Ashforth On State Power, Violence, Everyday Life - Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto
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State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto Adam Ashforth

Center for Studies of Social Change Working Paper No.210 [Note: this paper is a revised version of' Soweto's Children' presented to the American Political Science Association meeting in New York, September 4th, 1994 which was represented under the guise 'State Power in Everyday Life: Soweto' to the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, October 10th, 1994 and reincarnated as 'State Power and Violence in Everyday Life: Soweto' for the Workshop: "Violence and the State: Fear, Force and the Mystical Foundations of Authority" (Swarthmore College, December 8-11, 1994.) The research was funded by grants and fellowships from the City University of New York, the Advanced Area Study Program of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Program on Peace and International Security of the MacArthur Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.] Adam Ashforth Dept of Political Science Baruch College March 1995 *** In the 1960s, Mr Matodzhi Nephawu was a policeman. A migrant to Johannesburg from the far northern Bantustan of Venda, Mr Matodzhi firmly believed that the White Man was a superior being whose duty it was to command blacks. Now he is a shopkeeper in the Mapetla district of Soweto and knows better. For wages of twenty five Rands per month, Mr Matodzhi's main duty as a policeman was to check passbooks at the 'Nie-Blankes' section of Park Station in central Johannesburg when commuters were departing for homes in Soweto. People failing to carry their passes, as prescribed by the Bantu (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act of 1952, or whose books did not contain the correct authorization to reside in Soweto, as prescribed by Section 10; 1 of the Bantu (13rban Areas) Consolidation Act, No.25 of 1945, as amended 1952, 1957, and 1964 - amending the Natives urban Areas) Act of 1923 would be arrested by Mr Matodzhi and his colleagues under the supervision of an assortment of Constables van der Merwe.
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'Definitely, I could line up fifty guys and march them back to the cells,' Mr Matodzhi told me, thirty years later, while we were sipping sweet tea in the rooms behind his shop. In the old days, Mr Matodzhi and his colleagues were rounding up over 600 pass offenders every day in Johannesburg. 1 'Even if I was only one, they would not run away.' Mr Matodzhi might have been overestimating his prowess as a police constable, but in 1993 he was more concerned about the changing times: 'These days,' he mused, 'I don't think so. Boys these days, they all have guns. They would just shoot you.' How did this transformation come about? Mr Matodzhi did not know. What might it mean for the future as the chains of apartheid are broken and South Africans endeavor to create a free and democratic state? That is a question I propose to address. *** During the period from 1990 to 1994, blessed with a sufficiency of grants and three years leave from the City University of New York, I spent most of my time living in Soweto. This was an epochal period. I was there from shortly after the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, until shortly after the inauguration of the Government of National Unity in May 1994. I was staying with the Mfete family in the Mapetla Extension district. They adopted me as a brother and a son. A score of others became family too. They eased my passage into a world that was at once familiar and strange, beautiful and terrible. What follows is based largely upon experience and observation in Soweto during that period. Unfortunately, it focuses more on the terrors than the beauties of life. I will pay homage to the joys of Soweto at another time in another place. My experience in Soweto exposed me to the fact that the threat of violence, spiritual as well as physical, and a risk of violent death permeate all aspects of life in that place. This is not simply a case of Hobbes's war 'of every man, against every man' - the predicament of life when there exists no 'common Power to keep them all in awe.' For there does exist a powerful state in South Africa, a 'common power' in Hobbes's terms, which stands above all and which can, and does, intervene in the affairs of those subject to it Moreover, throughout the history of South Africa, the men who acted in the name of the state managed effectively in repressing political resistance, despite the ever-increasing costs, both human and financial. They dominated decision-making in the crucial economic and political processes that have shaped the society, retaining overall control throughout the various stages of the transition to majority rule during 1 990-'94. Yet the character of that state, both in terms of effectiveness as a system of domination and in the everyday experience of people subject to it in places like Soweto, changed dramatically over time, particularly in recent decades. Throughout the history of Soweto, Sowetans, like other South Africans, have refused to simply conform their lives to the patterns prescribed by outside authorities. Under the shadow of the apartheid state, they have created a vibrant and distinctive local culture. The apartheid state was a strange beast Men acting in the name of the state uprooted people
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from land held for generations; imprisoned them for a myriad of trivial offenses; tortured activists and suppressed all efforts to articulate a political voice outside the narrow confines authorized by the state. 2 Even during the darkest days of apartheid, however, the state remained a source of entitlement for Africans, albeit one marked by a chronic and systematic inequality. Although denied political, social, and legal equality with citizens of European descent and prevented from competing in the economic arena, Africans, insofar as their labor was essential to the accumulation of wealth by white capitalists and farmers, were provided with homes, hospitals, schools, pensions and a paltry taste of all the social securities which, it is commonly supposed, identify the modern welfare state. For most of the twentieth century, Africans in South Africa have remained, in the 1894 phrase of the Cape Premier, Cecil Rhodes, 'in a sense citizens, but not altogether citizens.' 3 Discrimination engendered a deep sense of injustice and resentment amongst the black people subjected to it, becoming the foundation for what State President Nelson Mandela described in his 100 Days speech to Parliament in Cape Town 100 years after Rhodes as the 'right to seek redress.' Yet this same structure of discrimination, especially as it became entrenched in the ideology of Apartheid and resisted in a great struggle for freedom connecting with the movements of national liberation and decolonization, provided a sense of historic purpose and mission not only for African political movements, but also a beacon of hope orienting the travails of everyday life. My interest in this paper is to begin sketching some of the history of Soweto in the context of state formation within the southern African region, while describing aspects of my own experience of state power, violence, and everyday life in Soweto. I want to begin this preliminary reconnaissance of the lineaments of violence and social power emerging in southern Africa's largest black city because I suspect that these dynamics of violence and power will have a long term impact on the character of the state that is currently being constituted in the Constitutional Assembly. *** Soweto is changing rapidly. So-we-to is no longer just the 'South Western Townships' of Johannesburg, the place where the 'Natives' were forced to live when they came to town to work for the White Man. It may have been designed and built by segregationist urban planners and patrolled by the policemen of Apartheid, but the people have made it their own. Like any city it has big problems. As a fast-growing urban zone in a part of Africa with a long history of racial domination and exploitation, where towns were proclaimed as the 'white man's creation' and Africans considered temporary sojourners', it has its own special problems. 4 From Zambia to the Cape, people look to Soweto with a mixture of horror and fascination. Some see the place as inimical to all that is worthwhile in human life. Some can't wait to get there. The history of Soweto has yet to be written. 5 Soweto was built to house the city's African workforce, separated from the 'white' parts of the city by fifteen kilometers of open ground, industrial estates, and mine dumps. It was a product of state policy at national and local levels, both during the era of Segregation before 1948 and under the regime of Apartheid, as well as
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under the leadership of both major political parties of white society - the United Party and the National Party. Apart from the small African freehold settlement at Klipspruit, established in 1904, the core of the township was built in 1930 by the Johannesburg City Council (JCC) and named Orlando, after the Chairman of the Non-European Affairs Committee of the Johannesburg City Council, Councilor Edwin Orlando Leake. Like all such developments between 1913 (when the Natives Land Act was passed), and 1991 (when it was repealed), Africans were denied property ownership in the townships that were to become known as Soweto, and thus were denied also the panoply of political rights with which property ownership is usually associated. During the late 1940s, a squatter movement led by the maverick James Sofasonke Mpanza spurred a massive building program which lasted until the mid-sixties. 6 After 1968, very little housing was built except for single sex migrant hostels. Building resumed in the 1980s, when private capital became involved and limited forms of property ownership - 30 and 99-year leases - were introduced for upwardly-mobile Sowetans. But these 'middle class' private developments are small enclaves in a region that is becoming dominated by shack settlements of squatters and 'informal townships'. In 1994, as part of an agreement designed to resolve the long-standing conflict between residents and local government known as the Greater Soweto Accord, freehold title to the houses and stands of Soweto previously owned by public authorities was granted, free of charge, to leaseholders. There are no reliable figures for the population of the areas loosely known as Soweto or Greater Soweto. 7 Estimates range from one to four million inhabitants. Suffice it to say that the population is large, black - though ethnically diverse and with significant class divisions predominantly young, mostly short of cash, and short of work. Including the various officially demarked 'Zones', 'Extensions', and 'Blocks' of the formal townships, as well as squatter camps, but excluding the ten hostels, there are more than 100 different residential subdivisions within Greater Soweto. There is no industry to speak of in Soweto, apart from petrol stations and backyard repair shops. Commerce is dominated by small-scale retail trade in groceries and alcohol through licensed and unlicensed premises. During the apartheid era, black business people were prevented from competing with white-owned enterprises through restrictions upon the number of retail sites they could own, all in 'Black Areas', and limitations upon credit provisions. The biggest formal sector employers in the area are the schools, administered by the Department of Education, and the municipal authorities. Perhaps half of the adults of Soweto have regular employment, commuting each day to jobs in 'town' or other centers on the Witwatersrand. Public transport, during daylight hours, is reasonably effective, and while Soweto in the early decades of its life was isolated from the main centers, it is now centrally situated for workers. At the heart of Soweto's history are all the ironies of racial segregation in an urban economy dominated by white capitalists and dependent upon the labor of black people. Throughout the history of the South African state, most of the policies of segregation and apartheid were centrally concerned with questions of labor: inducing a supply of labor for mines, farms, and urban industries from societies which were previously outside capitalist market economies; allocating supplies of labor between sectors of production, particularly trying to keep able-bodied young Africans at work on white-owned farms and away from towns; and,
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reducing the costs to employers of African labor while protecting the position of white workers and farmers. Until the 1 960s, the repressive policies of apartheid operated in a context of general labor shortage. From that time there has been an increasing surplus of people seeking to work for wages in the southern African region. For the last two and a half decades of its existence, the apartheid system served in repressing people growing increasingly desperate for work, particularly by attempting to stem the tide of rural-urban migration. The rationale for such repression was expressed in terms of a division of citizenship between residents of rural Homelands and those in urban townships. 8 In the planning of public housing provision in Johannesburg during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when massive numbers of people migrated from the rural areas to towns, 9 die available planking schemes, whether they drew upon architectural notions of the international modern movement with their Garden Cities and regionalism, or whether they built on old-fashioned racial segregation, amounted to much the same thing: low cost, publicly constructed, rental housing for black working people in single-story single-family homes on small plots in areas set aside from existing cities. 10 In many respects, the building of Soweto was a triumph of modern public housing. Twenty years after a housing crisis was proclaimed, the problem was 'solved.' State officials at the time saw it as a means of 'obviating' revolution. 11 Soweto, like the other urban developments of that period, was planned and constructed with virtually no consultation with the people who were going to live there, nor regard for their desires. 12 And despite the fact that the new National Party government in 1948 was proclaiming a radical program they called apartheid, under which the idea of Africans as 'temporary sojourners' was supposedly an article of faith, the regime proceeded with the settlement of a large permanent urban population in the Johannesburg region. 13 While the original townships in the place that in 1963 became known as the South western Townships, Orlando and Piniville, were quite well received by their new residents, the bulk of the city, which was built after the Second World War had an image problem almost from the start. 14 Firstly there were the 'Emergency Camps' of Moroka and Jabavu, where people from the shanty towns run by James Sofasonke Mpanza were settled on surveyed lots with minimal services and allowed to build their own shacks until, when all the lots were occupied, the municipality built houses and demolished the shacks. Then came the destruction of Sophiatown. After the National Party took office in 1948 it came under pressure from white working-class Afrikaners in the western suburbs of Johannesburg to clear the multicultural slum that had grown up in the township of Sophiatown. The men of apartheid were also obsessed with their own vision of racial separation. Despite intense resistance from political organizations like the ANC and churches, led by Father Trevor Huddleston, and a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Johannesburg City Council for rehousing the people being forced out, the national government prevailed. They renamed the new suburb, now housing Afrikaans speaking workers, Triomf: Triumph. The National Party government also tried to clear black people from the freehold township of Alexandra in the northern suburbs, but while many were moved, the place remained.
