South Africa's Struggle to Remember

Contested Memories of Squatter Resistance in the Western Cape

Kim Wale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781857437959
• eBook ISBN: 9781317439868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Transitional justice studies typically focuses on how nations remember, face and deal with histories of past violence. This book, however, shifts the frame from national discourses of transitional justice onto local memory actors who attempt to engage with these broader systems of meaning from below. The case study is based on the memory struggles of individuals and groups who are attempting to gain access to the discourses and benefits associated with dominant memory identities of 'victim' and 'veteran' in the context of post-transition South Africa. They share a common history of squatter resistance in the Western Cape in the 1980s and a common struggle for inclusion in dominant memory frameworks.

The main theme of this book is the politics of memory, as it relates to the conversation between national and local memory. Integrated within this theme is the further theme of alternative histories and counter-memories of struggle from below. In focusing on counter memories of violence and transition this book aims to tell a different version of South African liberation history in relation to the dominant narrative. It analyses local memory actors' attempts to bring their lived histories into conversation with national discourses of reconciliation and the national liberation struggle. In doing so it unpacks a memory paradox occurring within these narratives, which highlights the politics of inclusion and exclusion within the frames of transitional justice knowledge. On the one hand this alternate story exposes the paradox between local and national memory while on the other hand it brings into focus the local experience of the intersection between international transitional justice discourses and national transition politics.

This book will be of local and international interest to scholars and students in the field of transitional justice, memory politics, national liberation struggle and South African historiography. It will also be of interest to a broader South Africa public, as it offers a deeper understanding of South Africa's history, which challenges taken for granted transitional justice frames of knowledge.

1 Histories of struggle and violence

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694535-1

It was during one of those drinking sprees that he learnt of the move by homeless people to establish another shanty town on an empty piece of land outside the city. Everybody in the shebeen was agitated. The government was refusing to give people houses. Instead, they were saying that people who had qualifying papers had to move to a new township that was more than fifty miles away? And yet there was land all over, close to where people worked, but it was all designated for white residential development. Most people did not even have the necessary qualifying papers. Their presence was said to be illegal, and the government was bent on sending them back to the places it had demarcated as their homelands.

The people decided they were going to move en masse, and unilaterally take this land on the outskirts of the city, and build their shacks there. This was Toloki’s opportunity to get himself a house. He joined settlers, and allocated himself a small plot where he constructed his shack.

That was the shack that he decorated with newspapers and magazines. He was very proud of it, for it was the first property that was his alone. He was very angry when the bulldozers came and destroyed it. But like the rest of the residents, he immediately rebuilt it. Sometimes state-paid vigilantes would set some of the shacks on fire, but again the shanty town was resilient.

(Mda 1995: 120–121)

In the passage above from Zakes Mda’s 1995 novel Ways of Dying, he summarizes the experience of many creatively resilient black South Africans surviving under the draconian pass laws of apartheid. The few who had papers allowing them legally to be in South Africa were controlled through programmes of racial segregation and relocation to distant townships. Those who did not have papers, however, faced arrest, fines and deportation to the ‘bantustans’ (homelands) which were poor, underdeveloped, rural areas designated through separate development as African states within South Africa. Poverty and the lack of work meant that deportees would return again to face the brutal security forces of the apartheid state. Resistance to the oppressive apartheid regime of racial segregation and exploitation came in many forms.

In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the ANC and the well-known leaders of this organization have come to symbolize the memory and history of resistance to apartheid, but in reality many different organizations, groups and ordinary people played their part in challenging apartheid and creating the conditions for change. The particular history of Crossroads squatter resistance which forms the case study of this research is nestled within the popular resistance of the mass movement of the 1980s. Under the banner of the United Democratic Front (UDF), which was established in 1983, urban and rural struggles against everyday experiences of apartheid were brought together into mass resistance. Street and civic committees, inspired by poor black South Africans’ daily struggles to survive, sprang up throughout the country as expressions of people’s power. In this context, powerful forms of anti-apartheid resistance emerged from below. This chapter locates the case study of the Crossroads squatter resistance within the broader struggle histories of oppression and resistance in South Africa.

