Sovereignty & democratic exclusion in the new South Africa

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Sovereignty & democratic exclusion in the new SouthAfricaLars Buur a ba Danish Institute for International Studies , Copenhagenb Research Associate, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research , Johannesburg E-mail:Published online: 06 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Lars Buur (2005) Sovereignty & democratic exclusion in the new South Africa, Review of AfricanPolitical Economy, 32:104-105, 253-268, DOI: 10.1080/03056240500329205

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Sovereignty & Democratic Exclusionin the New South Africa

Lars Buur

In this essay I will outline the contours of the attempt by the ANC governmentto reorder state-civil society relations. This will be done by delineating theform of civil society participation that the government has promulgated inthe field of justice enforcement in order to ‘tame’ or direct the uncontrolledaspects and forces of self-organisation emanating from the struggle againstapartheid known as ‘people’s power’. The article will argue that theestablishment of institutions like the Community Policing Forums (CPF) werecreated to harbour and give direction to these forces rests on and allows fora particular type of democratic citizenship or normative ethical being, whileexcluding other types of political-ethical being. The essay illustrates how pastideas about friends and enemies of the ANC are used as the interpretive lensto decode opposition to the CPF.

Since 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has embarked upon a profoundventure to reorganise South African society. The aim has been to undo injusticescommitted under the apartheid regime by bringing everybody under the samesovereign rule of law: ‘One law for one nation’, as the first page of the newConstitution puts it. This exceeds by far any narrow definition of a project of law andhas had an impact on nearly all spheres of society. As Comaroff and Comaroff havepointed out, the project of the ANC is an attempt to ‘fashion a highly enlighteneddemocracy’ and yet

to free itself from a legacy of Eurocentric domination: a postcolony rooted in a modernistculture of legality that seeks, explicitly if uneasily, to make space for cultural diversity(2004:189).

My interest in this essay is not directly in the uneasy accommodation of culturaldiversity and custom, and their ambivalent interpolation in the South Africandemocracy and legal system. Instead, I want to explore the attempt to ‘accommodate’an equally ambivalent domain of the socio-political reality in the new South Africa.In particular, I want to focus on how the state and the ANC have tried both to undoand capture those forms of organisation that played an important role in the struggleagainst apartheid and upon which the new democracy was going to be based – or atleast that was the hope. These were radical forms of democratic organisation that,during the struggle, gained the reputation of being impossible to control, ruled bycrowd sentiments and intrinsically prone to violence, creating a ‘parallel’ or‘popular sovereign’ (Seekings, 2001; Nina, 1995). On the one hand, the politicalleadership of the ANC distinguishes itself from popular manifestations grounded in

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254 Review of African Political Economy

past forms of mobilisation that are seen as anachronistic or at odds with the newformal constitutional democracy. On the other hand, ironically, the ANC constantlydraws on the rhetoric of the past struggle against apartheid and insists that thedevelopment of the new democracy is a direct continuation of that history. Thequestion is how such a conundrum plays itself out. Are there spaces, even uneasyones, for a diversity of forms of democratic participation other than the onessanctioned by the new state and the party in charge of the state? If such spaces exist,what form do they take? Can a formal liberal democracy like South Africa – not onlyfounded on one law but also achieved through violent struggle – infuse itself withforms of democratic organisation based on other values? Does an adherence toliberal democratic organisation truly mark a contrast to these other forms oforganisation, as has been argued? What if, to paraphrase Mbembe (2001), opposingtrajectories of democratic organisation are inscribed in the same paradigm? Couldthe clash between old and new forms of democratic organisation be grounded incontradictions built into the constitution of the new democracy? If so, what are thesecontradictions and how are they settled?

I approach some of these questions by way of analysing the state’s attempt to reordercivil society relations in community-based justice enforcement in the adjoiningtownships of Port Elizabeth. Elsewhere (Buur, 2003; 2005), I argued that the use ofcorporal punishment and other disciplinary devices by vigilante formations calledinto question both the state monopoly over legitimate violence and the state’sattempt – by institutionalising the Bill of Rights – to regulate and govern the field ofjustice enforcement in Port Elizabeth’s townships. The use of force by vigilanteformations was justified by residents and the vigilante groups themselves, as well assections of the police, first, by the belief that rampant, out-of-control crime threatensthe lives of township residents and the well-being of their communities and, second,as a result of the alleged failure of government and state to safeguard communitiesagainst criminals because of the incapacity and corruption of the South AfricanPolice Services (SAPS). The failure by the police to deal with crime was explained bytheir need to adhere to the credo of human rights which was hampering their efforts.The use of force was deemed necessary as an information-extracting device and as away of inculcating the moral values of township residents, in particular unrulyyounger members.

For all the celebration of horizontal fraternity (Anderson, 1990) institutionalised bythe new South African Constitution and exemplified by the rights-bearing subjectequal before the law, many township residents are still excluded from the mostmeaningful forms of compensation for not taking the law into their own hands:access to jobs (Nattrass and Seekings, 2001; Terreblanch, 2003), participation in themembership of civic consumerism (Khunou, 2002:71-73) and purchase of insurancepolicies (Buur, 2003). Despite such continued marginalisation, the fiction of unity isstrong, as the 2004 election results show, which gave the ANC a 70 per cent nationalmandate – and over 90 per cent in Port Elizabeth’s townships – further underscoringthe legitimacy of both the party and the state as the exclusive guarantors of collectivewell-being and thus emphasising what Comaroff and Comaroff described as the‘indivisibility of nation from state’ (2004:190). While the use of vigilante force wasunderstood to represent a critique of the regime of rights, it was also presented as adefence of the new democracy, whose justice enforcement institutions – theCommunity Policing Forums (CPFs) – were failing to meet township residents’needs. The explicitly stated aim was not to undermine or challenge the newgovernment of the ANC, but rather to assist it; informants constantly reiterated that

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working ‘in the name of the people’ was not posing a threat to ‘the people’sgovernment’ of the ANC and its new institutions (Buur, 2005).