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Residents of Sophiatown and Alexandra were moved to houses in settlements called Meadowlands and Diepkloof on land adjacent to the JCC's townships in what is now Soweto. A new authority, the Native Resettlement Board, was established to administer these townships. One reason why the destruction of Sophiatown succeeded was that many people who had previously been renting overpriced rooms in crowded insanitary yards were provided with their own houses in Meadowlands. They had a chance of a better life. And there were jobs to be had in those days. But Sophiatown supported a cultural diversity and dynamism which was hard to replicate in the serried ranks of the identical houses of Meadowlands, and the confluence of varied African and European musical, artistic, and literary traditions in the old Sophiatown was gone. In the writings of black and white liberal intellectuals, Soweto came to signify the loss of the multi-racial potential that had been Sophiatown. Most of the people who took up residence in Soweto were not so smitten with the memory of Sophiatown, although if in a Sowetan shebeen today you were to strike up the rhythms of Marabi jazz, the jive music of the fifties, the older folks would tap their toes and click their fingers and someone would cry: 'Sophiatown!' When they came to Soweto, people continued raising families, making friends with neighbors, sacrificing beasts for the ancestors, planting trees, falling in love, and pursuing all those myriads of pastimes we humans indulge in to transform bleak urban space into places of the heart. The fact that their houses were owned by the City Council, which prohibited residents from altering their appearance except in the details, and occupied with insecure tenure, dampened somewhat the drive to identify with their new places, particularly amongst older residents. Those families who maintained strong connections with home places in the rural areas were also less inclined to put down spiritual roots in the new city. But the very sense of insecurity promoted by apartheid, coupled with the racist restrictions upon physical and social mobility imposed during the decades of oppression, helped bring into being close-knit local communities of people who, by the I 990s had known each other over generations. Soweto today combines the feeling of a big city peopled by strangers with that of a network of villages populated with kin. There are fashions of music, dress, and address - Soweto Style which sweep across Soweto through streets and schoolyards, shebeens and stokvels; from there to the rest of the country. There is a distinctive and ever-changing dialect, too, the language of Soweto's streets, known as isicamtho and built upon Nguni or Sotho roots with eclectic English vocabulary borrowings and a distinctive Anglo-Bantu grammar, mastery of which will mark you as unmistakably Sowetan. 15 In townships and other places of black people across South Africa, that mark, especially if you are young and male, can inspire fear and resentment. Soweto gained international notoriety during the uprising of the schoolchildren in 1976. 16 As a result of the brutal suppression of their protests against the compulsory use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in secondary school, riots and insurrection spread from Soweto to all parts of the country. The 1976 uprising shook the complacency of the South African regime, along with their local and international supporters. It presaged the revolts (curiously named 'unrest' by authorities) which were to mark the decade of the 1980s with their campaigns of 'ungovernability', and contribute to the end of white rule. It also prompted the ruling orders of state and capital to begin a reassessment of their strategies which would ultimately lead to the
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constitutional negotiations of the 1990s. The history of Soweto has been marked by a progressive collapse of state authority, an often violent struggle against representatives of the state waged in the name of 'ungovernability', a breakdown of paternal authority within families, the establishment and collapse of alternative political structures within local neighborhoods, and a general rise in crime and insecurity. As in most places, the risk of violent death arises overwhelmingly from the threat posed by young men: firstly, those driving cars 17 ; secondly, those involved in crime 18 ; thirdly, those engaged in political st:ruggles 19 ; and finally, those dressed in the uniforms of the state. Today Soweto is the largest black city in southern Africa. Along with central Johannesburg, which is now socially more connected to the black townships to its south than its white suburbs to the north, Soweto is the political and cultural center of gravity of the whole subcontinent The place has a fearsome reputation. authorities and other outsiders, black as well as white, approach Soweto with trepidation. Police officers, especially if they are white, routinely patrol with automatic weapons while wearing bullet-proof vests. Delivery vans making their rounds carry armed guards. Yet, along with 'Mandela', 'Soweto' is a word that resonates throughout the whole world. Many people living in Soweto hate the place. They hate its dust, its smoke; they fear its thugs. Their houses are too small; families too big. They would move to the white suburbs in an instant if they could. Others love Soweto. Most Sowetans love Soweto. The houses may be small. The neighbors may be noisy sometimes. But there is 'life' here, they will say. When in Soweto, I stay in an outside room behind the Mfete family's house in Mapetla Extension, the far south-west corner of 'deep' Soweto. Originally the neighbors assumed I was going to marry one of the Mfete daughters. They soon learnt my story. Then they knew that I was an Australian and a university professor from New York. They heard that I was writing a book. They could see that I had been adopted by the Mfete family. The other mothers laughed a lot about MaMfete's new white child. 'I've seen a big White Man washing dishes in MaMfete's kitchen,' her friend Hilda reported to the other kitchens of our neighborhood soon after I arrived on the scene. 'It's a miracle,' she said. I never had serious problems as a white man living in Soweto. Over time; I underwent a sort of acculturation that was registered firstly, and most importantly, in a host of unconscious, and almost imperceptible, bodily dispositions signifying if not belonging, at least a different register of tensions from those which Sowetans are accustomed to reading in the bodies of white people who approach black worlds as a source of undifferentiated anxiety. My stumbling efforts to learn the local languages helped. I was also celebrated as one of Soweto's handful of white residents, signs for many that a 'new South Africa' was being born *** An African man moving through the south of Africa throughout most of the twentieth-century
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would have encountered a bewildering array of regimes of power, some of European design, others of more purely African provencance, the rest hybrid. The rural Reserves, later called Homelands, resembled more-or-less independent African polities exercising limited sovereignty under the overall suzerainty of Pretoria. There were of course white Magistrates and Native Commissioners, traders, missionaries and a variety of other emissaries of the imperial state, but their effectiveness and political presence varied greatly from place to place. White-owned farms resembled feudal fiefdoms, where residence and transit was largely at the whim of the Farmer, although the relationships between farmers, tenants, and laborers were hedged by a myriad of conflicting rights, mutual interests, and customary usages. Mines constituted a largely separate regime connected to the rural social and political structures although permitting of some contact with urban life. And the towns resembled distinct city states, each requiring its own 'visa' for entry in the form of a stamp in your passbook. Each city imposed its own distinctive regime of residence and citizenship, within the limits of a framework overseen by the Native Affairs Department m Pretoria. In addition to these domains, in a limited number of areas, which in the 1960s and 1970s came under attack from Pretoria as 'Black Spots', Africans enjoyed freehold title to land and a certain freedom from central control. A woman's movement through these zones was a different story, for women had to contend with all of these regimes alongside subjection to fathers, husbands, and brothers as well as to African men in general. For the first half century of the Union, women were not subjected to official controls on movement through pass laws because African women were expected by both the agents of the state and African men to be subject to African men. The household was, and to a large extent remains, a realm integrally connected to the broader regimes of state power but distinct from it. ('t is a rare father, for example, who does not consider himself entitled to the privileges of ruler in his house.) Imagining a community subject to a singular, over-arching, national state can have been no easy feat under these circumstances. Mandela and his colleagues in the ANC Youth League in the 1940s, following the Communists with their commitment to a Native Republic, were amongst the first to make this leap. It was not until Apartheid came to resemble a massive and monolithic edifice of white domination that the image of a single nation artificially divided could begin to take hold in the African popular imagination with any degree of coherence. Within all of these domains there is no doubt that the cities, particularly the big cities of the Witwatersrand, offered individual Africans the greatest scope for avoiding the strictures of authority, black as well as white, whether they were familial, chiefly, 'masterly', official, or priestly. And there is no doubt either, that the success of large numbers of Africans in so evading authority was a cause celebre in the minds of all political authorities. 'A large number of incentives,' wrote the Native Economic Commission in 1932, 'draws the young Native to town: potent drink, amours, fine clothes, better opportunities for education, contact with civilization.' 20 Hence the perennial obsession with the 'teeming masses' in urban slums and the quest by the ruling orders for the philosopher's stone of the 'well-ordered Native township.' Soweto emerged from this obsession. The structure of urban government in the southern African region for most of the twentieth century resembled an archipelago of city states. Prior to Union in 1910, cities, towns, and
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villages exercised a wide degree of;autonomy regarding the government of Africans. All of the powers of government affecting the basic conditions of African life in urban areas - entry, residence, health, trading, liquor consumption, taxation - were focused in 'White' local authorities and remained so until the 1970s when the Bantu Affairs Administration Boards (BAABS) were established. In the urban areas, the BAABs and their descendants, were basically segregated structures of local government. Shortly after Union a constitutional conflict between Provincial authorities, who had oversight of local government, and the Union government, which had responsibility for Native Affairs was resolved in favor of the central authorities. From the end of the First World War, central authorities endeavored to consolidate their powers over local government of Native Affairs. In 1923 the Natives (Urban Areas) Act regularized the relations between Pretoria and the cities, towns, and villages of South Africa. A system of indirect rule of 'Natives' was instituted, with wide powers remaining in the hands of local governments subject to oversight by the Governor-General-in-Council, effectively the Native Affairs Department. African urban life for most of this period was understood by the ruling orders in terms of the relations of Masters and Servants. People outside of a clearly-defined labor relationship, whether they were moving to or from towns, or resident in towns without a job, were subject to government regulation under the term 'Vagrant'. 21 Until the 197 Os, when the central government assumed direct control over the administration of Africans in urban areas, albeit still under a scheme of divided sovereignty, there was an abiding tussle between the goals of uniformity pursued by national policy-makers and local administrators responsible for finance and services. The all-important issue was that of labor control and the allocation of workers between farms, mines, and urban-industrial areas. Particularly in the bigger cities, local councils were more responsive to industrialists. After 1948, the National Party government was more responsive to farmers and white workers. Freedom for an African in the big cities, such as it was, however, was purchased at considerable risk. Urban life contained manifold terrors, some unknown in the rural areas. Soweto was always a fairly dangerous place, although perhaps less so than Sophiatown and the other inner-city areas. Landscapes of fear within Soweto changed over the years, sometimes in dramatic ways, sometimes in fashions more subtle. Some of the terrors remain constant Rapists, for example, have always been a real and present danger. Some fears are known by general names: the 'Government'. Others seem more blanket: unemployment and poverty. Political colossi can stride onto the scene with sudden fury, begetting fear and inspiration, love and hate: the 'Youth' in 1976; Inkatha in 1990. Yet other powers, the Police, for example, stalk about in slowly changing guises, evoking different fears at different times and in different places. The White Man, in all his guises, used to be a major problem. Gangsters, tsotsis, thugs, criminals... all come and go, spreading fear in direct proportion to their prowess and notoriety. When named, their powers are local; unknown, they rule all. A couple of bad boys can make a street unsafe. Multiplied a thousand-fold, the whole city trembles. Keep a lookout for groups of young men. Many, too, are the powers unseen. Ancestors have always been feared when angry and unappeased. And witches are everywhere. Old women need to be watched carefully, especially those who would talk to themselves or wander abroad at night. No-one is spared the risk of evil wrought by the jealous through witchcraft and sorcery. Fear and danger are always distributed unevenly, rarely in direct proportion to each other.