1 Violence and popular struggle

This book interrogates memories of violence but violence is a complex concept. This section discusses some useful theoretical conceptualizations of violence. It focuses on the violence of oppression and the impact of oppression on the consciousness of the oppressed. Drawing on the work of Franz Fanon, it shows how both the violence of oppression and resistance are connected to the development of consciousness in the oppressed–oppressor relationship. It presents some of the key studies which researched the nature of violence during the apartheid wars. It focuses on the literature on popular struggles, comrade identities and the relationship between the ANC in exile and the mass movement which developed from below.

1.1 Conceptualizing violence

Memories of struggle and violence are the key subject area of this book, but the way in which the people of Crossroads remember violence is different from the way in which violence is remembered through the lens of transitional justice. For example, the TRC limited its understanding of violence to gross violations of human rights. However, the experience of violence as told through histories of struggle in South Africa is much broader and deeper than this narrow focus. These histories show that black South Africans faced different levels of violence in their everyday lives. Following Johan Galtung’s (1969) definition of violence, these ‘levels’ of violence included structural violence, cultural violence and direct violence. Direct violence involves physical force such as beatings, rape, torture and murder. Cultural violence refers to ideologies which legitimize direct or structural violence. Structural violence exists when institutions and structures deny some groups access to resources and goods in ways that prevent them from meeting their basic needs and cause harm. These levels of violence open up our understanding of the nature of violence experienced by black South Africans under apartheid which will be discussed in this chapter.

To add to this deeper conceptualization of violence in the South African context, the work of Fanon demonstrates how structures of inequality (structural violence) are maintained through the threat of direct violence and internalized at the level of consciousness. Fanon theorized the relationship between oppression, consciousness, violence and resistance through extending the work of Hegel on the master-slave dialectic and applying it to the colonial context. Fanon’s formulation builds on the philosophical contributions of Hegel’s (1977) master-slave dialectic as outlined in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojeve (1969) clarifies Hegel’s stance by explaining that self-consciousness and humanity are born out of the desire for mutual recognition, that is, to be recognized and have one’s self-worth confirmed by the other. Non-reciprocal recognition is what gives rise to the master-slave dialectic. In this dialectic the slave recognizes the humanity of the master but does not receive recognition of his or her own humanity in return. However, the master, through dehumanizing the slave, also dehumanizes himself. Recognition from the slave can never amount to complete recognition for the master, because it comes from a self who has been dehumanized. Therefore, the humanity of the self is not confirmed for slave or master in this dialectic. This dialectic is set up through violence and the fear of death.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1986) analyses the psychology of racism in terms of the dialectic-psychic relationship between the black slave and the white master. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon (1963) situates Hegel’s master-slave dialectic within the unfolding historical drama of racial domination. For Fanon, the oppressor-oppressed dialectic is set up through violence and the fear of death, whereby the master serves the tenet ‘conquer the other or die’ and the slave, ‘submit to the other or die’ (ibid. 1986). Since this dynamic is created through violence and the fear of death, it can only be broken by the willingness to sacrifice physical life for social humanity and freedom. In order to attain freedom, the slave must risk the violence of the master in order to declare, in Fanon’s passionate words: ‘No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom’ (ibid.: 222). However, this sacrifice of physical life by saying ‘no’ to slave-hood is at the same time a decision to say, ‘Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity’ (ibid.). What Fanon demonstrates here is the relationship between violence used to enforce oppression and violence used in the name of liberation. He shows that these two forms of violence are not morally equivalent and operate in two different directions. This abstract philosophical understanding of human relations of inequality and inhumanity is situated by Fanon (1963) against the backdrop of colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle for freedom in Algeria. His insights, therefore, are powerful for our understanding of the effects of oppression on consciousness and the process of the liberation of consciousness from relations of oppression.