In this article, I want to take this argument further and explore in greater detail localattempts to organise societal fields such as justice enforcement through thetechnique of community policing that is gaining currency. In particular, I want toexamine what it means when an apparently neutral or depoliticised global devicefor inclusion of communities in policing is inserted into the South African contextwith its particular history of anti-apartheid struggle. This is important, I willsuggest, not only because of what takes place in the field of justice. Newly emergingsocial campaigns and movements contesting state policies, such as the LandlessMovement, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the Sowetan Electricity CrisisCommittee (SECC) and the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), draw to a large extent onthe popular democratic legacy of the struggle against apartheid and are confrontedby official, state forms of local organisation that resemble the democratic modelapplied in the CPF. I will here argue that the ‘other’ of the new democraticdispensation was not only the apartheid regime and its racialised legacy; aspects ofthe struggle against apartheid also qualify as ‘other’: the mode of popularsovereignty – captured in the slogan ‘people’s power’ and mode of democraticorganisation – the ‘people’s court’ – that brought ‘the people’ to power. We need,therefore, to outline the salient features of the ‘other’ of the democratic form oforganisation and ethical being that the new legal-political order tries to promulgate.First, I will outline the formal attempts to reorder state–civil society relations throughcommunity policing that has followed the mode of popular sovereignty thatmaterialised during the 1980s. I will then explore how past and present forms ofdemocratic organisation play themselves out today.

The Depoliticised Form of the Community Policing ForumIn an attempt to regulate the relationship between the state and the wider public, theANC-led government established Community Policing Forums (CPFs) in 1995. TheCPFs had been anticipated from at least 1991, but they were officially introducedthrough the Interim Constitution (CRSA Section 221, Act 200 of 1993), whichallowed for a network of community policing forums to be established at police-station level throughout the country. Only eighteen months into the term of theGovernment of National Unity, CPFs were legislated through the South AfricanPolice Service Act of 1995 (SAPS Act 68 of 1995) and they remain part of law in termsof the final Constitution of 1996 (CRSA Act 106 of 1996). The reform of the SouthAfrican Police Force (SAPF), symbolically renamed South African Police Service(SAPS), was crucial as an attempt to bolster its legitimacy facing a more thansceptical public, which remembered the role of the police in the torture and quellingof internal resistance to the apartheid regime. Integral to this was the 1996 NationalCrime Prevention Strategy’s (NCPS) explicit aim of capitalising on ‘the participationof civil society in mobilising and sustaining crime prevention initiatives’ (Dixon,2000:14). Earlier draft documents had opened the way for incorporating andrecognising organised civic formations emerging from the struggle against apart-heid, often referred to as ‘alternative and autonomous, non-state systems ofordering’ (Schärf and Nina, 2001). Instead of cooperation between the state systemand non-state forms of ordering systems, the role of community participation islimited to working in partnership with the state police on the mutual identificationof and solution of local problems (Section 18(1) SAPS Act 68 of 1995). Initially, CPF'swere to work closely with the police through the designated community police

Sovereignty & Democratic Exclusion in the New South Africa 255

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officer, whom each police station is required by law to appoint. However, during thefirst years of implementation the CPFs functioned primarily as a civilian check onpolice negligence of abuse of power. The relationship with the police structurestherefore often became strained, with little active participation by CPFs in de factocrime prevention and agenda setting, which as Dixon has illustrated became‘skewed in favour of the state, its agents and institutions’ (2000:14).

Despite this, considerable energy was put into the formation and education of CPFs.Members of CPFs are formally, democratically elected at an Annual General Meeting(AGM) by the communities adjoining a police station. A CPF comprises achairperson, vice-chairperson, secretary and treasurer. Various portfolios for youth,crime prevention, schools, gender and business are either identified at the AGM orappointed subsequently by the board. The CPF and each sub-committee elect theirown chairperson, secretary and so on, and they work according to the stipulationslaid down in the CPF constitution; thus mirroring the various tiers of governmentand the ANC itself, both in organisation and in adherence to constitutionalism. CPFparticipation rests on basic standards of democratic behaviour that emphasiseaccountability and equality. Such behaviour would disregard specific racial, ethnicand social, class mores as the basis for democratic organisation which should behierarchically encompassed under the constitution. Furthermore, the rules laiddown in the CPF constitution must be respected and participants are accountable tothe forum. Most CPFs have an office with a phone in the police station and ideallyhold daily meetings with the Community Policing Officer to synchronise policeactivities with the work of the CPF. While CPFs have access to limited funding andmay receive training in human rights and strategic crime prevention, few resourcesare generally used on concrete activities. From the beginning, the relevant legislationstipulated that a CPF form safety and security structures (popularly known as S&S)to work under its jurisdiction. In Port Elizabeth, S&S structures first became aconcrete reality after 2000 (Buur, 2003). Made up of locally elected or appointedmembers, S&S structures are organised around the lowest level of local governance:the ward. S&S members may serve on CPF sub-committees and may receive humanrights sensitivity training.