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Protecting yourself against all the dangers of life in Soweto can be a time-consuming business. Don't expect much assistance from the Police. Whatever credibility the police force might have had in the early days of Soweto dissipated throughout the 1950s and 1960s as the impositions of apartheid policies became more severe and African political movements were violently repressed. By the early 1970s, the South African Police were arresting more than half a million black people each year throughout the country for offenses relating to the pass laws. In the 1970s, moreover, the police became more involved in activities such as evicting tenants and, after 1976, shooting schoolchildren. During the 1980s, thousands of young people fought battles with the police, who became viewed as the unambiguous enemy of the entire population. Given their paucity in number, the preoccupation of the South African Police in imposing regulations of apartheid, quelling political dissent, and generally serving the communities of 'white' South Africa, meant that there were scant resources available for ordinary criminal investigations in the black townships. 22 Most white police officers speak Afrikaans as their first language, and insist upon black people addressing them in that language. Most Sowetans despised Afrikaans as the 'language of the oppressor'. Police were known generically as 'the Boers', the armed wing of the oppressors. The had little more legitimacy than any other armed gang. During the uprisings and 'Emergencies' of the 1 980s, too, when the forces of the state were energized by the slogan of 'total strategy for total onslaught' soldiers of the South African Defense Force were deployed in the townships, contributing to a sense of generalized assault from the forces of the state. 23 Young men were at the forefront of these struggles with representatives of state power in Soweto. *** Young men in Soweto, taking a lead from their seniors, are rarely encouraged to listen to, or take note of, the words of women. 24 This makes life even more difficult for mothers of sons, especially as most of them live in houses without fathers. Girls are more tightly controlled, for they fall under the day to day purview of the mothers; and there are more mothers than fathers in places of household authority. On a typical Sowetan weekday afternoon, for example, adolescent boys will be playing football at a local sports ground or roaming in search of adventure, while the girls and younger boys play in the street near their homes between finishing their cleaning chores and helping with the evening meal. Of course, girls can also be what they are pleased to call 'Clevers', only, a girl returning home after dark will typically need a very good reason. Many fathers were unable to cope with the limitations of life chances under the apartheid regime and the strictures placed upon their ability as members of a poorly paid urban industrial working class to meet requirements of 'manhood' emanating from a rural past. Men suffered countless humiliations under the infantilizing and patronking attitudes of white authorities and employers who treated them as 'boys'. The migrant labor system, particularly after 'influx control' became tighter in the 1960s, compelled rural workseekers, mostly younger men, to leave their families in the impoverished Homelands areas and seek work in the cities
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alone. Sometimes the migrants never returned. Often they established new families in towns. Moreover, while the institution of polygamy has largely disappeared in Soweto, as in most of South Africa, the practice remains entrenched. You are considered a poor excuse for a man if you can only boast of a single wife or girlfriend. So it is not uncommon for young adults to find themselves confronted with a father they have never met, or siblings they never knew they had. Oftentimes, too, the patterns of drinking that became a feature of urban masculine society encouraged a servitude to alcohol which precluded fathers from successfully conducting their affairs in such a manner as to inspire the respect from women and youths to which they considered themselves entitled. Many deserted their families, abandoning their children to the sole care of mothers and grandmothers. Of the thirty households in the street where I stay, twenty three are headed by women. The fathers are either dead, departed, or what the women call 'useless' due to alcoholism. This has had a particularly important impact on the behavior of young men. Older men still cling to power in families and communities but their authority is constantly undermined. From the late- 197 Os, school-leavers in Soweto, as elsewhere in South Africa, have been facing the prospect of unemployment at rates which were unknown to their parents. From 1976 onwards, as the schoolchildren and younger people generally became more militant in politics, the authority of parents, particularly fathers, within families and communities also diminished. There were fathers - still are - who exercised strict control over their children, but as the broader political struggle mobilized the energies of the young, and as those struggles increasingly took the form of physical confrontation with the police and school authorities, representatives of the hated apartheid political order, the respect traditionally accorded to elders in Africa began to wither. This attrition of respect and authority within the community was also related to a perception amongst the young, with more in school than ever before, that their elders had acquiesced in, if not actually collaborated with, the system of oppression that was apartheid. During the 1980s, and until about 1992, political organizations - 'the Structures' as they were called - served to some extent in reconstituting authority relations. Young men were proud to identify themselves as 'Comrades', fighters committed to the liberation of 'the People'. The Comrades were overwhelmingly male. Comrades created a vibrant new culture, which they spoke of as the 'culture of struggle'. They had distinctive styles of dress and address. Tee-shirts were emblazoned with images memorializing heroes in the colors of the liberation movements, proclaiming a bewildering variety of slogans and names as new acronyms sprang to life faster than organizations could be banned. 25 Militant comrades dressed in khaki uniforms reminiscent of the soldiers of Umkhonto we Sizwe. They greeted each other as 'Comrade', composed hundreds of songs which they called 'struggle songs' or 'freedom songs', and popularized a political dance with military overtones of physical training routines, the 'toyi toyi', which they performed to the accompaniment of these songs or while chanting slogans and shooting imaginary guns. 'People's Culture' or the 'Culture of Struggle' was seen by activists as 'an instrument for
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mobilization.' (I quote Bekhi Masilo, one time Cultural Secretary of the Phiri Branch of the ANC Youth League.) Its primary locus was the schoolyard and the street. In the schools, young people would teach each other the struggle songs; the younger children would learn from their elders. Many of the battles with the police took place in the schoolyards. 26 Whenever young people gathered for political discussion or action, they would sing struggle songs and 'shava [hit] toyi toyi'. The songs were particularly popular, so even if an event were not ostensibly political, young people, particularly young men, would sing the songs. Children learnt these songs as soon as they learnt to speak and sing. Grandmothers knew many of them, too. 27 In 1985, after the government of P.W. Botha implemented restrictions upon outdoor political meetings, funerals of activists became a central forum of black political opposition and cultural expression. Coffins would be draped with political colors, speakers would eulogize the departed while not forgetting to 'conscientise' and mobilize the crowds of mourners, and the police would take the opportunity to teargas and shoot at the crowds, thereby ensuring fresh victims for the next funerary round. Those were the days of heroes and martyrs. Politics was a vocation that brought risks of punishment. It also brought the rewards of respect and social honor. As the uprisings continued throughout the 1980s, the repression intensified and gangs of vigilantes joined the police and soldiers in suppressing opposition. Politics became impossible to avoid; every aspect of life became politicized. 'Freedom in Our Lifetime,' began to seem like a realistic expectation. Many thousands of activists dedicated their lives to the struggle for freedom. Not all of the young men who identified themselves as Comrades, however, were disciplined and saintly. There was always a degree of delinquency and vandalism in the activities popularly known as 'umzabalazo' [Zulu for 'a firm stand'], 'siyanyova' [from 'nyova', to disarrange, disorder, or crumple] or 'the Struggle.' In the light generated by the heat of resistance to a clearly immoral political order, moral choices seemed stark and simple. Many so-called collaborators were burnt. The Necklace, a petrol-filled tyre around a victim's neck, was born. The Structures, as political organizations were called, were always extremely fissiparous. In the absence of a coherent, effective, and legitimate overall authority representing superior force in the name of the state, the young men in political organizations often found themselves in endless and sometimes deadly combat with each other. They were frequently distracted from their common enemy: the South African Police, representing the 'apartheid system'. Disagreement with the comrades could be dangerous, carrying the risk of being branded an 'informer'. It could risky to be without friends in the Structures, even just to be eccentric. Everyone who remembers the uprisings of the 1980s knows stories of people who were necklaced because of personal grudges. There were also young men who eschewed politics and embraced the label 'tsotsi' or 'thug'; self-professed 'criminals'. To be a tsotsi didn't mean you were not opposed to the System, but it did mean you had not made politics your primary passion. The 'Structures' demanded of members at least the appearance of righteousness in personal behavior. Excessive drunkenness, fornication, brawling and other related recreations were frowned upon in the
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upright moral order of political life. Robbery, the principle pastime of the tsotsi, was seen by the politically conscious as an understandable consequence of poverty. Poverty was understood to be a product of apartheid. But robbery was not supposed to be a hobby of Comrades. Tsotsies had their own moral order of sorts. In the business of crime, robbing people 'in Town', that is, white people, was a risky though more or less morally neutral enterprise. Some people were even able to characterize their efforts as part of the revolutionary project of redistributing wealth. Robbing people in the township, however, was despicable. In both instances, the risks of failure were high. Prison terms awaited you if the police caught in town. You might even get shot. If the Community got you in Soweto, you could be beaten or burnt to death. Spreading from the prisons, where they were established in the 1890s by the notorious Nongoloza Mathebula, is a network of criminal gangs with members right throughout southern Africa. 28 Most young men who graduate from prison belong to one or another of these gangs. There are also ethnic gangs, most notably the Basotho 'marashea' or 'Russians', and innumerable small scale crime syndicates some of which are functional (car theft, hijacking, and housebreaking are the most popularjobs) and some of which are territorial. Car theft has become the crime of choice for most successful thugs since the 1980s. Most car thefts are organized through syndicates with established financiers, distributors, and links with the police. 29 Since the advent of more sophisticated immobilizing devices in cars, it has become simpler for thieves to steal the driver as well as the car. Consequently, the rate of car hijacking has increased dramatically. So have the casualties. The young men who take the cars typically get paid between R800 and R1500 for their troubles - approximately what they would earn in a month if they held an unskilled job, and representing between one fiftieth or one hundredth of the value of the car. 30 Rape is another matter. I cannot claim to be able to comprehend the ethics of rape amongst tsotsies nor have I spent time talking with self-proclaimed rapists about rape. But I have spoken with many women on the subject In Soweto, if you ask a young woman what percentage of men are rapists or potential rapists, you will generally get the answer: about twenty or thirty out of a hundred. Older people, who tend to have a broader definition of coercion, put the figure higher. Of course, such a figure could never really be determined scientifically' or accurately. That is beside the point Every girl growing up in Soweto knows of others who have been raped, often with extreme violence, and whether the proportion of potential rapists is really five or ninety five percent of men and boys, she will never know who the actual rapists are until it is too late. So life has to be lived on the presumption that all men are rapists. Sometimes it seems as if rape in Soweto is but one front in a pervasive war on women in that place. Given a high incidence of rape (some analysts have rated Soweto a world peace-time leader in this field), the job of protecting young women falls on the shoulders of young men. 31 The police have traditionally proved as incompetent and unsympathetic in this field in South Africa as they tend to be elsewhere, although since the 1994 election a rape and domestic violence
