Sovereignty & democratic exclusion in the new South Africa

Abstract

In this essay I will outline the contours of the attempt by the ANC government to reorder state-civil society relations. This will be done by delineating the form of civil society participation that the government has promulgated in the field of justice enforcement in order to ‘tame’ or direct the uncontrolled aspects and forces of self-organisation emanating from the struggle against apartheid known as ‘people’s power’. The article will argue that the establishment of institutions like the Community Policing Forums (CPF) were created to harbour and give direction to these forces rests on and allows for a particular type of democratic citizenship or normative ethical being, while excluding other types of political-ethical being. The essay illustrates how past ideas about friends and enemies of the ANC are used as the interpretive lens to decode opposition to the CPF.

Notes

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).

5. Necklacing, or burning someone alive with a tyre around the body, is widely associated with people’s justice. Police statistics indicate that there were around 700 to 800 people necklaced or burnt 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 their former activist comrades and work for the security police. Thus because they were technically traitors they were regarded with hatred and contempt and considered the lowest of the low, by both sides.

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 Bikós 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 the war of liberation.