Abstract
Jacob Dlamini’s books do not provide easy answers. Perhaps this is because they do not ask easy questions. Indeed, his work examines some of the most uncomfortable topics in South African politics. For example, his first book, Native Nostalgia, explores the surprisingly fond memories that some black South Africans have for elements of the apartheid era, even as they abhorred its racism. In another book, Askari, he delves into the fraught, uncomfortable worlds of those who collaborated with the apartheid regime to complicate our understanding of the liberation struggle.
He continues this practice of asking questions that unsettle received wisdoms in the present book, The Terrorist Album. Here, he trains his analytical lens on the apartheid state itself. A common view in South Africa holds that, even as it was racist and violent, the apartheid state was efficient and capable. In a meticulously researched book that relies on difficult-to-access archival material and interviews with former Security Police and anti-apartheid activists, Dlamini questions this common sense, asking if the apartheid state really was as capable as it is imagined in order to cut it down “to analytical, moral, and political size” (p. 24).
To do so, he examines one of the central tools the apartheid state used to pursue its counterinsurgency mission: the Terrorist Album, a book of photographic files the Security Police used to track its opponents. At the height of the apartheid state’s counterinsurgency campaign in the late 1980s, five hundred copies of the album had been distributed to security outposts around the country. Currently, only three copies of the book are known to exist (p. 15).
The existence of these three copies is a first piece of evidence Dlamini uses to build his case about the apartheid state’s ineffectiveness. Their continued existence is evidence of the state’s ineptitude because the head office of the national Security Police ordered the destruction of all operational records in March 1992 as apartheid was collapsing (pp. 14–15) – an order that set off such a large campaign of document burning that some have called it a “paper Auschwitz” (p. xii). Some offices, though, simply ignored the order and so remnants of the apartheid state’s security files remain. As a consequence, despite the Security Police’s best effort to hide how they did their work and to cover up the crimes they committed while doing so, these surviving documents record their (mis)deeds. To be sure, it is a record filled with fissures, blind spots, and factual inaccuracies. But it is a record nonetheless, and one which they failed to destroy.
Still, one might think that this crucial moment might not be representative of a state’s otherwise effective surveillance capacities. But, here, through the example of the Terrorist Album, Dlamini shows that the state’s files themselves were filled with fissures, blind spots, and factual inaccuracies. And, in training his eye on the Terrorist Album’s failures, Dlamini demonstrates that the apartheid state was anything but efficient or capable in pursuing its most basic task: suppressing an insurgency that sought to overthrow it. As he perceptively argues, to see the Terrorist Album “as pointing to a sophisticated panopticon-like capability is to take apartheid’s delusions as givens” (p. 13).
Delusion is a key word here. Dlamini places the apartheid state’s security practices in relief against a growing body of scholarship on authoritarian police states like those in the former Eastern Bloc (pp. 22–24). One of the key insights emerging from this scholarship is that political opponents were not simply identified by security police; the security police actively made them (p. 23). Put differently, in a parody of how security services should work, states often created their opponents, not the other way around.
In South Africa, the state identified its opponents by identifying individuals who left the country without permission, deeming them “terrorists” on the assumption that only those with ill-designs against the apartheid state would leave in such a fashion (pp. 8–9). The effect of such a wide sweep is predictable. Many “terrorists” – like the novelist Bessie Head – left the country never having taken up arms against apartheid and having no intention to do so in the future (p. 53). But, in its delusions, the apartheid state made them “terrorists” nonetheless.
But why have an album that includes such a broad sweep of people, especially when that breadth would make it difficult to identify those who might actually take up arms against the state? This is the wrong question to ask, Dlamini suggests, because it presumes a rationality, a clearly designed higher purpose, and a coherence that the apartheid state simply lacked. The Security Police, on his account, created “terrorists” and put them in an album for no other reason than they could. As he writes, the power of the Security Police “to name, to jail, to hound, to terrorize, to kill, was central to the operation of apartheid. It was there, in its projection of the power of the apartheid state to do all of the above, that the album’s operating logic was to be found” (p. 53). Yet, even as the power to name someone a “terrorist,” to harass them, or to kill them may have produced terror, that doesn’t mean the police used this power rationally, efficiently, or even with attention to basic facts about the state’s perceived opponents.
Indeed, one consequence of this broad power to name and one measure of its ineffectiveness are the myriad delusions built into the album. Perhaps the most remarkable delusion Dlamini tracks in the book is the album’s identification of the white, Jewish student leader, Barry Gilder, as one of the country’s most wanted men, Aboobaker Ismail (codenamed Rashid Patel), an Indian Muslim who led ANC units on spectacular military operations. During interrogations and having been tortured, turned ANC militants repeatedly identified Gilder’s photo in the album as “Rashid,” even though the police knew it couldn’t be true because they knew “Rashid” to be Indian. Worse, this error contravened the most basic fact of the apartheid worldview: “everyone was supposed to know definitively his own race and that of others” (p. 169). And, so, “Rashid Patel” became white in the Terrorist Album, even though the police who put him there knew it was false. And because the Security Police did not have a photo of the real Rashid, “they could not confirm their own knowledge […] So they went along with assertions that he was white,” in defiance of what they knew to be true (p. 171).
And it is here that Dlamini points us to the ultimate delusion of apartheid: that the racial divisions, which underpinned this brutal, incompetent state apparatus, had any truth to them in the first place. As with the apartheid state’s terror, this is not to say that this racist delusion had no effect. On the contrary, much as the apartheid state’s brutal incompetence continues to live on in the violent institutional routines of the post-apartheid state and in the traumas haunting those people the Security Police terrorised, this biggest of all delusions continues to live on in the country’s present inequities and injustices.