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unit has been established at Baragwanath Hospital to coordinate medical care and criminal investigations. Every girl or woman knows that if she is going to be out with a boyfriend, he has to be able and prepared to defend her should others try to take her by force. Of course, in Soweto, as elsewhere, most rape and sexual abuse takes place inside homes, perpetrated by men related to, or known by, the victim. This indubitably helps secure the subordination of women within the society at large, although the dynamics are somewhat different from those that concern us here. According to accepted protocol amongst young, and not so young, men in Soweto, if you talk to a man's girlfriend in his presence at a party, or anywhere else for that matter and you are not another woman or a blood relative, you are presumed to be 'proposing love' to the woman and thereby challenging that man's manhood. The boyfriend then has every right to warn you to desist. He should do this politely at first. If you persist in talking to his woman, he must become aggressive. If you don't stop, a fight will very likely ensue. Many young men have died in this way. The only times I have been directly involved in violence (apart from being shot at by the police when they opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators) have been as a result of arousing male jealousy. Because of the danger of the situation arising where a girlfriend' is taken from a young man by force, young women will sometimes encourage their boyfriends to fight, for if her 'boyfriend' can not or will not fight, she will not be secure. Consider my friend Lizzy's story. She told it to me one afternoon when I asked how she got the scars on her legs: I had gone there to that party with my boyfriend. Then another boy said to him: 'I like your girlfriend.' Then my boyfriend said to him: 'no, my girlfriend is not going anywhere.' Then they just say: 'boy, if you don't want to get in trouble, go.' Then my boyfriend went. After that they shout to me and they say: 'hey you sefebe' (you know what's the meaning of sefebe, it means 'bitch' [the dictionaries define it as 'adulteress' in Sotho and 'prostitute' (isifebe) in Zulu]) 'you don't want us when we introduce ourself to you, so you're coming with us today whether you like or not. We don't ask for permission, we just take you. If you don't want to, you don't want to, but you'll go with us.' But I say, 'no, I won't do that. Why you say my boyfriend must go away before he get in trouble? What you want to do of me?' Then they say, 'you have a big mouth.' He started to hit me. Then I said: 'no, you mustn't smack me like this.' I fight for myself. They were two, they both just hit me and hit me... Then I ran away to my mummy and told my mummy what's going on. Lizzy was fourteen at the time. Sometimes a girl will deliberately stimulate her boyfriend's jealousy, just to 'test' him. Such testing takes a number of forms and can serve a variety of purposes. Not only does it serve to bind the boy more securely into the girlfriend's orbit, but it can be important in gauging how far a young man is prepared to go in order to protect what he will call his property', or his 'rights': his girlfriend. If you are young and female and want to avoid these dynamics, which reign in virtually every public, or semi-public, gathering (such as taverns and parties) you have
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to stay home. Most do, in fact, which is why you will find a great preponderance of young men at public gatherings - unless they take place inside churches. This further exacerbates the tensions. The dominant style of fighting in Soweto is vicious, deadly, and fast. There is rarely scope for steady escalation in the manner of an old-fashioned fistfight. Everyone either has a weapon or presumes the opponent has one, so the successful combatant is the one who hits first and hits hard. Consequently, an argument which springs from a simple misunderstanding, and which could be simply resolved if calmness and reason were able to prevail, can erupt into full-scale war because of a single pre-emptive strike. Matters are made worse by the habitual consumption of intoxicating liquors in quantities sufficient to preclude rational discourse. One common and successful tactic is to hit your opponent on the forehead with a half-full bottle of beer. The glass will break and beer and blood will blind him. Then you either finish him off with the broken bottle or run away from his friends in case they have a gun. When it comes to the crunch, you must have friends who will assist you, even if you do not make a career out of fighting. Few boys grow to maturity in Soweto without being stabbed at least once. These days guns are the things you really have to watch out for. In some areas of Soweto, such as the Phiri district near where I stay, which had been notorious for violent crime in the 1970s and early 1980s, the comrades engaged in campaigns to 'discipline' the thugs and combat crime. Sometimes, as in Phiri, they were successful. In many communities the balance of power between Comrades and Thugs has shifted, since the early 1 990s, in favor of the criminals. Phiri, for example, which had been cleaned up by the Comrades, had, by the end of 1993, begun to resemble its old violent past Bubu was out of gaol and busy raping schoolgirls. Chafunya, down the road in nearby Senaoane, was amusing himself by terrorizing the community with his gang of young friends and settling grudges with the Comrades in Phiri. The 1990s have also been marked by a large increase in the number of firearms available in Soweto. Some were obtained through robbery of cars and houses in the white suburbs, many were imported from Mozambique where the ending of the civil war and the relative strength of the South African Rand stimulated a brisk trade in cheap AK47s. Since the elections of 1994, the Government of National Unity has been endeavoring to restructure the police force in order to create a service responsive to community needs and trusted by the people they are supposed to serve. It remains to be seen whether this effort will succeed. In the second half of 1990 and the first part of 1991, the people of Soweto found themselves at war with residents of the migrant hostels aligned with the Inkatha Freedom Party. 32 This conflict precipitated a degree of cohesion amongst the youth of Soweto. Young men were expected to fight to 'defend the community'. But the conflict was much more problematic than previous violent struggles against representatives of the apartheid state. For in the struggle against Inkatha, there were no easy indicators such as white skin or police uniforms marking out the enemy. Everyone had black skin and the fighting was done mostly at night Sometimes, the word 'Rand' was used as a shibboleth, for Zulus typically pronounce 'R' as 'L'. The enemies were people who, in the anti-apartheid scheme, were supposed to be brothers. One consequence of this was that it became dangerous to wear the colors of political parties.
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Political tee-shirts went quickly out of fashion. Another consequence was that hostels became 'no-go' areas for township residents and people with 'deep' or 'typical' Zulu accents, such as are common amongst Inkatha members who tend to come from the rural areas of KwaZulu/Natal, became targets of attack. 'Inkatha' became the name of a pervasive and general fear for Sowetans. Even young children would speak of the Zulu nationalist organization: 'Inkatha is going to kill you,' was a common playful threat that belied a deep sense of dread. Everyone had heard stories of children killed by Inkatha Fortunately for Sowetans, the conflicts around the hostels subsided in 1991. Despite desultory efforts by the ANC to organize 'Self-Defense Units', the groups of armed young men who had risen to defend their communities never became entrenched in Soweto as they did in other parts of the country. 33 Around Merafe Hostel in Mapetla Extension, for example, there were several groups who tried to organize the residents' side of the war but none was able to conduct affairs on a more than ad hoc basis. Nobody was in a position to give orders and command obedience. During the fighting, anyone could come, don a white headband to distinguish themselves from the red-banded Inkatha warriors, and join the fray. if you didn't like the orders of the day, or thought yourself braver than they, you could always go your own way. It helped to have a few beers first and many inyangas ('1erbalists) were busy preparing muthi (medicine) for protection and power. The Youth League in Phiri wrote to ANC Headquarters, asking for help in establishing Self-Defense Units, but their letters were unanswered. Some members of the Youth League formed a group, calling themselves 'Fighting Youth'; half a dozen young men sharing a common love of politics and fighting. In 1991, three members of the group were 'recruited' into the ANC guerilla wing umkhonto we sizwe and given rudimentary weapons training at a local school, but the police raided the house of their recruiter, confiscating weapons, and shortly afterwards the main man of Fighting Youth was arrested trying to rob a municipal policeman of his shotgun. After 1991, political mobilization amongst the youth declined markedly. There had been a flurry of activity in 1990, before the war began, with the launching of ANC branches and organizing the return of the African National Congress to 'above ground' politics. Activism lost its lustre, however, when the new structures were established and politics became a matter of routine: attending meetings of the local Youth League branch and submitting reports to ANC Headquarters where the leadership was preoccupied in top-level negotiations with the regime. The 'Youth', which at the beginning of the 1 990s was a widely organized and powerful, if mercurial, political force, became relegated to a residual category; the bearer of special problems (now known as 'marginalized youth'), along with women and rural people. 'Politics' fell out of fashion. 34 Apart from the exciting interlude of the war with Inkatha, the era of negotiations and elections brought to prominence those dull bureaucratic procedures that bedevil mass parties everywhere. Political organizations became the province of the self-seeking and the terminally active. The 'Youth' lost most of their capacity to articulate demands outside of formal educational institutions. Increasingly, their campaigns within the schools, such as the 1993 campaign against the matriculation examination fee, came to be viewed by the Sowetan public
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and political leaders as mindless disruption. Few people, however, were in a position to stand up to the schoolboys. The slogan, popular during the 1980s of'liberation before education' has come to haunt the ANC leadership. The ANC Youth League, previously the South African Youth Congress and thriving home of all young activists, spent most of its 1994 Congress pondering its dismal future in the face of declining membership, widespread political apathy, and an imminent ANC government threatening a ministry of youth affairs. During the long years of 1992 and 1993, when negotiations seemed stalled and communities were wracked by political violence which the ANC was unable to counteract (despite all those years of militant rhetoric about their 'military wing', umkhonto we sizwe) active membership of political organizations declined. People began to feel betrayed by the political leadership. Many comrades contemplated shifting their allegiance away from the ANC to the Pan Africanist Congress whose militant rhetoric offered the promise of a continuing fight against the 'settler colonialist regime.' Some made the switch, but in January of 1994 the PAC abandoned their armed struggle. This move destroyed the PAC's support base, which had been overwhelmingly young and male and, in my experience, drawn to the organization less for reasons of philosophy than the desire to fight. From that point onwards, the era of political fighting was over. The habits of militancy, however, die hard. In his first year in office, President Mandela has found himself making increasingly strident threats to 'come down hard' on people using violent means of protest, from university students to police and civil servants. He ordered the police to raid the home of his estranged wife who was accused of corruption and berated white university rectors for 'reverse racism' in being afraid to discipline unruly students just because they were black. *** Older residents say Soweto has become progressively more dangerous since the early 1970s. At that time, administration of the townships was taken from the Non-European Affairs Department (NEAD) of the Johannesburg City Council and placed in the newly instituted West Rand Administration Board (WRAB), part of the Bantu Affairs Administration Board system directly under the national government. 35 Under the administration of the West Rand Administration Board, services and public amenities in Soweto, never adequate to begin with, declined markedly while charges increased. 36 The Administration Board, which was charged with carrying out policy and regulations handed down from the Department of Bantu Affairs and Development in Pretoria without independent powers, was also seen to be riddled with corruption. Senior officials, all Afrikaners, paid themselves hefty salaries out of the rents of poorly-paid Sowetans. Excluded from voting at the national level, residents of Soweto had little effective local political representation either. 37 A system of elected Native Advisory Boards had been established in the older townships of Soweto under the Native (Urban Areas) Act which was expanded as the township grew. But, as their name suggest, these bodies were purely advisory. Some local notables were drawn onto the Advisory Boards and the African National Congress, prior to its banning in 1960, generally supported participation in the boards although their Programme of Action in 1949 advocated
