Innocent violence: social exclusion, identity, and the press in an African democracy

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by David B. Coplan

... the wave is anything but new.... Raiding, in southern Africa of early colonial times, had a peculiar conceptual status. Since there was no body of law governing relations between groups, it could not be called an offence at law. At the same time it was not quite warfare. It was more like a sport, a cultural activity with serious undertones.... There are thousands of people from the black areas of South Africa [for whom] raiding is their business ... seeing what they can grab ... preferably without a fight, preferably eluding the professional defenders of property, the police. (Coetzee 2007) (6)

Granting that Coetzee is among the most darkly pessimistic of commentators, let us consider this conception. First, raiding has hardly been an activity exclusive to black peasants and proletarians. As Jeremy Krikler observes, Africans living on their own communal lands in the years before the Anglo-Boer War,

   were also subjected to the predatory activities of the ZAR state's
   functionaries--native commissioners and veldcornets. These
   officials, whose briefs included the collection of taxes and the
   settlement of disputes between landlord and tenants, widely
   extended their activities ... looting some of the resources
   remaining to peasants. The seizure of captives and booty in wars
   against black rural communities, the imposition of forced labour
   and 'tax raids' which often took the form of massive exercises in
   armed robbery, formed part of their contribution to the prehistory
   of capitalism in South Africa. (1993: 8)

In brief, South Africans--both black and white--have historically considered only might, and not right, as the only reason why their neighbour should continue to have much, and they comparatively little. While European settlers may have respected one another's property rights most of the time, those of non-whites, animist or Christian, were fair game. Neither the white apartheid state nor its black-dominated successor did anything to change this principle, both producing regimes of law while intensifying disrespect for them. As Julia Hornberer observes: 'Crime ... is woven into the everyday moral logics of those communities who have experienced a historical distance from the formal law. That which is and is not criminal is divided by a very porous line.' (7) She might have added that soaring levels of 'white-collar' crime in both the civil service and the private sector demonstrate that South Africans do not have to experience 'distance from the formal law' to ignore this line.

More to the point, as Hein Marais pointed out in the Mail and Guardian: 'The distinction drawn so often between xenophobic attacks and acts of criminality is spurious. Murder, assault and looting--indisputably criminal acts--historically have been intrinsic features of pogroms.' (8) Nor can such attacks be explained merely by searching for the spark that ignited a mindless mob mentality. Organised criminal networks have been frequently mentioned as perpetrators by South African residents of the areas where the violence broke out. Further, the separation of the criminal from the political does not work well. With the closure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty for 'political' crimes, the African National Congress (ANC) government de-legitimated political violence, but it remains popular. Of course 'the political' itself is hard to define in South Africa, where the concept appears less related to the institutions of democracy or public resource allocation than to the contentious articulation of nationality and community, with no secure boundaries set to date.