Notes from a tense field: threatened masculinities in South Africa

Abstract

Violent crime affects every South African resident. How can crime so affect a culture, so inscribe its topographies, that it becomes possible to say these words out loud? Whereas the apartheid state was so inexorably present, reaching deep into individual lives, the post-apartheid state seems now unaccountably absent, abdicating responsibility for safety and security to private companies, the new growth industry of the post-apartheid years. Analyses of the effects of crime in South Africa often draw on government statistics, journalistic accounts, ministers’ statements, and the narratives of victims and criminals, while exploring the political and socio-economic dimensions of a situation which neither communities nor governments have successfully confronted. This essay proposes a different agenda; one based not on the false certainties of immediate causation but rather on the tenuous, subversive, almost invisible traces left by crime. Seeking to read the cultural contexts within which violent crime has flourished, the essay's aim is to understand the role of threatened masculinities in the perpetuation of violence beyond the time of apartheid and political struggle. While considering the poetics of traumatic memory and of living with violent crime, the essay seeks to create a non-hierarchical text within which the interplay of diverse modes of discourse challenges a contemporary idealising of the new South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork for two long-term research projects (policing in Soweto, 1994–1998, and more recently on memory, identification and place in Durban) as well as on readings of external texts, such as the powerful and disturbing play Relativity: Township stories by Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and Presley Chweneyagae, the essay explores a culture profoundly traumatised and disempowered.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• violence
• trauma
• threatened
• masculinities
• memory
• narrative

Notes

1. My thanks to the editors of this special issue of Social Identities, Suvendrini Perera and Antonio Traverso, and to the two anonymous referees, for their perceptive readings of my paper.

2. I am a foreigner in South Africa, a resident, living for part of each year in a small hidden corner of Durban within a strong local community.

3. Whose dangers were most eloquently defined by President Nelson Mandela as he opened Parliament in 1995: ‘It is important that we rid ourselves of the culture of entitlement which leads to the expectation that the government must promptly deliver whatever it is that we demand, and result in some people refusing to meet their obligations such as rent and service payments or engaging in other unacceptable actions such as the forcible occupation of houses’.