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boycotting all separate political institutions. 38 Replacing the Advisory Boards in 1968 an Urban Bantu Council was established for Soweto, including the big hostels in central Johannesburg. Established under the Urban Bantu Councils Act of 1961, this body was elected on an ethnically segregated black voters' roll and a council chamber was built in what was zoned to be Soweto's central business district in Jabulani. But the Council had very limited powers and every decision it made was subject to review by the Administration Board. By the early 1970s the UBC was already in decline, and in 1976 the Chairman of the UBC, David Thebehali, as well as being known as the 'Mayor' or Soweto, was referred to as 'Mr Ten Percent' after the poor turn out for voting. After the uprising of 1976, the National Party Government introduced a new system of Community Councils to replace the Urban Bantu Councils, giving them slightly increased powers and making them directly responsible to the Minister rather than the Administration Board. These bodies were rejected by African leaders and enjoyed minimal popular support. Although these local bodies had no significant powers from the point of view of improving the quality of life for most Africans - something most people by that time considered would require a complete transformation of the racist structure of the state - they did have access to certain functions, particularly regarding the allocation of trading sites, which allowed councilors to accumulate wealth and reward supporters. Despite their lack of community support, the Community Councils continued in operation, eventually becoming the City Councils of Soweto, Dobsonville, and Diepmeadow with full autonomy of local government 39 These bodies were corrupt and incompetent as well as lacking popular support Their popularity was not improved when, charged with the task of drawing up and controlling its own budget in 1979, the Council discovered it was broke and had to increase rents. Turnout for local elections in Soweto was always poor - in 1978 3,600 Sowetans voted 40 - though even at the height of the struggles of the 1980s when the dangers of being branded a 'sellout' or 'collaborator' were extreme, there were always some residents willing to participate. During the apartheid era, however, few residents found satisfactory political avenues within official institutions for solving their problems or airing their grievances. Increasingly, local representative bodies served as scapegoats for the hated apartheid authorities of the central government in Pretoria. In 1977 a group of prominent Sowetans, under the stewardship of Percy Qoboza, editor of the World newspaper, came together to form the 'Group of Ten' with the idea of providing representation for Sowetans and devising a new system of local government They were promptly arrested. During the uprisings of the 1980s, particularly during the states of Emergency, community councilors became subject to attack by residents. After 1983, following the lead of community organizations in the Eastern Cape town of Craddock, a network of street committees and civic associations was established in Soweto. In the mid-1980s these operated as attempts to create 'organs of people's power' taking over some of the functions of local government While they never had access to the resources necessary to run a city properly, or become fully fledged 'organs of people's power', they were important in organizing opposition
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to the community councils, Black Local Authorities, and the central state. Street committees also operated as informal courts and dispute resolution forums, although the excesses of these 'kangaroo courts' brought forth reaction in many areas, particularly where they were in the control of young men and active in punishing older men. Street committees and civics helped establish local cohesion behind the programs of the United Democratic Front, and ultimately the ANC, through organizing rent boycotts, consumer boycotts, and stayaways. In response, more than 30,000 people were arrested and detained throughout South Africa in the period 1986-88 during a concerted effort by the government to destroy this movement. 41 While there is now some dispute amongst representatives of the ANC over their responsibility for the slogan, during the 1980s many young comrades were committed to the idea of making the townships 'ungovernable'. In 1986 a boycott of rent, service charges, and electricity bills was initiated which continued into 1994, despite periodic efforts by the civic associations and the ANC leadership to halt it The history of rent and service charge boycotts in Soweto is both a reflection of the collapse of state authority and a contributor to that collapse. In each instance of boycott, community solidarity organized primarily through the civic associations, prevented authorities from punishing individuals in arrears. The authorities were nervous about imposing coercive measures upon the whole community for fear of provoking the sort of violent response which Soweto had become famous for. Because Sowetan families typically have no, or very small, savings, the build-up of arrears quickly became impossible for them to pay and authorities were forced to write off the debts that accrued. The Soweto Civic Association was effective in organizing boycotts, but completely ineffectual in securing compliance to agreements negotiated on residents' behalf Every time representatives of the authorities and delegates from residents' organizations negotiated agreements whereby residents would resume paying charges, residents would refuse. In 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1994 agreements were reached. In each instance they quickly collapsed, leaving the continuing boycotters vindicated and those who resumed payment bitter and frustrated. Eventually the Government paid. 42 In January of 1994, when Mandela, along with delegates representing all political organizations, endorsed the Local Government Transition Act requiring residents to pay R45 per month in service charges, most Sowetans greeted the measure with derision. The agreement also granted leaseholders of public housing stock full freehold title to their property without charge. Part of the agreement reached in January 1994 involved the strategy of creating visible improvements in Soweto's services in order to encourage people to pay, and break what some people referred to 'the culture of non-payment' 43 However, as soon as agreement was reached on funding for improved services, the proposed residents contribution of R45 representing a mere 18% of the cost, the municipal workers embarked upon a month-long strike demanding backpay. Services declined still further. A year later, barely a quarter of households were paying rent and service charges and Mandela was launching a campaign to promote payment Since 1990, representatives of municipalities, the national government, political parties, 44
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and civic associations have been negotiating new forms of local government for the region. 45 Democratic elections for new local governing bodies have been scheduled for October. Efforts by the Government of National Unity to enroll voters for local elections have so far met with as much success as those of the National Party government previously. *** 'Yes,' said Mr Motingoe, my grandfather in Soweto, 'it was the procedure that on arrival one had to report at the pass office for endorsement of your arrival here. So I went to the Pass Office in order to fix my papers. So, when I got there to the Pass Office in Albert Street, I found that the yard was full of queues of people reporting for endorsement. On that day I was so well clad that I appeared immaculately tidy. And those days I was using a Battersby hat. It was quite common for me to use a hat. It was a nice expensive hat. Now, as I was drawing nearer the window, it became my turn now to be attended to by the officer there. Whilst I was standing outside the window, this man leaped over the window and gave me such a hot clap in my face. My hat flung one way and I had to draw nearer, closer to the window. I could not pick up my hat immediately because my concern was to see to it that my papers are completed. This white chap here did not speak tome as to what to do, but the clapping of my face by hand indicated that this man did not want me to appear m front of him with a hat on my head. 'One thing I have to confess was that clap was so hot that it reminded me of my home. I felt like returning home immediately.' Everyone laughed. Grandfather repeated the punchline over a few times: 'a hot clap.' He likes this story. Granny joined us at the dining table. 'That was a good one,' said MaMfete, his daughter, chuckling. She recited a brief prayer of thanks in SeSotho and we began to eat 'After I'd been attended to,' Grandfather continued (when he starts on one of his tales, he will not be diverted) 'I went to pick up my hat and went on pondering whether it was worthwhile really coming to Johannesburg.' The year was 1939. *** Prior to the election of April 1994 and the inauguration of the Government of National Unity, the state (usually spoken of as 'the System') was typically seen by black South Africans as an instrument of oppression of black people and a racist benefactor of white people. As the Freedom Charter of the Congress movement pronounced: 'our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality.' 46 Justice and equity were not things you expected of the System. Whatever their legal entitlements, Africans were usually compelled to approach representatives of the state as supplicants, and those representatives were more often than not arbitrary and capricious, like
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the Boer who clapped Grandfather Moetingoe. Despite the fact that in 1932 the Native Economic Commission could report that the 'Natives are a law-abiding people' (para.772), Africans have never experienced laws of the state as an expression of their own social being, a representation of the common good, or any of the other things that, it is commonly supposed, instil in citizens a sense of belonging to a political community with just laws and legitimate public authority. 47 'European' law and the public authority of the state were always alien impositions. Customary Law, too, insofar as it was codified and administered under the auspices of the state was also alienated from indigenous cultural forms. The Commission report quoted above recognized this implicitly when it attributed the reason for the law-abiding nature of Natives to 'habits' deriving from the past, rather than positive sense of loyalty, obedience, or willingness to submit to legitimate authority: 'Under their tribal system discipline was well-maintained and the habits so instilled in them persist today in the majority of Natives.' (772) Yet, as Nelson Mandela exemplifies, there was also a profound commitment on the part of Africans, a commitment by no means restricted to an elite, to principles of the rule of law. Perhaps deriving from a faith in the Biblical prophecies and a Christian stoicism, as much as the pre-colonial African virtues which Mandela also evoked at his trials, Africans have displayed a tremendous faith that justice and freedom would come. Throughout the twentieth-century history of the South African state, until the early 1990s, Africans in South Africa were subjected to a steadily increasing burden of oppressive and unjust laws imposed by more or less arbitrary and corrupt public authorities. The pass laws alone had the effect, after they were extended in 1952 to include all black people over the age of sixteen, of creating a whole population that was presumed to be criminal unless they could prove otherwise. 48 It is hard to imagine how even a basic respect for law could have survived those decades of apartheid. For most Africans, negotiating the labyrinthine regulations of the pass laws was the primary exposure to the realities of state power. Like undocumented aliens of the United States in the 1990s, survival in the pass system, particularly in the urban areas, meant staying abreast of the legal technicalities. Exposure to the pass laws was to know a power that was at once systematic and arbitrary, material and mysterious. Rights of residence in the urban areas, for example, were not rights at all, but categories of exemption from a blanket prohibition on the presence of Africans in town. Proving your entitlement under these categories meant accumulating bits of paper and finding the right office to attend. 49 After that, you had to carry your book with you at all times in order to avoid arrest by the likes of Mr Matodzni and the Constables Van Der Merwe. At the end of the day, your basic rights of residence, movement, and employment were dependent upon the whim of an Afrikaansspeaking clerk behind a window in the Pass Office. Yet, despite its oppressive and racist character, the South African state was fundamentally a lawful, if not legitimate, state. 50 For the most part those who acted in the name of the state were authorized through laws passed in the legislature as a result of public debate and subject to judicial interpretation and review. 51 A great deal of the struggle against apartheid took
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place in the courts, particularly with cases brought against public authorities to hold them accountable to the letter of the laws. 52 At the same time, however, for the African population, the vast bulk of rules and regulations to which they were subject were the result of administrative decree. Indeed, under the Native Administration Act of 1927, the GovernorGeneral, acting through the Department of Native Affairs, had virtually unlimited legislative, executive, and judicial powers over people classified as 'Natives.' 53 Rules were mostly made by officials in distant offices who were unseen and unknown to the people affected by them and who might as well have represented an invisible and almighty power. Nor did black people generally have access to reliable education about procedures of law and government Particularly since the introduction ofBantu Education in 1954, the curricula of what might be called 'civics', or 'social studies', history and related subjects in schools which might be expected to impart an understanding of the functioning of government have been dedicated to the propaganda requirements of 'separate development'. Indeed, as the Eiselen Report, which laid out the rationale for the system of 'Bantu Education' made clear, the whole school system was made subordinate to the propaganda requirements of the state. 54 My own discussions with high school students in Soweto in the 1 990s have revealed a profound ignorance of the workings of government 55 Moreover, particularly after the 'securocrats' took control of the state in the mid- 1 970s, a number of secret and unlawful institutions were created in the name of 'covert security'. 56 Covert operations had the effect of adding a sense of omnipresent evil to the alien powers of the state. These powers were summed up in the name 'the Government' On August 16th, 1990, the day when the war with Inkatha started at Merafe Hostel, near where I stay in Soweto, I sat down with a group of friends and recorded a discussion about the causes of the violence we were witnessing. Everyone was unanimous in attributing the cause of the fighting to the Government After some time, Madumo brought up the case of the death of Tsietsi Mashinini, leader of the Students Representative Council during the Soweto Uprising of 1976. He had recently died, in exile, in Guinea. Clearly the Government was behind the death. Several other examples of unnatural deaths of activists in car accidents were cited. 'Does that mean that an activist cannot die except by being killed by the Government?' I asked. 'Yes,' replied Seipati, a newly graduated schoolteacher. 'We take it like that Even if we know that he can die a natural death or an accidental death. But we will never believe that, for the fact is that we know that he is against the Government and the Government is capable of doing anything to such people.' 'And we know that the government is always looking at those who are active,' added Mpho, a final-year high-school student Apartheid, or the System, were names typically applied to the more or less visible domains of law, politics, and policing. As everyone from the youngest child could tell you, the System was