Even though non-state popular justice self-regulation has continued to play acrucial role in local justice enforcement up through the mid-1990s and to the present– often in conflict with the state initiative – the CPF is the most visible expression ofthe South African state’s community policing policy. It became the main instrumentfor the state (and the ANC) to domesticate and to defuse potential antagonisms in thejustice field. While local extra-state justice enforcement structures proliferated in thetownships of New Brighton and Kwazakele outside Port Elizabeth after 1999 (seeBuur, 2003; Buur and Jensen, 2004; 2005), the New Brighton CPF could claim that itinitiatives taking care of justice enforcement, the CPF was the only initiative that hadofficial approval. They could, with certainty, assert that every project related to crimefighting ought to be conducting its work in the name of the CPF and be regulated byits constitution. Other structures had local community support, but they also ran thedanger of being classified a priori as anti-ANC because of their unofficial status. TheCPF can, as such, be interpreted as an attempt to contain the energies of ‘the people’spower’ in state and dominant party practices – what we with Canetti (1988) canunderstand as a move from ‘open’ to ‘closed’ masses – through the use of‘governmental communitarianism’ (Delanty, 2003:87; Rose, 1999). This can clearlybe seen as a positive, structured and coordinated attempt to mobilise and harnessactive democratic participation and self-management in justice enforcementalongside the police services. In this sense, the CPF can be seen as an attempt to

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accomplish a form of democratic socialisation by capturing township residents inparticipatory forums that in a variety of ways compel citizens to act according tostandards of democratic behaviour played out under conditions regulated by a moreor less well defined set of democratic procedures. Considering the extremely violenthistory of democratic nation-state formation in South Africa, this is, after all, nosmall matter.

However, and this is often overlooked in the present celebration of ‘participation’, italso implies the imposition of a potentially proactive model of policing on(underdeveloped) countries which, some would claim, lack the democratic historythat underpins the CPFs’ role in long established democracies (see in particularlyBayley, 1995:91). The introduction of CPFs has, quite legitimately, been seen as animposition of ‘Anglo-American state-police-centred policing’ (Dixon, 2000:15), partof the enforcement of a particular form of liberal democracy with no or little relevanceto the South African experience, which is guided primarily by a need for socialstability while pursuing economic growth, rather than community priorities(Brogden, 2004). It has even been suggested that it forms part of ‘a new colonialism’(Dixon, 2000:8; Brogden and Shearing 1993:95), mainly governed by the require-ments of ‘overseas aid’ (Brogden, 1996:225). As is well documented (see Brodgenand Shearing, 1993; Brogden, 2004; Dixon, 2000), the emergence of CPFs during theSouth African political transition forms part of wider systems of globalisedgovernmental change in which the community and its representatives become thespaces that order the interface between citizens-subjects and global institutions (seealso Rose, 1999; Garland, 2001). As I have illustrated, the South African CPF modelincludes the use of a spatial matrix based on the local governance unit of the wardfor ascendancy, which is more often than not at odds with the organising basis ofnon-state formations in the field of justice (see Buur, 2005). The CPF can also be seenas a formal redrawing of the space for governance between the authority of state onthe one hand, and the liberty of rights-bearing, autonomous, individual subject-citizens of the nation on the other, as Rose has pointed out (1999:167). One candebate, however, to what extent it is solely autonomous individuals that areproduced and not individuals conditioned by political allegiance to the rulingparty.

While this particular form of redrawing extrapolates certain representatives of thecommunity and transports them into the apparently neutral or depoliticised spaceof the police station, it also encourages and harnesses a particular form of politicalsubjectivity in the South African case, whose ‘other’ must be outlined in some detailto explain why CPF in South Africa was an appealing model for reordering state-society relations. This point has never really featured in the various rigorouscritiques of the CPF model; these tend to conclude with the argument that what isneeded is a greater reliance on ‘bottom-up’ and localised modes of justiceenforcement based on ‘what works’ (Brodgen, 2004:649). In the South African case,‘what works’ comes with a particular history, one on which the ANC, for a numberof reasons, did not want to base its new democracy.

Local Justice Enforcement & Political Contestation1

In South Africa, local justice enforcement has been intimately related to the changingmeaning of vigilantism (Buur, 2003; Buur and Jensen, 2004). Until the mid-1980s, theconcept of vigilantism was generally used in the same vein as categories like‘popular justice’ or ‘informal policing’, which referred to ordering activities thatwere undertaken outside the ambit of the apartheid state (Bundy, 2000). The term


