Locations of violence: Political rationality and death squads in apartheid South Africa

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Quoted in Scott, D. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality. New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 4–5.

2. The criticism of this approach has been made most forcefully by Mamdani (2001b).

3. This is a widespread foundational assumption from which many studies of state violence proceed. The naturalisation of the assumption leads many of them to focus on extra-judicial forms of violence as problematic while ignoring the relationship of that violence to ‘authorised’ forms of state violence. See Asad (2003) for a useful problematisation of this assumption as it pertains to the category of the ‘human’ in human rights discourse, particularly on torture.

4. As Asad (2003:107) notes, this capacity of the state to deny its involvement in such activities marks the modern state's relationship to pain. Unlike the relation to pain of previous forms of state formation, where pain and suffering was inflicted as a public spectacle, the infliction of pain has now been made into a public scandal.

5. The anthropologist David Webster, who was researching state strategy and death squads, was himself assassinated by a police covert unit.

6. See Seegers (1996); Chidester (1991); Grundy (1986); Swilling (1990); Cock and Nathan (1989); and Selfe (1998).

7. See Gottschalk (2000); Van Vuuren and Liebenberg (1998) and Laurence (1990).

8. There is an ambiguity here which Trouillot (1995:13–14) calls constructivism's dilemma: “to state that a particular narrative legitimates particular policies is to refer implicitly to a ‘true’ account of these policies through time, an account which can itself take the form of a counter narrative. It is to admit that as ambiguous and contingent as it is, the boundary between what happened and that which is said to have happened is necessary. It is not that some societies distinguish between fiction and history and others do not. Rather, the difference is in the range of narratives that specific collectivities must put to their own tests of historical credibility because of the stakes involved in these narratives”.

9. In a survey in which white South Africans were asked “do you think the government is exaggerating the communist threat?”, some 80 per cent of the respondents thought the government was not exaggerating (Geldenhuys 1986:7–8).

10. See Bourdieu (1980).

11. See Abu-El Haj (2001); Ferguson (1999); Malkki (1995).

12. See Said (2001:141).

13. Tilly (2002) sees the ability of the state over time to legitimise its own violence, in contrast to criminal violence (as illegal). This does not in my view adequately address the distinctive relations and concerns of the modern state, or its colonial forms.

14. Agemben draws significantly on Benjamin's essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” which notes that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight” (1978:257).

15. Wilson (2001) makes this point effectively, despite his very determinist view of the negotiated settlement in South Africa as one purposely designed to benefit white and black elites – an argument which confuses cause with effect in my view.

16. This analogy is provoked by a distinction Asad (2003:92–99) makes between virtue and morality in his discussion of the tale of Oedipus. Oedipus, suggests Asad, was not acting ‘morally’ since morality was not a concern for the Greeks at that time. Conducting oneself virtuously was.

17. Foucault's concept of docile bodies does not imply the creation of automatons. And, as Asad notes, Foucault did not focus on the lack of capacity to act, but rather the capacity of the body to learn, to be taught, to be inscribed upon – a quality intrinsic to the subject rather than a sign of passivity, as Mauss similarly describes the body's relation to habitus. See also Asad (1993:47).