Punishment,violence,and grassroots democracy in South Africa—The politics of populist punitiveness

Abstract

This article discusses the apparent contradictions, and consequences, of the state’s embracing of democratic ‘community’ based criminal justice initiatives, in tandem with long-term imprisonment, in the context of vigilantism in Khayelitsha, a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town. I argue that vigilante practices are part of a continuum of community-based crime prevention and punishment practices, where the legal and illegal are blurred, and with which the state is complicit. Looking back, from the vantage point of 2014 to the time when South Africa emerged from apartheid rule and held its first democratic elections, in April 1994, it is clear that mass democracy has had an uneasy relationship with the liberal values enshrined in the Constitution. I argue that punitive punishment is one of the consequences of the state’s turn toward democratic localism and its embracing of a discourse that encourages communities to take responsibility for crime prevention. The danger of rallying ‘communities’ around combating crime is that it has the potential to unleash violent technologies in the quest for ‘ethics’ and ‘morality.’ As George Herbert Mead pointed out many years ago, when community members unite against an outsider, they are bonded for an intense moment in a way that masks the very real problems that tear the community apart. The ironic twist is that ‘mob justice’ in Khayelitsha is also a mass technology to protect private property in the context of the endemic inequality that characterizes South Africa