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‘captured manifestations of social ordering’ related to the maintenance of peace andorder, some of which had a ‘conservative’ bent, addressing issues related to rapidurbanisation such as generational, class and gender conflict and emphasising themoral codes of African culture and tradition; others had either a ‘para-military’component or a ‘progressive’ attitude to social cohesion, addressing, for instance,civic issues (Seekings, 2001:85-86). In the 1980s, the concept came to denote twodifferent things. Most importantly, it came to denote ‘reactionary’ tendencies in theblack populations and to refer specifically to conservative vigilante groupings thatfought violently against anti-apartheid components in the struggle in blacktownships and homelands, more often than not secretly backed by the apartheidregime. As Hayson has shown (1989:2-7), this shift coincided with a more structuredinfusion of modern counter-insurgency warfare in South Africa after 1985, withemphasis on ‘low intensity conflict management’ with its roots in military theoriesemerging from the French general Andre Beaufre and the American colonel J. J.McCuen. The logic of these theories was institutionalised by the apartheid regimefrom the mid-1980s, first in its ‘total strategy’ and later in its Joint ManagementSystem approach, which dissolved conventional boundaries between military andcivil society and focused on ‘winning hearts and minds’ (known as WHAM). Anintegral facet was the emergence of the regime’s hidden hand or ‘third force’ whichinvolved ‘the clandestine creation of surrogate armed forces [which] appear toemerge spontaneously from the “people“ themselves’ (Ibid. p. 3). It is in this contextthat ‘concerned residents’ groups’ or, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission(TRC, 1998) calls them, ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary vigilantes’, emerged intownships around South Africa. It is generally agreed that the apartheid state wasinvolved in fuelling violence through what famously became known as ‘third forceactivities’ run by secret and extra-judicial security force units. Nonetheless, as theTRC made clear, not all vigilante activity was a product of state engineering:

Intolerant actions and coercive campaigns of the UDF2 and its adherents mobilised genuinedisaffection and anger amongst black residents, forming the basis for retaliatory actions by so-called ‘vigilantes’ (TRC, Vol. 2, 1998:302).

The mid-1980s saw the emergence of another potent understanding of what wouldcome to be conceptualised as vigilantism or mob justice: that of the ‘people’s courts’that formed part of building People’s Organs for People’s Power. Some regarded‘people’s courts’ as a continuation of the forms of self-regulation and communitydiscipline that had long been a feature of rural and urban communities in SouthAfrica (Bapela, 1987; see Schärf and Nina, 2001 for a recent summary). With the twokey mobilising slogans adopted by the ANC and the ANC-aligned UDF – ‘people’spower’ and ‘making the country ungovernable’ – the notion of self-regulation wasradicalised and adapted to the political struggle and as such went ‘beyond itstraditional roots’ (Suttner quoted in Nina, 1992:2). The slogans referred to attemptsboth to dismantle the apartheid government and its security forces, and to displacethe authority and reach of the apartheid state by seizing control of administrative,welfare, policing, judicial and other functions in the townships, thus creating analternative sovereign. ‘Building People’s Organs for People’s Power’ was intro-duced as a campaign in early 1986 following the collapse of the government-createdBlack Local Administrations. Here, residents started forming alternative structuressuch as street committees, area committees, people’s courts, school committees,residents’ associations and so on, acting in the name of the ‘liberated people’ (seeNina, 1992; Seekings, 2000; Schärf and Nina, 2001).3 The dual face of ‘ungovernabil-ity and organisation’ created a parallel authority that ‘was seen as part of a process

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of organising the future society’, as a prefigurative endeavour for the futuredemocracy (Nina, 1995:7; see also Mayekiso, 1996).4

The hope was that, along with taking the best from struggles for equality within theWestern legal system – for gender, youth, women and gay rights, for example – theideas behind ‘people’s power’, its courts based on its ‘own structures of legality’(Nina, 1992:3), would be carried over into the future liberated state, where notions ofpopular participation would prevail. Some commentators argue that, up to mid-1986, in the six to seven months when they functioned in an optimal manner, the‘people’s courts’ were relatively well organised and politically disciplined (Nina,1992; Mayekiso, 1996; Seekings, 2001). However, with the declaration of variousstates of emergency from 1986 onwards, the killing, imprisonment or exile of mostUDF township leaders and the counter-insurgency strategies of the apartheidregime, the picture became far more chaotic and contingent. People’s Courtssometimes meted out severe punishments – the infamous ‘necklace’5 being the mostnotorious – for crime and for other forms of behaviour considered deviant bytownship activists. Mob toyi-toying (an ‘amble-stepped’ quasi-military dance)became associated with the enforcement of the ANC/UDF’s ungovernabilitystrategy in township schools and streets, as did the ‘harassment’ of politicalopponents. Harassment took various interlinked forms: gatherings in front of thehouses of people classified as enemies, which were then attacked or burned down;the burning of people classified as enemies (the infamous askaris),6 the building ofburning tyre barricades and so on.

‘Conservative’ and ‘struggle’ vigilantes are described separately above, but theirdevelopment and intensification were simultaneous and intertwined. Channellingdissatisfaction against the regime in an attempt to gain control over the uncontrolla-ble masses created its own uncontrollability, manifest both as outbursts of extremeviolence and as potent circulating fears of hidden evil forces using opponents of theUDF to undermine the democratic revolution – fears that persisted throughout the1990s and well into the new millennium (a subject to which we will return below).

The Ambivalence of ‘the People’We know that the State used its considerable resources to wage a war against some of itscitizens. We know that torture, deception, murder and death squads came to be the order of theday. We know that the liberation movements were not paragons of virtue and were oftenresponsible for egging people on to behave in ways that were uncontrollable. We know that wemay, given the present crime rate, be reaping the harvest of the campaigns to make the countryungovernable (Tutu quoted in TRC, 1998:17).

The leadership of the various strands of the liberation struggle later acknowledgedbefore the TRC that they did not have control over the youth. At the hearing on theUDF, Mr Patrick ‘Terror’ Lekota, former UDF leader and current Minister of Defence,had the following to say about ‘necklacing’ by UDF activists:

We accept political and moral responsibility. We cannot say these people have nothing to dowith us. We organised them; we led them. When we were taken into prisons, they were leftwithout leadership and many of them, angry even at our arrest, did things which wereirrational (TRC, Vol. 5, 1998:383).

