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| Achille Mbembe |
The banalisation of cruelty and the repetition of often
brutal and traumatic events – the Marikana massacre, deaths at the hands of an
increasingly paramilitarised police force, the proliferation of
bureaucratically induced and popular forms of xenophobia, countless and
horrific incidents of rape, an expanding culture of venality, corruption and
theft, the rebalkanisation of society and the resurgence of racism, the
undisciplined and violent nature of citizens’ protests – have led many, here
and abroad, to wonder what kind of social order, or figure of freedom, or even
of the human, is being constituted in South Africa.
A few decades after the formal end of apartheid, are we
witnessing the emergence of something radically new and insidious, or simply a
return to the same shameful, hideous and brutal lie – this time with a black
skin and a black mask? Is it true that so many sacrifices, so much hope and so
much potential have, at the end, come to this?
Frantz Fanon – a key analyst of post-struggle syndromes –
believed that a result of the deep injuries inflicted on those who had been the
victims of white supremacy was their inability to project themselves forward in
time. Crushed by the misery of the past, their historical consciousness had
been severely crippled. They had developed a propensity for compulsive
repetition and a profound disbelief in their capacity to shape their own
future.
For Fanon, repetition was the way death inhabited thought
and language. To stop repeating, the whole social and psychic structure had to
change from the bottom up. This is how a new concept of life, of freedom and of
the human could be reinvented, the theatrical world of masks destroyed and a
new world of pure intensities instituted.
It may be that South Africa is still struggling to exit the
world of masks. To be sure, it is far from falling into the category of “failed
states” and to pretend that nothing has been achieved in almost 20 years of
freedom is patently dishonest. But nor is the country decisively moving towards
what can be legitimately expected from it and what it could become.
It is not going backwards, either. At best, it is going
through oscillations, twists, folds and turns. At worst, it is in a stationary
state, and in some areas of social and political life almost close to stasis.
Undoubtedly, this is not unrelated to the nature of the transition away from
apartheid.
Indeed, the single most important transformation the end of
white minority rule has brought is the turning of South Africa from a society
of control into a society of consumption. This shift is happening in the
absence of structures of mass production and in the context of an armed
citizenry – the majority of whom is propertyless.
For almost 20 years, the ANC has struggled to find the
proper formula to establish its hegemony over such disparate and fragmented
social formations. It could not simply reproduce the apartheid model of
control. The latter mostly aimed at tracking black people’s mobility. By
regulating their relationship to space, it could extract their labour at a very
low cost. By multiplying microenvironments of enclosure, it could forcibly separate
people from each other by law, or tightly regulate connections between them
across the colour line.
Black people’s capacity
Under white minority rule, to govern was fundamentally about
the modulation of brutality. As a mode of governance, brutality performed three
crucial functions.
On the one hand, it weakened black people’s capacity to
secure and sustain social reproduction both generationally and on a daily
basis. They could never acquire enough of the basic means necessary to produce
a sustainable life: food, shelter, health and, more importantly, knowledge and
learning capabilities.
On the other hand, apartheid brutality was somatic. It
surrounding the black body and made it prisoner, while allowing it to enjoy
various temporary microfreedoms. It manifested itself in the way one’s body was
treated once captured by the state (the police, the military, the prison, the
court) or caught in the webs of private apparatuses of extraction (the mining
compound, the farm).
Finally, this form of brutality systematically targeted its
victims’ nervous systems and tended to deplete them of the capacity to engage
in meaningful symbolic and creative work. Their world of symbols and their
world of imagination could only shrink.
Distracted by their misery as well as by the work of power,
their psychic energies were constantly scattered. In order to survive, they
were forced to repeat daily the same gestures, the same speech and the same
rituals.
Post-apartheid South Africa has not taken proper stock of
the extent to which these three forms of brutality have been internalised and
are now redeployed in a molecular fashion in our public and communal existence.
We can track their dynamism at almost every level of our
social and psychic life and interactions: in the intimate spheres of daily
existence; in the structures of desire and sexuality; in the irrepressible lust
for commodities; in the small encounters with our bureaucracy; in the behaviour
of the police; in the manner and style of crime; and in the language of
politics itself.
Society of consumption
South African politics and culture are in a profound state
of crisis because we have taken the entitlement to consume to be the form and
ultimate substance of democracy and citizenship.
The conflation of democracy and consumption is not typical
to South Africa. The shift from a society of control to a society of
consumption is nevertheless happening here – in a context of acute privation
for the majority of black citizens and in the absence of structures of mass
production. Ours is a democracy with a majority of propertyless citizens in a
country historically shaped by the contradiction between the rule of the people
and the rule of property.
Even the emerging black middle class is not entirely certain
that whatever it owns today (a house, a car, a fridge) won’t be taken away
tomorrow. This sense of precarious ownership is a key marker of its psyche as a
class in the making.
The ANC has understood that control today can no longer
operate in the time frame of a closed system, as during the years of white
minority rule. In the South African version of capitalist democracy, control is
now free-floating.
This is the ominous calculation made by the current ruling
political elite and increasingly by the owners of capital too: that mass
poverty and propertylessness, plus high levels of inequality, crime, or even
taxation, might lead to unruly protests, episodic strikes and ever more
incidents of violence. But they need not lead automatically to a radical
overthrow of the current political or economic dispensation.
In this unique historical moment, post-apartheid hegemony
might better be cemented through a skilful modulation of relative instability
and the instrumentalisation of disorder and indiscipline. If necessary, the
liberation movement itself will foment indiscipline and controlled disorder in
order to better use it as a means of “outing” its enemies, crushing its
internal opponents, drying up the sources of their sudden enrichment, intimidating
the populace and cementing its hegemony.
South Africa has entered a new period of its history: a
post-Machiavellian moment when private accumulation no longer happens through
outright dispossession but through the capture and appropriation of public
resources, the modulation of brutality and the instrumentalisation of disorder.
Disciplined organisation
Characterised by a wave of nostalgia for the environments of
enclosure that ensured predictability under white minority rule, the cultural
climate in the country clearly favours this path. More than we dare to
recognise, South Africans are overwhelmingly attached to the mental, affective,
spatial and psychic frameworks of segregation. This attachment to anachronisms
has been partly fuelled by high levels of crime and has led to the
rebalkanisation of society.
It is a direct response to the country’s transformation into
a nation of privately armed men with a police force in military garb and
affect, hundreds of private security firms and a citizenry divided between the
few who can pay their taxes but do not vote for the ruling party and the many
who support the ruling party and depend on it for various kinds of grants.
This is the mixture of clientelism, nepotism and
prebendalism so prevalent in the immediate aftermath of African decolonisation.
Increasingly exposed to all kinds of risks to their lives, many now believe
that each individual can be his or her own police, or that most disagreements
are better settled by force. Yet an armed society is anything but a polite – a
civil – society. It is not a political community. It is hardly a democracy.
It is mostly an assemblage of atomised individuals isolated
before power, separated from each other by fear, prejudice, mistrust and
suspicion, and prone to mobilise under the banner of either a mob, a clique or
a militia rather than an idea and, even less so, a disciplined organisation.
South Africa’s experiment with freedom will be short-lived
if we let brutality turn into the privileged means mediating the relationships
between putatively free and equal citizens on the one hand and the state and
the market on the other. The gun is a brutal and undemocratic form of
communication.
If we let this happen, the rule of the people will not only
turn into the rule of property. The rule of property will quickly turn into the
rule of the gun.
