? Up to now, there has been great
cynicism about the lack of capacity to implement the growing plethora
of regulatory laws and administer them efficiently, which tended to
ensure that their bark could never really become their bite, beyond
certain geographical spaces in the city. Then came Marikana.
Whilst law is
celebrated as the highest form of civilisation in some circles, we
should also recall that the history of law is entwined with colonial
conquest and rule, and complicates the legitimacy of certain legal
traditions in most of the formerly colonised world.
Law was not
only an expression of the codification of order, but also the
expression of the imposition of liberal conduct and of liberal
paternalism. The rule of law and constitutionalism, scholar James
Tully tell us, drawing on the Australian experience, is not a
culturally neutral set of ideas, but is rather the hegemonic
imposition of a set of norms which originate in colonial conquest and
are imposed on subject populations in order to transform their
behaviour to produce what we might call good modern subjects.
We should
recall that the early justifications of colonial rule were based on
doing good for the native by, for example outlawing "barbaric
practices" in India and Africa in order to civilise them.
My point is
not to celebrate these outlawed practices, but to point out that
liberalism has historically relied on law to enact its paternalism on
populations in order to transform their conduct into what is seen as
the good subject and good citizen, who acts and thinks in a
particular way. From the liberal vantage point, this is celebrated.
In our
present context, this liberal paternalism now seems to be running
rampant as the only way in which political authority can transform
our conduct. This leads to the proliferation of rules, not the
proliferation of debate and dialogue or of engagements designed to
transform through alternative modes of self-regulation.
Post-apartheid
state
If political
authority only relies on the wagging finger, it quickly comes to rely
too much on the wagging stick. When those populations upon whom rules
are imposed start to find its paternalism offensive, authority slides
into authoritarianism. Liberal
colonial occupation and the massacre have never been far apart in
history. When subject populations resist the liberal gift they are
supposed to express gratitude for, the response has been to reveal
the ultimate authority that gives law its power: violence.
In the
constitutional order of post-apartheid South Africa, the grassroots
mass has been transformed from being seen as a source of activism to
being seen as a population to be transformed, as a target. The
developmental state views the population through the lens of
administration. It brings to bear experts who devise techniques and
technical solutions.
The
post-apartheid state is producing the largest archive of policy
documents drawn up by local and foreign consultants. We are in a
cycle of plans and new plans. But as many will admit in the state,
implementation of these plans is another story.
Majoritarian
rule has been interpreted by the state to mean rule on
behalf of the
majority not rule of the majority. Given the legacy of apartheid,
most black South Africans - the majority which votes - are the same
majority living in poverty and the target population of developmental
upliftment.
In other
words, they are "the problem" to be solved, not the
majority to be represented. What we are witnessing is a growing
divide between majoritarianism and the popular. Understanding the
majority as "the problem" has brought out the liberal
paternalism of the state and the wagging finger. It is therefore
losing control over the popular.
The battle
over the popular is now an open site of contention, where rival
unions, expelled youth league leaders and new political leaders on
the ground battle for hegemony with the traditional ruling party
figures of the tripartite alliance - the African National Congress,
the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African
Trade Unions.
When these
populations start asserting themselves as they are doing now, they
quickly shift from being considered targets of development to targets
of repression. They are easily labelled and named: as impatient and
ungrateful, automatons of external interference, "third forces",
counter-revolutionaries or political opportunists.
Everything
but citizens asserting legitimate political expression, simply
because these are expressed in increasingly illiberal forms and
repressed more often now with illiberal methods. Marikana is its most
acute expression, and will henceforth be the symbolic name we give to
event which revealed the disjuncture between law, politics and people
in post-apartheid South Africa.
The German
political theorist, Hannah Arendt, was of the view that a turn to
violence signalled the end of politics. For Arendt, politics is a
process of agonistic engagement with contending ideas, and the moment
one resorted to violence to do the work of politics, politics has
vacated the building.
A reliance on
violence and the punitive aspects of law, as the only way in which we
transform social conduct, signals a failure of the imagination and of
political thinking.
Are our
political leaders, who can rightly claim to be the proud inheritors a
radical tradition and of a liberal tradition, really be so bereft of
their sensibilities to govern that they are resorting to violence to
do the work of politics?