The then Deputy President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, was less reconciliatory; hemade it abundantly clear to the TRC that such groups ‘were controlled by


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communities themselves, not by ANC headquarters’, implying that, had the partycontrolled the communities, the situation would had been different.7 By saying this,he avoided taking responsibility for a whole range of human rights violationscommitted by aligned supporters.

The exchanges between the TRC and the ANC/UDF were notoriously ambiguous:ANC and former UDF leaders tried to maintain that the unrest formed part of itsstrategic intervention, while at the same time they had to acknowledge that ‘thepeople’ and various formations acting in their name did things that were deeplydisturbing and outside the movement’s control. Simply to say that the youth actedon their own would have been to reject key elements of the internal struggle.Ambivalence arises because, in order to keep political face with their constituency,ANC and UDF leaders needed to appropriate a domain of the struggle againstapartheid that they never fully controlled, while simultaneously they had todistance themselves from it to maintain their stance on human rights in the eyes ofthe international community (Buur, 2001). The images and fears of mob justice thattroubled the political class in the apartheid state as well as the leadership of theANC are not necessarily over, as Desmond Tutu’s, TRC Chairperson, explains.What I want to draw from this short summary is that, during the struggle of the1980s, when sovereignty was entrusted to the people, they became a scandal and anembarrassment for their leaders. The ‘people’ therefore could not be the agent for thedevelopment of the future society. When one takes into account the ANC’s socialistexile past, it is clear that the state and party would have to take the role of directingsocietal transformation: ‘Formally, it is a state based on a democratic constitution, astate which is obliged to serve the aspirations of the majority’ (ANC Strategies andTactics, 1997). However, the emergence of a ‘truly democratic state’ depended on thetransformation of the old machinery and such transformation had clear Jacobinovertones: ‘the location of the motive forces of the revolution at the helm of the state,as the classes and strata which wield real power’ (Ibid.) could only be the ANC (seealso Jensen, 2001).

Given that history, along with current political mobilisation in the name of ‘thepeople’, democratic consolidation and the challenges to it can be analysed byexamining the relationship between ‘the people’ and the guardians of the people,and how that relationship is organised. As a first approximation, it is worthconsidering Agamben’s answer to the question, ‘What is a People?’ (2000:28).According to him, the Western political concept of ‘people’ is inherently ambiguousbecause ‘what we call people was actually not a unitary subject but rather adialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the People as awhole and as an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the people as a subsetand a fragmentary multiplicity of the needy and excluded bodies’ (2000:30). Thedouble nature of the concept of ‘people’ as that which already is and that which hasyet to be realised – the citizen and the poor, underprivileged and excluded subjectaspiring to become a citizen – fits well with the idea of ‘achieving people’s power’ ofthe 1980s and with the ANC’s present democratic project, since its aim is the mergerof people and People. Agamben traces the attempts to stitch up this constitutivefracture in Western political history where its subject has, in different contexts, takendifferent forms but has always functioned as the ‘pure source of identity and yet hasto be redefined and purify itself continuously according to exclusion, language,blood, and territory. It is what has in its opposite pole the very essence that itselflacks; the realisation therefore coincides with its own abolition’ (2000:31). Thequestion is then: is the ANC’s attempt through the CPF to create order and to

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organise the justice field through a set of practices and institutions underpinning ademocratic liberal political model capable of doing so in a manner that allows forpluralism. The specificity of modern democracy is exactly that it recognises andlegitimises conflict over ideas about how society should be organised. Allowing forfierce contest over such ideas and over the right to defend such ideas is neverquestioned.

Democratic Form & ExclusionIn the following, I will consider to what extent the CPF model, as a depoliticised andneutral form of democratic participation, shapes inclusion and exclusion. Inparticular I want to explore what can be termed the internal limit for participation inthe CPF. As I have already suggested, the formation of CPFs is marked by normativeand ethical prescriptions defining a good citizen by particular qualities: equityallowing for community participation and accountability to the constitution. Whilethese ethical standards form part of basic democratic behaviour and as such areused broadly to characterise democratic participation in different contexts, I willsuggest that they become adapted and appropriated in specific contexts that notonly capture residents in participatory forums but produce such forums’ byforeclosing the options for participation in the field of justice enforcement.Furthermore, opponents to the CPF become recast as untenable people, who cannotbe included in democratic forums.

The vice chairperson of the CPF for New Brighton police station, on the outskirts ofPort Elizabeth, indicated how the normative-ethical nexus is understood in the workof local justice:

In a nutshell, this structure of the CPF is for no political purposes at all […] we want peoplewho are committed, to ensure that they do represent the interests and aspirations of thecommunity, not to represent their party political interests (interview, March 2001).

Recalling my earlier comments on the formal properties of the CPF the particularsocio-political circumstances of township residents do not seem to matter: thisseems to be an implicit critique of the conditions for democratic forms ofparticipation in the past based on ethnic and political belonging. The only provisoseems to be that participation ‘represents the interests and aspirations of thecommunity’ for particular political persuasion, solidarities or social membership.That the depoliticised form was intended to avoid the reproduction of past violencewas confirmed when the vice-chair spelled out that the CPF was an attempt to shunparticipation based on forms of organisation that drew their legitimacy directly orindirectly from forms of allegiances to ‘people’s power’. However, much hinges onhow one defines ‘the interests and aspirations of the community’. It seems to be adirect paraphrase of the 1980s political rhetoric that constituted part of the languageof the UDF and the ANC. As the vice-chair explained the problem, with democraticparticipation:

We always do accept all people, but the problem is that we must make sure that there is anelement of accountability. Where would an individual account? What if a particular personhaving joined as an individual, happens to misbehave, how are you going to deal with thatparticular person? (vice-chair, March 2001).