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a product of 'the Whites'. Most black people, however, particularly when addressing a white person, were careful to distinguish between the System and the Whites. That is, the System was made by Whiles to oppress Blacks, but was not the same as The Whites, for not all white people supported the System and you could hate the System without hating Whites. This last was particularly important because the 'moral high ground' in the anti-apartheid struggle was the opposition to racial discrimination and the struggle had to be spoken of in terms other than the replacement of white power with black power. Oftentimes the category White was sub-divided into the two component parts of English and Afrikaans or, more commonly, and insultingly, the 'Boers'. Apartheid was frequently seen as a product of the Boers, and the distinction between the Afrikaner people and the state was more ambiguous than that between the System and Whites in general. 57 In the way young people I know in Soweto understood the world of apartheid, the 'Government' was a different category from the System. For the Government represented an invisible power. Certainly there was a public face to it, embodied in the President and all his men. But the real source of power was invisible. In countless discussions about politics in Soweto I have often been struck by the mysterious quality of this thing they call the 'Government'. It would be spoken of as if it were an omniscient and omnipresent Being. Once someone entered 'politics' they entered into a life and death struggle with this being. And knowledge of the nature of the Government, because the Government was a power within an essentially secret domain, was arcane and beyond the ken of most people, for the truth about the Government was only known by the Government Neither the President, nor any of the men that made up the Government, could be trusted. Everything they said was a lie. It was wise to believe the opposite. When the Government said things like the Communist Party is full of traitors seeking to impose atheism and Russian domination, people read the statement to mean: the Communist Party is for the people. At this level, black people routinely inverted public statements by those speaking in the name of the state. They were by no means foolish to do so, for the apartheid regime had a long history of unashamed and well-documented mendacity. Moreover, apartheid itself 'Separate Development' they called it, which was proclaimed by the authorities and for a long time sincerely believed by their supporters to be in the best interests of the whole country, black and white, was experienced by Africans as a massive lie. The real power of the idea of 'The Government' derived from its being the name of an ultimate effective cause of misfortune. Like the violence of the gods, which, as Walter Benjamin teaches, announces their existence, state violence in South Africa served in bringing into being this mythic force of Government. 58 In this sense, it was an evil power, or the name of a coterie of powers, which were assimilated into existing categories of everyday experience. While people did not necessarily speak of the Government as having supernatural powers, such as those possessed by witches and sorcerers, the ways in which 'the Government' became the name of the cause of misfortune worked in much the same way as when a person is said to be bewitched. At the root of these powers, both in witchcraft and with 'the Government', is the fact of radical uncertainty. Bad things happen. They must have a cause. There may be no
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immediate evidence of the cause. (Or, what amounts to the same thing, the immediately specifiable cause is not considered to be the ultimate cause.) Yet there must be someone, as well as the obvious something, behind the misfortune. The difficulty is deciding who. Prior to Mandela becoming President, there was no-one who could speak of the powers of Government with authority. There were many, however, who would try. Because of the dispersed nature of authority in Soweto, the parameters within which interpretation of events are deemed valid are wider than they might otherwise be in communities where authority is less fluid and modes of verification, 'proof, more secure. The ultimate cause of misfortune is invisible. This can cause some difficulties of interpretation. If, as is widely assumed, life has a meaning, so too must death. Apart from the rather too unusual instances of death from extreme old age, every other death has a direct social cause. That is to say, as well as knowing what caused a death, relatives and friends must also determine who caused it. There is no such thing as an accident. Sickness and death are mobilized and sent by enemies, and enemies are pre-eminently motivated by jealousy. If the misfortune is deemed to be 'political', such as the death or disappearance of a political activist or the outbreak of violent conflict within or between organizations, the real cause will be the Government. It is in the nature of these assertions that there cannot be any sufficient proof to the contrary. In the South African case, however, such suppositions about the activities of government agents were by no means always foolish. Enough people were known to have been arrested, tortured and assassinated for reasonable people to suspect the engagement of state power in the widest range of crimes. But whether or not there was any actual, or even possible, involvement of agents of the state, the evil powers attributed to 'the Government' would typically be said to be at work. Thus that power grew. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that there was any deliberate strategy on the part of state authorities to foster this dimension of state power. Indeed, I have seen no evidence in documents, the press, or public utterings, that state officials, or political observers, are even aware of this phenomenon. Of course, such processes occur in all states, and the shadowy, 'magical', aspects of state power are arguably always as important as the supposedly 'rational' agency which is usually attributed to states. 'As a matter of fact,' wrote Theodor Herzl of his efforts to create a Jewish state, 'a mixture of human and superhuman goes to the making of a State.' 59 In the South African case, however, given that it was the majority of the population who were subjected to state power as an alien form of rule, and given that the terms of the struggle to transform the state were articulated in a western European language of justice, rights, democracy, and legitimacy, the politics of truth surrounding these supernatural powers is perhaps even more significant In the era of apartheid, many of the misfortunes of a person's life could be readily linked to the misfortunes of a whole nation suffering oppression. This sometimes made them easier to bear, for there was a widespread expectation of 'freedom in our lifetime.' Since 1990, and even more so since the election of 1994 when Mandela announced victory with the words 'free at last', failure to 'progress' can no longer be accounted for by reference to the shorthand phrase
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'victim of apartheid'. Unless you are one of the few who can point directly to something like twenty seven years on Robben Island, if you blame your misfortunes these days on 'apartheid' people in Soweto will laugh at you. They are more likely to retort that you are lazy, a fool, a drunkard, or just plain useless. (There is still some mileage to be had from this line when addressing white people, however.) A big problem, then, of community life is that of explaining why some people are 'progressing' and others are not. In Soweto, 'progress' is generally spoken of in economic and cultural terms. You are said to be 'progressing' if you are in a position to earn sufficient money to adopt the trappings of a middle class style of life. And middle class is largely synonymous with 'white'. For many, the meaning of the category was learnt through service in white households. For those without direct experience of middle class worlds, television, particularly in the form of the ever-popular soap operas Days of Our Lives and The Bold and the Beautiful, provide content for the middle-class character. Popular local African-language television serials uniformly portray affluent black families with suburban flair. Black Americans seem like the epitomy of style, wealth, and success. Education is seen as the key to economic and social advancement. And there is now a substantial and rapidly growing black middle class, located for the most part in suburbia. They dominate the key local image-making media. That is not to say these notables control the ownership and editorial content of the media, but their 'image' (in the broadest sense) is omnipresent in the media, particularly television. Everyone in the township can name the 'stars' of sport, music, business, politics, film and television etc. against whose success they must measure their own achievement Success comes with its own risks. In every street, in every family, in every location, there are some who are benefiting from the new advantages that are emerging, and there are others who remain where they are. For every person who 'progresses', there are many who will be dependent upon their beneficence. Yet counterposed to the new dynamics of progress and social mobility is what might be called a moral center of gravity wherein poverty and greater need ground claims upon public resources and entitlement to state assistance. To be poor, then, is to be more deserving, yet, to be rich is to be envied. To be envied is to be exposed, for from the envious can come all the malignant forces of witchcraft and sorcery, not to mention more mundane forms of violence. From Progress, then, a myriad of problems emerges of which two are most important: discriminating entitlement, and protecting against jealousy. For you cannot survive unless you share, but no matter how rich you are, there will always be more need than you can meet. The most effective way of securing necessary protection, physical as well spiritual, is to nurture family and pseudo-kin relations so as to create a network of people, deceased as well as living, who will come to your aid. In this context, too, the only legitimate way of discriminating between recipients of largesse is through the metaphor of family. People thus excluded may still feel jealous. They may still be moved to engage in physical or spiritual violence (sorcery), but if they have no claim to be embraced in the kinship network they will have no legitimate grounds for reprisal If your enemies lack legitimacy, protection is easier to manage - so long as you maintain good standing in the community. As the new democratic regime committed to 'a
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better life for all' becomes more entrenched, the political implications of this dynamic are likely to become ever more significant. For the people connected to resources of state power will be subject to the same dynamics of social jealousy as the privately wealthy. In public life, the typical Sowetan response to protecting oneself from such forces is usually called corruption and nepotism. In the sort of worldview among Sowetan youth I have outlined, the power of the System, emanating from the Government, could not bring anything but misfortune to black people. It was not seen as an entirely destructive power, however, for it was capable of bringing enormous advantages to the Whites whom it favored. With the ending of Apartheid, the meaning of misfortune began to change and the possibilities of political entitlement expanded dramatically. During the period between 1990 and 1994 in Soweto I witnessed the crumbling of certitude around the ultimate cause of misfortune and the emergence of a broader convocation of fears, woes, and confusions. Since April 1994, the state, personified in Nelson Mandela, has become the focal point of a tremendous hope for the alleviation of hardship and suffering. Mandela himself has many times denied that the people who voted for him see a 'magic wand in the new government.' 60 They have a right to expect change, he argues, and are right to judge the new government upon their ability to deliver change. But the way in which the new rulers are judged in practice will have a great deal to do with popular understandings of the intrinsic capacities and powers of Government measured against their own experience of change. But no matter how difficult life remains in the future or how disappointing the new regime might turn out to be, the evil, magical, power of the Government has been' substantially neutralized. In a very real sense, this is freedom. It is, of course, entirely possible that some of the new people who have been drawn into the orbit of state power could start to behave in ways which bring about the rebirth of this malignant state power in new forms. *** Footnotes Note 1: The Star, August 8th, 1968. Cited in Heribert Adam, Modernizing Racial Domination: The Dynamics of South African Politics (13erkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p.12. Back. Note 2: I have suggested some of the principal features of the dialectic within the South African state between representations of Blacks and political representation by black people in The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Back. Note 3: Cecil Rhodes, 'Speech to the Cape House of Assembly on the Glen Grey Act' July 30th, 1894, extracted in Arthur Percival Newton Ed.) Select Documents Relatina to the Unification of South Africa (2 vols in 1) (London: Cass, 1968), p.125. Back. Note 4: The main exposition of this doctrine is identified with Col. Stallard, Chairman of the Transvaal Local Government Commission (1921) which advocated the principle that Natives should reside in urban areas only for such time as they 'minister to the needs of the white
