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Understanding South African Political Violence
du Toit, Andre
du Toit, Andre
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Abstract
"Political violence has in recent years become a dominant and pervasive feature of South African politics and society. In various ways this has been a complex and paradoxical development: the violence has been central to the national scene, with open and dramatic conflicts leaving large numbers killed and maimed (e.g. in populist insurrections against the apartheid state, or conflicts between supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) and Inkatha), but it has also proliferated in marginal contexts, largely unnoticed by anyone except those directly concerned (e.g. in local feuds or “faction fights”); surprisingly, the violence has been strikingly absent in some contexts where it was most feared and predicted (e.g. by blacks against whites), while it has erupted elsewhere in unexpected contexts and forms (e.g. the revival and use of traditional “cultural weapons”); often the very agents of this new violence have been unclear and its purposes hotly contested (cf. the allegations about the presence of a “third force”). Understanding South African political violence has become both an urgent challenge and a special problem. This paper will make a number of different moves aimed at opening up the problem of understanding political violence in South Africa in contemporary, historical and discursive perspectives. First we will need to make some preliminary conceptual clarifications as to the specific sense of violence at stake, as well as to just what is involved in the problem of “understanding” this violence. Next we will briefly survey the most recent period so as to give some substantiation to the suggestion that in an important sense we are currently confronted with a new and more elusive problem in understanding South African political violence, as well as to gain some idea of how and when this new problematic has come about. The upshot of these introductory sections will be that the task of understanding current and past political violence is an eminently historical project, and the major part of the paper will be concerned with an attempt to provide an analytical framework for this purpose. It will be argued that an understanding of political violence in South Africa needs to be located with respect to four different historical contexts: i) the pre-modern context of frontier conflict; ii) the modernizing period of centralized state-formation; iii) the post-1948 period of apartheid and resistance to apartheid; and iv) the current transitional period on the verge of a post-apartheid South Africa. With reference to this periodization of the history of political violence in South Africa, we will trace the emergence of a “master-narrative” structuring conventional understandings of political violence in relation to the general project of modernization. It will be argued that it is in so far as the current proliferation and escalation of political violence confounds the expectations embedded in the earlier “master-narrative” that we are confronted with a new and urgent problem in understanding political violence in South Africa. Critical reflection and analysis on this turn of events should help to clear the way for a better understanding of both present and past political violence in South Africa."(pg 5)
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1993-04
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With permission of the license/copyright holder