His remedy for making members of the CPF accountable was to implement the term‘structured organisations’ (political or non-political), because such organisations


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become ‘liable and responsible for the activities of that particular individual’. Overtime, the CPF in New Brighton settled on a model in which the CPF engaged solelywith recognised political and civil society groups who were then invited to sendrepresentatives to the Annual General Meeting (AGM). The executive body of theCPF was elected from this pool of people, who understood that they wereaccountable to the representatives electing them and, in turn, presumably represent-ing the will of the people. In this model, an election must be understood within thedemocratic tradition of the ANC which is based on internal discussions andexternal unity. Officially, the AGM elected the executive, but at the 2001 AGM and allsubsequent AGMs that I attended, participation in the election was based oncaucusing by the representatives participating in the meeting who appointed orpointed out the executive board, who then in turn set up the various subcommitteesof the CPF. Open elections were never held.

Where did the representatives come from? As it was explained to me, therepresentatives formally electing the CPF came from different political organisa-tions, church groups, civic, business and sport associations. In reality, hardly anyorganisations participated, other than members of the ANC tri-party alliance (ANC,SACP and COSATU), the ANC Women’s League, the ANC Youth League and so on.One PAC representative was present, as were two members of a well-known churchwho were also members of the ANC, but they were not included in the variouscaucuses where decisions were taken. As the local councillor described it, the type ofdemocratic organisation the government/ANC pursues with regard to the CPFincludes ‘people [who] are coming straight from their organisation: AZAPO issupposed to have a representative, the PAC is supposed to have a representative,ANC, South African Communist Party, Women’s League or whoever, they must bepart of the CPF’. Individuals attempting to participate in the AGM or members ofautonomous non-state justice enforcement groups (usually firm ANC members butnot delegated by the ANC or its alliance members), were either turned away orexcluded from participating in the election of the CPF or its various sub-committees.

Like an election in this scenario, the concept of accountability also needs to beunderstood in context. To be accountable to the people of the township did not meanaccountability directly to ‘the people’ or the community they represented as such,but rather to the organisations that presumably represented them. If there wereproblems with an individual representative, the organisation that had sent theperson to the AGM/CPF was the sanctioning body responsible for discipline if thisperson ‘stepped out of order’. Here people who do not belong to any known formalgroup cannot participate. Although the CPF operates within a liberal democratictradition and attempts to be inclusive, in practice it became operationalisedaccording to exclusive categorisations and generalised profiles of representativegroups or populations. In this case, the groups are based on formal politicalorganisations, to which democratic rights are allocated.

Unknown Forces Among UsThe CPF obsession with the screening of possible members operating outside theparty-political domain dominated by the ANC is fuelled by the recollection of ‘oldstruggle/friend and enemy’ schemes. In Port Elizabeth, such memories circulatedaround the ‘conservative’ group AmaAfrica.8 That this was more than fifteen yearsafter the last clashes between UDF and AZAPO supporters that tore Port Elizabeth’stownships apart in the 1980s, somehow did not diminish the attraction of the past asan explanation for present signs of dissidence. When the vigilante group Amadlozi

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emerged in 1999 in New Brighton, attracting a large following by 2001 (as I havedescribed elsewhere, Buur, 2003; Jensen and Buur, 2004; Buur, 2005), it wasinterpreted through the lens of the past; this became abundantly clear the first time Iinterviewed the councillor from the ward where Amadlozi held its quasi-courtsessions:

When we formed the UDF, we also got other organisations which were used by white people,you know. Organisations like AZAPO, they were fighting against the UDF […] People werekilled like flies at that time. If you check [the historical material] you will find that everybodywas dying and they were using other people against other people by telling their minds tochange [make activists into Askaris through torture], so they could use AmaAfrica. We stillhave those people between us.

Like semantic contagion, the slippage between people ‘used’ by some malevolentelements forming part of the apartheid state apparatus with reference to AmaAfrika;the explanation of ‘third force’ activities; the fact that AmaAfrika had started out as aconcerned residents’ group against the violence of the UDF youth; and then finally,fifteen years later, a new group called the Amadlozi emerged on the scene also calledconcerned residents (although this time fighting against crime) and led by a formerUDF activist, a former MK-cadre9 and one old AZAPO activist – all of these factorspointing in the same direction were conspicuous. The circulation of past strugglenarratives about evil forces, enemies of the ANC, that use and misuse groups andindividuals has been a common theme in South African politics. The idea of a ‘thirdforce’ functions to explain why things go wrong in particular contexts. Thereiteration of ‘third force’ and dissident narratives has a remarkable capacity toreconcile local and global concerns, because it forms part of a lived semanticuniverse, a constant subtext for understanding apparently innocuous and mun-dane incidents. The recycling of ‘third force’ narratives in the context of oppositionto the CPF was indeed giving meaning to apparently innocuous and mundaneeveryday incidents such as crime and criminals released from prison. Consider howthe local councillor explained the phenomenon of crime in 2001:

If you look how high the crime rate is in our country, you will find there is a ‘third force’around. There are people who are used by some of the old regime to do crime, because if acriminal is caught by the community and is taken to the police, within two days you will findout that they got out of the cells. They did have guns, where did they get guns? So they areused by some of the people (interview with local Councillor, 2001).