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man.' [Report of the Transvaal Local Government Commission (1921) (T. P. 1-1921).] For a discussion of the Stallard and other official inquiries into the question of Africans in urban areas at the time of the founding of Soweto, see Adam Ashforth, Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Ch. 4. Back. Note 5: The available literature is not rich. For the most part, Sowetan life has been written off as a tale of woe secondary to the main story of Apartheid. An insight into the mind of the officials responsible for the creation of Soweto can be found in a personal history of the township written by the bureaucrat whose fiefdom it was. This mind was thoroughly Benthamite in its sanitary ideas: order and regulation were the supreme virtues, efficiency the only goal. Where I see a city emerging into life and chaos from the strictures of Apartheid, Mr Carr sees only 'decline' from the halcyon days of the sixties, when he had everything under control. J.P.W. Carr, Soweto: It's Creation. Life. and Decline (Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations, 1990). See also the essay by the former mayor of Johannesburg (1969-70), Patrick Lewis, 'City Within a City': The Creation of Soweto (Johannesburg: Johannesburg City Council, 1969). A compendium of out of date facts can be found in Pauline Morris, Soweto (Johannesburg: Urban Foundation, 1981). In 1994, the History Workshop in Johannesburg and Free Filmmakers, produced a six-part television documentary entitled Soweto: A History. Back. Note 6: See, kW.Stadler, 'Birds in the Cornfields: Squatter Movements in Johannesburg, 1944-1947,' in Belinda Bozzoli (Ed,), Labor Townships and Protest: Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979). Back. Note 7: 'Greater Soweto' is the name given to the areas covered by the three local authorities with jurisdiction in the region: Soweto, Diepmeadow, and Dobsonville. Officially, the subdivisions of these areas are known as 'townships', although Sowetans typically refer to them as 'locations' [eLokshini] after the old denomination of'Native Location'. There are no accurate and up-to-date maps currently available for this area, and the number of settlements is changing regularly as new squatter camps spring up. Residents have their own names for many locations. If you want to navigate your way through these places you have to move with someone who knows them, and is known by them. Approximately half a dozen white people live in Soweto, mostly foreigners married to former political exiles. Back. Note 8: One of the ironies of the South African state is that while it was premised on a system of racial domination, and while there was, and is, no shortage of white racists in the country, at the highest levels of the state, officials were able to explain and justify their actions with little reliance on explicit doctrines of white racial superiority. For discussion of the various schemes of legitimation proffered during the years before majority rule, as well as accounts of the relationships between these discourses and labor control, see Ashforth, Politics of Official Discourse. Back. Note 9: At the time there were divergent opinions about the size of this 'influx' as it was called, and no reliable figures as to its size. In its submission to the Native Laws Commission of Enquiry, replying to a questionnaire circulated to municipal authorities by the Commission,
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the Johannesburg City Council reported in 1946 that 'between 1936 and 1946 the Native population increased 72%.' The economic historian D. Hobart Houghton has estimated that during the war years alone the number of Africans employed in South African urban industries increased by 74%. The South African Economy (4th Ed.) (Cape Town: Cape Town University Press, 1973). For description of the impact of this immigration upon the working of the Johannesburg City Council and the development of Soweto, see W.J.P. Carr, Soweto Ch.7. Back. Note 10: For discussion of the thinking behind planning for these settlements during this period, see, Alan Mab in, 'Conflict, Continuity and Change: Locating "Properly Planned Native Townships" in the Forties and Fifties," (Paper presented to the Planking History Study Group Symposium, Pietermaritzburg, September, 1993), and 'Origins of Segregatory Urban Planking in South Africa, 19OO-194O,' Planning History 13 (1991), pp.68-81. See also, P. Wjikinson, 'Providing "Adequate Shelter": the South African state and the "Resolution" of the African housing crisis in Johannesburg, 1948-54', in Doug Hindson Ed.), Working Papers in Southern African Studies vol.3 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983). Back. Note 11: At least, these were the terms used by the then Minister for Co-Operation and Development, Dr P.G.J. Koornhof, in describing that period during an interview on November 18th, 1981 in his office in the old Native Affairs Department building in Pretoria. Koornhof joined the Department of Native Affairs on his return from Oxford in 1952 to work in a special research section reporting to the Minister, Dr Verwoerd. During his time in Oxford, Koornhof had spent months in the Bodleian Library reading the reports of the Poor Law Commissions. While his own impact on policy-making in the 1950s was probably less than decisive, thirty years later when he was Minister his recollection of that period was infused with a Benthamite enthusiasm: 'having studied those reports, it became clear to me why Britain became the miracle of the previous century. The reason being basically that they increasingly enabled themselves to meet up with the basic demands of housing, of sewerage, and factory situations, and that sort of thing. And I've been influential in carrying those notions very much into government since 1952.... And I tell you that we avoided a revolutionary situation in the fifties basically because we've applied the good things which Britain applied in the previous century in a similar situation. There's no question about it... And I thoroughly hold the belief that if we can meet up the demand in our situation with regard to education and what goes with that, then we will definitely, and certainly as that cup is there, obviate the bloody revolution in our time.' Kooruhof himself provides striking testimony to the South African regime's ability to transform itself After leaving ministerial office, he served for a time as Ambassador to Washington. Following his return home, he left his wife of forty years to move in with a young woman, his former secretary, a 'Coloured.' Fortunately, the Immorality Act outlawing interracial sex had been repealed by that time. Back. Note 12: See, J.D. Rheinallt-Jones, 'Native Housing in Urban Areas with Special Consideration of its Social Aspects' Race Relations Yournal 18;1951, pp.96-124. Back. Note 13: See, Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid. 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Back.
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Note 14: In 1946, the JCC attempted to appeal to the African urban middle class by establishing in Dube, an area which is now part of Soweto, a 'Native Village' where people could build their own houses on lots leased from the city. The idea was not popular. For several years the only residents in Dube Village were the Mncube family, after whom the main road through Dube is now named. 'It's no fun having a township to yourself,' Mr Mncube, a lecturer in the Bantu Studies Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, is reported to have said while waiting for a businessman friend to build and occupy a house across the street. [Star August 27th, 1951.] Most people were not prepared to risk investing their money without the security of freehold and after 1948, the National Party government in Pretoria refused to allow the JCC to offer anything other than 30-year leases on the building plots. (Originally they were offering 99-year leases.] See, Susan Parnel, 'The Ideology of African Home-Ownership: The Establishment of Dube, Soweto, 1946-1955.' I am grateful to Dr Parnel for sharing her material on Dube and the history of urban segregation 'with me. Back. Note 15: I am grateful to my friend Jombolo Ntshangase, who wrote a Master of Arts thesis in the Department of African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand on the subject, for insight into the history and morphology of isicamtho. Back. Note 16: For accounts of this historic event, see John Kane-Berman, Soweto: Black Revolt. White Reaction (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1978) and Baruch Hirson, Year of Fire. Year of Ash: The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution? (London: Zed, 1979). Back. Note 17: An average of 800 people were killed on South Africa's roads each month in 1993. South Africa's road death toll per unit traveled is ten times higher than the United States' Dr Johan van der Spuy, Director of National Trauma Research, Medical Council of South Africa, quoted in Sowetan, January 4, 1994, p.9. Back. Note 18: The Johannesburg Star of March 1, 1993 trumpeted on its front page that 'SA Crime leaves world in its wake', following up with a page two story: "'Murder City" tag confirmed', in which it was proudly reported that 'Johannesburg [including Soweto) has indeed achieved the dubious status of being the murder capital of the world,' with residents scoring a 1 in 647 chance of being murdered in 1992. By contrast, Cariocas in Rio de Janeiro, the former champion, racked up a mere 1 in 1,158 chance, and New Yorkers a pathetic 1 in 4,303. Back. Note 19: In August, 1993, the Sundav Times reported police statistics over the preceding three and a half years of 52,800 people suffering a violent death, of whom 8,967 were involved in incidents which the police described as 'political unrest.' [August 22, 1993, p. 6X.] Back. Note 20: NEC Report para. 383, cited and discussed in Ashforth, Politics of Official Discourse p.83. Back. Note 21: Over the years a chilling lexicon of terms was applied in legislation to such people: 'Loose Kaffirs,' 'Idle and Undesirable Natives', 'Superfluous Natives', 'Redundant Natives', 'Surplus People'... being but a few. These categories were counterposed to that of 'Poor Whites', for whom the 'Civilized Labor' policies were developed. For discussion of the category 'Idle and
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Undesirable Native' in legislation and case law regarding Africans in urban areas for the first fifty years of Union, see, Gordon Davis et al Urban Native Law (Port Elizabeth: Grotius, 1959), pp.151-161. Back. Note 22: South Africa has always had a comparatively low ratio of police officers to population, 1.4 per 1,000 in 1984 (compared with 2.3 in Britain, 2.6 in Germany, and 4.4 in Northern Ireland). [Figures cited in Lawrence Schiemmer, 'South Africa's National Party Government,' in Peter Berger and Bobby Godsell (Eds), A Future South Africa: Visions. Strategies. and Realities (Boulder: Westview, 1988), p.32.) Back. Note 23: For discussions of the militarization of the South African state during the 1 98 Os, see, Jacklyn Cock and Laurie Nathan (eds) War and Society: The Militarisation of South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989). Back. Note 24: The best account of some of the 'traditional' attributes of manhood-making in this part of the world is still to be found in G.M. Pitje, 'Traditional Systems of Male education Among Pedi and Cognate Tribes,' African Studies Vol.9, no.2 (1950), pp.53-76, and 9;3 (1950), pp.105-201. Back. Note 25: The battle against tee-shirts was initially conducted by the authorities under regulations permitting censorship of material likely to promote racial hostility. In the Halt MI Apartheid Tours case (36/1983), it was argued by the Censorship Board that '[t]he message carried by the shirt remains that of discrimination by whites against blacks, and the blunt, almost brutal way in which it is represented will, in the opinion of the Board, cause or heighten ill-feelings against whites amongst a substantial number of blacks.' [Cited in Louise Silver, A Guide to Political Censorship in South Africa (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1984), p.114.] In September, 1988, regulations were proclaimed under the Public Safety Act of 1953 (the law governing, amongst other things, the proclamations of states of emergency), which empowered the minister to prohibit 'persons in general or persons belonging to a category of persons' 'without prior notice to any person and without hearing any person' from 'being clothed in apparel specified in the order, at a place or in an area or in circumstances likewise specified.' regulation 9 (c) (ji), cited in Carol Cooper et al (eds) Race Relations Survey 1988/89 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1989), p.560.] Back. Note 26: After the demise of the Struggle, schoolboys managed to keep the excitement alive by continuing the tradition of 'hitting targets' during school hours. At the school near where I stay, Mapetla Tswana High School (nicknamed by students the Nicaragua School of Socialism), adolescent boys regularly enliven their protest activities by hijacking passing delivery vehicles and burning them in the school yard, thereby provoking a conflict with the police and disruption of bread and milk supplies in the neighborhood. Back. Note 27: During the late 1980s, when censorship was still tight under the regime of P.W. Botha, the musician Blondie Makhene resuscitated his flagging career by recording instrumental versions of the melodies of struggle songs under the name of the African Youth
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Band. These recordings became popular throughout the country, even being played on the state controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation radio stations. Eventually the SABC management became aware of what was happening, but was unable to censor the songs because while words, images, and even colors were subject to restriction, sounds escaped into the air unfettered. It was Blondie's version of 'Ntate Modise' which the SAB C played to accompany the broadcast of Nelson Mandela's walk through the gates of Victor Verster prison. Of the hundreds of popular 'struggle songs', few date from the post-1990 period. When Mandela announced victory in the 1994 election, and again when he was inaugurated as President of the Republic, many of the songs sung in celebration in Soweto's streets called for his release from prison. Back. Note 28: See, Charles van Onselen, The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of Nogoloza Mathebula (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1984). There is also a typescript published by the South African Department of Prisons in 1975 by a black prison warder, E,R,G, Keswa, entitled Outlawed Communities: A Study of Contra-Acculturation Amonn Black Criminals in South Africa on prison gangs. Back. Note 29: For an account some incidents in the wars between United Democratic Frontaligned comrades and supporters of the Azanian People's Organization, see, Nomavenda Mathiane,... (1990). Back. Note 30: Cars are expensive. A new basic Japanese four cylinder car costs approximately twice the annual income of a black schoolteacher with a three year teaching diploma. Yet cars are hijacked at gun or knife point in Soweto at the rate of about ten per day, a considerable figure if you consider that half of the population of the place is under fifteen and most of the rest are too poor to own cars. In the first two months of 1994 there were five fatalities reported in hijackings. [Sowetan Feb.25, 1994, p1.] Since the election in April, the rate of vehicle hijackings in the PWV area, including Johannesburg and Soweto, has doubled. [Sunday Times, July 17, 1994, p.1] Back. Note 31: In 1988, there were 19,368 rapes reported in South Africa, of which 819 were of women classified While. The National Institute of Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders suggests that the reported figure is only one twentieth of the actual number. This would result in an average of 1,000 rapes per day. While the statistical methods for attributing such a disproportion between reported and unreported cases might be questionable, my experience in Soweto suggests that the vast majority of rapes are unreported, either because of fear of retaliation by the rapist or skepticism about the police and courts' abilities and willingness to bring justice. See, Lloyd Vogelman, 'Violent Crime: Rape' in Brian McKendrick and Wilma Hoffinan (eds) People and Violence in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990). In March of 1995, South African Press Association news reports were quoting unnamed sources alleging the rape of children under ten, believed apparently to secure a cure for AIDS, at the rate of 100 per day in Soweto. Back. Note 32: There have been many clashes between hostel dwellers and township residents over the years. In 1957, Zulu speaking men from Dube Hostel went to war for a weekend against the
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largely Sotho-speaking residents of nearby Meadowlands, leaving 40 dead and more than 100 wounded. During the 1976 uprising, with the assistance of the police, Zulu men from the hostels attacked schoolboys trying to enforce consumer boycotts and stayaways. Similarly, during the uprisings of the 1 980s, there were clashes between the migrants, who were usually employed in poorly paid jobs with families in the rural areas dependent upon remittances of their wages, and the young comrades of the townships. Back. Note 33: In 1991, the ANC published a pamphlet entitled For the Sake of Cur Lives: Guidelines for the Creation of People's Self-Defense Units, in which it was argued that '[c]learly we cannot rely on the apartheid police and army for protection. When they are not attacking the people they are encouraging, siding with and arming the ultra-right forces, warlords and vigilantes.' (p.4) The document goes on to describe procedures for organizing, arming, and training SDUs with a chain of command and political discipline which can best be described as fanciful. In the East Rand townships of Tokoza, Vosloorus, and Katlehong, conflict between SDUs and hostel residents became entrenched, continuing even after the elections, and abating only during the occupation of the area by troops of the South African Defense Force. Back. Note 34: In July, 1991, I attended a local branch meeting of the Youth League where most of the meeting was taken up with presentation of reports (the women's affairs secretary being reprimanded for not having a written report prepared), discussion of an upcoming soccer match with the neighboring branch, and debate over ways to discipline members of the executive committee who failed to attend meetings. One suggestion on the latter issue was that offending members should be forced to stand on one leg for the duration of the meeting following that which they absconded from. ('rile proposal was not endorsed.) Back. Note 35: In 1948, the National Party advocating a program of apartheid won office at the national level by defeating the United Party under the leadership of Gen. Smuts, who was seen as more 'liberal' and 'integrationist'. The Johannesburg City Council, however, remained under the control of the United Party and for the following two and a half decades there was constant friction between the City of Johannesburg and Pretoria over 'Native policy", particularly over the extent to which segregation should be imposed upon Johannesburg's residents. Many people saw the imposition of the Administration Board as a final defeat for the Englishspeaking liberals of Johannesburg, although it should not be forgotten that all public authorities were committed to racial segregation of some sort. For a first-hand account of these conflicts, see, W.J.P. Carr, Soweto. For an account of the Administration Board system, see, Simon Bekker and Richard Humphries, From Control to Confusion: The Changing Role of Administration Boards in South Africa, 1971-1983 Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1985). Back. Note 36: While the rental charged for each house remained constant at R3.65, the 'service charge' levied by the Administration Board rose from R2.50 in 1970 to Ri 1.50 in 1978. Meanwhile the surplus raised by the WRAB rose from R2,499,000 in 1973/4, the first year of operation, to R7,024,000 in 1975/6. More than half of the income of the Administration Board was derived from the sale of liquor, over which it held a legal monopoly. As a result of a
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concerted advertising campaign, sales of liquor increased by 64% between 1973/4 and 197516. (In 1976 the schoolchildren burnt down the liquor stores and beerhalls.) [Source: Republic of South Africa, Report of the Commission of Inquiry in to Legislation Affecting the Utilization of Manpower excluding the Legislation Administered by the Departments of Labor and Mines) (1978), tables 3.23 and 3.24. The small subsidy that had been paid by the City Council from the revenues of 'white' Johannesburg towards the administration of Soweto was discontinued under the WRAB, which had to be entirely self-funding, along the lines of the Resettlement Board which administered the townships of Dub sonville and Meadowlands. For discussion of the economic background to the administration of the WRAB in Soweto during the 1970s, see, Jolin Kane-Berman, Soweto, ch.5. Back. Note 37: The principal rationale for denying Africans permanent rights of residence in urban areas was the argument that if they held such rights it would be impossible to deny them political franchise. For discussion of these arguments, see, Ashforth, Official Discourse, pp.128-9. Back. Note 38: See, Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 London and New York: Longinan, 1983), p.78. Back. Note 39: Between June 1978 and December 1979, the Soweto Council gained powers over housing, land allocation and trading matters, a municipal police force popularly known as the 'green beans'), budget and treasury, and salaried officials. By 1980 it was supposed to be operating as a full municipal government, but it had no powers relating to the crucial issues of'influx control' and labor bureaux, which remained in the hands of the Administration Boards. Back. Note 40: Robin Bloch, 'All Little Sisters got to try on Big Sister's Clothes: The Community council System in South Africa,' (University of the Witwatersrand, African Studies Paper No.115), p.9. Back. Note 41: Figures from the Human Rights Commission, cited in SAIRR, Race Relations Survey, 1988. Back. Note 42: By 1991, the central government, via the Transvaal Provincial Administration, was providing 'bridging finance' for Soweto's deficit at the rate of R7.5 million per month. Most of this money was paying salaries of staff who had neither the resources nor the inclination to provide services. (The Star, August 16th, 1991, p.13.) Back. Note 43: One of the popular 'struggle songs' from the 1980s while calling on all to join the struggle boasts: In Soweto we stay for nothing, and the informers have been defeated. I often heard this phrase quoted in song early 1994 when people were discussing Mandela's call to start paying 'rent'. Back. Note 44: Statement by Gauteng housing and local government MEC, Dan Mofokeng, to Gauteng legislature, Tuesday, February 21, 1995. Back.
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Note 45: For an account of some of these negotiations and the ways in which they have become increasingly technical and removed from popular involvement by residents of black townships, leading to the isolation of civic association representatives from their township constituencies, see, Alan Mabin, "'Forget Democracy, Build Houses": Negotiating the Shape of the City Tomorrow,' (Paper presented to the History Workshop Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, July 1994). Back. Note 46: 'Freedom Charter', in Thomas Karis and Gail Gerhart (eds), From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa. 1882-1964 (4 vols) vol.3, p.205. Back. Note 47: Nelson Mandela eloquently argued this position when requesting that the Magistrate recuse himself from the case in 1962 when Mandela was accused of inciting strikes and leaving the country without a valid passport: It is understandable why citizens, who have the vote as well as the right to direct representation in the country's governing bodies, should be morally and legally bound by the laws governing the country. It should be equally understandable why we, as Africans, should adopt the attitude that we are neither morally nor legally bound to obey law which we have not made, nor can we be expected to have confidence in courts which enforce such laws. [Transcript of trial held in the Old Synagogue court, Pretoria, October 15th to November 7th, 1962, reprinted in Nelson Mandela, The Struggle is My Life (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1986), p.137.] Back. Note 48: In the year 1968/9, for example, the Commissioner for Police reported that 632,077 black people had been arrested and sent to trial for infringements of the pass laws, 26.5% of total prosecutions for the year in question. [Quoted in Muriel Horell (ed.) A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1970), p.164. Back. Note 49: For a sense of the frustration and effort that this quest for a pass and endorsement could entail, see, Elsa Joubert, Poppie Nongena (New York: Norton, 1980) ch.4. Back. Note 50: Throughout its history, the people who have acted in the name of the South African state have gone to great lengths to devise schemes of legitimation capable of giving them a sense that the oppression of which they were part was both just and necessary. I have described some of these schemes in Official Discourse. Back. Note 51: Judicial review was, however, generally considered as being limited to the manner and form requirements of legislation and not the substance. See, John Rund, 'Aspects of Judicial Review in Southern Africa,' XV CILSA, 1982, p.276. See also, D.H. van Wyk, 'Judicial Review in the Republic of South Africa, Jarbuch Des Offentlichen Rechts Der Gegenwart, 29 (l980)(Tubingen, Peter Haberle). Back.
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Note 52: The annual Surveys of Race Relations published by the Institute of Race Relations give accounts of these contests year by year. Back. Note 53: For the official history of the Native Affairs Department in the early years, and an outline of the extensive powers they exercised, see, Howard Rogers, Native Administration in the Union of South Africa (2nd ed.) (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1947). Back. Note 54: See, Union of South Africa, Report of the Commission on National Education. 1949-1951 RJ.G. 53/1951], esp. Ch. 4. Back. Note 55: I have heard it said by a high school graduate with a strong interest in politics, for example, that the three flags at the center of the old South African flag indicated that South Africa was still a colony of England and France, which was why Margaret Thatcher was sending the CIA to kill opponents of the regime. In 1990, too, I had some difficulty explaining to certain local comrades that the CIA would not send an Australian to live in Soweto in order to spy on the activities of the Youth League. Back. Note 56: A glance at any edition of the investigative weekly, The Weekly Mail, will provide numerous examples of these organizations. Back. Note 57: Most Sowetans will say that when they have to deal with white South Africans, they prefer dealing with Boers rather than English because with the Boers 'you know where you stand'. With a Boer, it is simple: he doesn't like Blacks (the figure of the Boer is almost always male in this kind of talk, when a female is involved she is inevitably a 'Boer lady'), he calls them 'kaffirs' and he wishes they didn't exist, so, unlike the Englishman, he doesn't pretend. He says: Do this.... Do that....' And the Black must just do it or be 'klopped', beaten. The typical adjective attached to the word Boer is 'rude'. But when a Boer does befriend a Black, then he is a true friend. He will say: 'You know, you're not like other Blacks,' (not 'kaffir'). And the Black will say: 'You know, you're not like other Whiles,' (not 'Boer', because for Blacks 'Boer' is a term of abuse even though for militant Afrikaner nationalists it is a badge of pride). Back. Note 58: Valter Benjamin, Critique of Violence', in One Way Street and Other Writings (trans by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter) New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1978), p.148. Back. Note 59: Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State, An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Ouestion New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, 1946 [1st, 1896]), p.137 Back. Note 60: Nelson Mandela, '100 Days Speech to Parliament,' August 18th, 1994. Back.
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Ashforth On State Power, Violence, Everyday Life - Soweto

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State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

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State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto Adam Ashforth

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

State Power, Violence, Everyday Life: Soweto

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