Here, everyday incidents are given meaning by drawing on the emotionally loadedhistory of past conflicts. To use the release of ‘criminals’ as an indication of ‘thirdforce’ activities aimed at ‘spreading chaos’, as she explained it in the township andthereby discrediting the ANC/government – which is the implicit subtext, showingthat it cannot deal with crime – is an attractive hypothesis, perhaps because of itssimplicity. When I asked if the councillor had come across evidence to substantiatethe claim that the police gave criminals weapons the answer was, predictablyenough, a clear ‘No, but I have seen criminals with weapons’. The same can be saidabout the fact that just as most people handed into the police would be released aftertaking their statements or because of lack of forensic evidence this does notnecessarily mean that there is a conspiracy operating. The ease with which ‘thirdforce’ narratives give meaning to everyday incidents like these shows how pastnarratives are used today to explain rather contingent events; events nobody canreally do anything about but which nonetheless require fixing. Or, to paraphraseJensen (2001:116-117), it gives an indication of how events are localised in one locus


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of evil that exonerates the ANC, the councillor and others working for the new SouthAfrica of any guilt for crime and violence.

One should not overlook the fact that references to the ‘use of people by evil forcesand to AmaAfrika as elements fighting the UDF’, have a different twist today. It is nolonger possible to point out with the same certainty the exact identity of the evil orhidden forces. As democracy becomes more consolidated, the answer to the question‘who exactly should be blamed for violence and crime in townships?’ has becomehomeless. The recycling of the ‘third force’ narrative in the context of present-daycrime and police responses to it plays partly on popular perceptions and readilyavailable images of inadequate police transformation. More specifically, it plays onthe perception that the police opposed the transformation of the new South Africaand were actively trying to destabilise it through the use of certain (black) elements(in this case township criminals who rob, kill and rape). To draw on the image ofsecret apartheid agencies or ‘networks of the past’ as the ANC often do when noother explanations can be used (see for example ANC 1996) is easy because thenegotiated political settlement ensured the jobs of many former apartheid officials inthe new state apparatus. Although fear of the Amadlozi was not only related to ‘thirdforce’, the indication is important because of the semantic universe it draws on that,seen from the viewpoint of the dominant party, is more or less the same as being anti-state or anti-ANC. In other words, what the revocation of the ‘third force’ narrativedoes whenever it is used is to delegitimise, a priori, any claims that communities oropposing organisations may have.

From Adversary to Enemy of the State & PartyThe abstract but still fairly concrete interpretive lens of ‘evil forces of the past’ and‘used’ vigilantes is powerful. I will suggest that it moves activities by competingforms of justice enforcement and individuals challenging the CPF into the domain ofthe untenable. From being merely ‘unaccountable’ and therefore in need of order anddemocratic socialisation achievable by capturing and containing township resi-dents in participatory forums to coerce and compel them to act according tostandards of democratic behaviour, these groups and organisations are moved intothe category of ‘combatants’ because they create dissidence. If indeed the centralcategory of democratic engagement is the adversary, as Mouffe (2002:9) suggests –the ‘opponent with whom we share a common allegiance to the democratic principleof ‘liberty and equality for all’ while disagreeing about its interpretation [butwithout questioning] opponents’ right to fight for the victory of their position’ – thenthe account of the CPF in New Brighton reveals some serious flaws in the particularmanner in which the liberal model is appropriated. Even though the interpretivelens is shaped by the past, it is equally about the present and the fear of theemergence of political opposition to the ANC.

As the vice chairperson phrased it,

[when] vigilantism [comes] into the community, it will explore weaknesses that are therewithin the community and capitalise on those weaknesses, trying to embrace and associateitself with the community and thereafter reflect its true colours (vice chairperson of CPF2001).

His real fear was that the Amadlozi would develop into a vigilante group that wasanti-state or even anti-ANC (the ANC being the organisation he himself representedin the CPF) because ‘the motive behind Amadlozi … it’s political. These guys, most of

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them, have been disillusioned within this political organisation (the ANC) theybelonged to. Now they are trying to create a following’. Therefore, one had to becautious, as the councillor asserted: ‘If we do not take it seriously when it starts, if wekeep on letting these people operate in our communities, we are going to get the samething’.

Because of Amadlozi’s popularity and extensive following (see Buur, 2003; 2005),even with the disapproval of the established structures and ANC leaders in NewBrighton, hundreds of people continued to come to their meetings. Local officialsand state functionaries feared that a viable political opponent would emergechallenging the ANC’s control. What the councillor and the vice chairperson feared,I will suggest, was that the sovereign will of the people represented by the ANCwould be challenged by a group or formation over which it apparently had nocontrol. This, of course, says a lot about how local ANC cadres perceive politics anddemocratic contestation. More importantly, however, it points to the deeply politicalnature of issues related to crime and apparently ‘neutral’ forms of governance inSouth Africa, constituting arenas for the playing out of a range of struggles notobviously related to specific justice enforcement. Here, the classification of crimeprevention and community participation makes a difference; any hint of ‘third force’activities and ‘vigilantism’ and the wider domain of associated violence and pastpolitical struggles associated with such concepts a priori undermines any claims tolegitimacy – placing potential adversaries in the enemy camp.

ConclusionThis essay outlines the reordering of the relationship between the state and civilsociety in the justice field which the new government of the ANC began after 1994through the creation of Community Policing Forums. Drawing on fieldwork fromPort Elizabeth’s townships, I have suggested that the constitutive fracture in theconcept of ‘the people’ can be a useful way of approaching the reordering process.This is the case not only because the struggle against apartheid was fought in thename of ‘the people’ but also because acting in the name of, and for ‘the people’,points both at the source of identity and at what has not yet been achieved. Theimplication is that the CPF can be approached from the perspective of governmentalsovereignty where ‘the people’ can be defined as the constitutive category of thesovereign political structure. I pointed out that, in the 1990s, apartheid-era fears of a‘third force’ converged with contemporary fears of vigilantism, threatening thealready uneasy transformation towards democracy. Like social movements,autonomous non-state justice enforcement in present-day South Africa draws to alarge extent – and often in unwitting and contradictory fashion – upon an array ofpast symbols and concrete activities of ‘people’s power’. In invoking theseassociations, members of non-state formations – such as concerned residents’groups, all modelled on past forms of sovereign organisation – exercise theirpartisanship of the new nation-state in a way that is at odds with or defies correctorganisational practice and behaviour according to the new legal-political project.These formations become an embarrassing presence that must be abolished, but thatalso legitimise the plethora of legislation, the foundational values of human rightsand the attempts to organise civil society.

While some sections of the struggle constituency hoped that the democratic form of‘people’s power’ from the 1980s would become the basis for democracy in the newSouth Africa, I have suggested that, because of the excesses of ‘the people’s’ actionsduring the 1980s, this was not to be. Instead, the CPF represents a positive and


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productive attempt to mobilise, enrol and harness active participation and self-management in justice enforcement in a structured and coordinated fashion. Theparty and state intended to achieve democratic socialisation through the capture ofresidents in participatory forums that would compel them to act according to basicstandards of democratic behaviour such as accountability, equality and respect. Isuggested that the formal or ideal model of the CPF did not require any particularentrance fee. All that counted was that residents behaved according to the standardsof ethical behaviour in the public domain which, at least in principle, is open to all,as individuals or groups. In other words, the institution of the CPF was, in concept,indifferent to political or other forms of persuasion. As my analysis unfolded,however, it became clear that this ideally apoliticised model for participation was farfrom indifferent to residents’ socio-political world or to the salient properties of thepast re-emerging in different shapes as fears of ‘hidden forces’ and as practicesmodelled on past modes of democratic participation. Exploring the internal frontierfor participation in local justice enforcement, I suggested that this was marked by theexclusion of those residents who did not belong to the political party; morespecifically, of those who were not affiliated to organised formations belonging tothe tri-party alliance of the ANC. The nexus on which the legitimacy of the CPF restscan thus be said to be less direct or popular participation by the general populationand more adherence to a particular kind of proceduralism founded on representa-tive constitutional democratic behaviour, along with threats posed by dissidents.Formations that do not conform to the particular model with which the CPF worksbecome illegitimate.

Exploring further the fears feeding this appropriation of the ideally neutral form ofethical participation and political subjectivity, it became clear that it was not onlyinformed by fear of the ‘unruliness of mob justice’ of the 1980s, but also by the widersemantic universe of ‘third forces’, ‘concerned residents’ or merely opposition to theANC. The decoding of apparently innocent signs as opposition to the CPF, such asthe release of captured criminals by the police or criminals, made all oppositionillegitimate. I suggest that for local CPF and ANC leaders the double-sided dangerthat vigilantism represents both historically and currently – ‘counter-revolutionary’reactionary forces and uncontrollable youth – has to a large extent structured theattitude of local state representatives to local justice enforcement. It is therefore worthexploring further how this vernacular semantic universe contributes to theradicalisation of opposition, which allows and justifies the state in employing farmore drastic measures against its opponents.

Lars Buur, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies,Copenhagen and Research Associate at Wits Institute for Social and EconomicResearch, Johannesburg; e-mail: [email protected]

Endnotes

1. The first part of the following section has appeared elsewhere (Buur, 2003; Buur and Jensen 2004;Buur 2005) in slightly different forms. The versions complement and develop each other.

2. It stands for the United Democratic Front.

3. While UDF leaders later emphasised that it was not an official campaign of theirs, they alsoacknowledged that the campaign appeared in publications and public speeches by UDF leaders(TRC Volume 2, 1998:383).

4. Numerous civics later merged in the South African Non-governmental Civic Organisation(SANCO).

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5. Necklacing, or burning someone alive with a tyre around the body, is widely associated withpeople’s justice. Police statistics indicate that there were around 700 to 800 people necklaced orburnt to death in the period from 1985 to the end of 1989 (see TRC Final Report 1998).

6. Askaris were former MK operatives who were caught and forced through torture to betray theirformer activist comrades and work for the security police. Thus because they were technicallytraitors they were regarded with hatred and contempt and considered the lowest of the low, by bothsides.

7. Nonetheless, he admits that in some instances things did go wrong (TRC Volume 3, 1998:385).

8. The AmaAfrika shared many of the characteristics of conservative vigilante groups elsewhere,but were perceived to have an ideological basis in Steven Biko´s Black Consciousness Movement, or‘Africanism’, which formed the ideological underpinnings of the PAC and AZAPO.

9. Umkhonto we Sizwe (isiXhosa for ‘The Spear of the Nation’), the ANC’s military wing during thewar of liberation.

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Documents

Sovereignty & democratic exclusion in the new South Africa