The connection between oppression and violence is an important one. Bulhan (1985) points out that this is a connection that has been mystified and the process of liberating consciousness involves becoming aware of the violence of oppression: psychologically, materially and socially. Fanon (1986) argues that as long as the colonized accept servitude as a result of their fear of death and are unwilling to die for freedom, the colonizers’ tyrannical violence will not end. Furthermore, Fanon provides an understanding of horizontal violence in terms of the ways in which violence against the oppressor turns inwards on the self and on other selves like the self. As the colonized eke out an existence on an ever narrowing margin of survival, the accumulated rage against their target is deflected and turned upon themselves and their own people. The oppressor becomes internalized and the anger against the oppressor is expressed in self-sabotaging behaviour or horizontal violence against loved ones and the community.

In sum, these theorists allow us to understand the levels at which violence operates (structural, direct, cultural), the impact that systems of violence have on the psychology of the oppressed and the different directions of violence in the context of racist structures of oppression. Violence can be enacted to support the oppressive system, it can be enacted against the oppressive system, or it can be internalized by the oppressed and enacted horizontally against one another. As this chapter unpacks the contextual histories of violence and struggle in South Africa, a similar picture emerges. The nature of violence explored in the following pages can be understood through these levels and directions of violence offered by Galtung and Fanon.

1.2 The violence of apartheid

The violence of apartheid was multi-layered and multi-directional (Foster et al. 2005). On the one hand, apartheid represented the deep structural violence of oppression. This point is powerfully demonstrated by Bulhan, who argues that in many ways the ‘homelands’ resembled concentration camps of reserve labour, where 80 per cent of South Africa’s population categorized as ‘African’ were stripped of their rights inside South Africa, and pushed out from ‘white areas’ onto 13.7 per cent of the poorest land, where farming and mining was difficult (Bulhan 1985). In the various areas that Africans moved through in South Africa they confronted the structural violence of the apartheid state. In the mines, work was extremely dangerous and arduous and performed for little pay. In hostels, life was characterized by a lack of privacy, and few amenities, facilities or recreational opportunities. On farms, labourers were paid even less, called derogatory names by the white ‘baas’ (boss) and often beaten with whips called ‘sjamboks’ (ibid.). Migrant workers were separated from their families, and in townships African families constantly faced the brutality of police during raids when the police searched for illegal migrants.

In addition to the structural violence of the apartheid state and the direct violence of the white bosses empowered by this system, black South Africans also faced the direct violence of state forces such as the apartheid police and security forces. This included the brutal experiences of arrest, detention and torture. Bulhan (1985) writes that a frequent trauma in which black children were initiated into the obscenities of apartheid was the sight of terrified parents woken from their beds scurrying to cover their naked bodies and find their pass books before being violently forced into police vans and spirited away to prisons, where they faced further dehumanization and torture. Foster et al. (2005) describe the top-down violence of the machinery of the apartheid state as the ‘uni-directional’ violence of the powerful against the powerless, which includes the bureaucracies, chains of command, one-way instructions and dominant ideologies that support state violence against the oppressed.

There was also a challenge to the violence of the state which following the insights of Fanon, Foster et al. (2005) describe as ‘bi-directional’ violence. The concept of bi-directional violence recognizes the dialectic of oppression and violence. Through a bi-directional lens of violence, the violence of the state is characterized as violence against the oppressed. In the opposite direction, the violence of the liberation movement and its allies is characterized as being against the oppressor. This classification is useful because it recognizes the different political positions out of which violence arises within differential relations of inequality and power. Examples of violence against the oppressed during apartheid have been documented in the literature on the militarization of the South African state, especially under the apartheid government’s strategy of total onslaught against the popular insurrection from below (Grundy 1986; Cock and Nathan 1989; Cock 1991; Cawthra 1993). In opposition to this violence, the resistance movement of the oppressed enacted its own violence against the militarized state (Davis 1987; Cobbett and Cohen 1988; Manganyi and Du Toit 1990; Bornman et al. 1998). Thus this relational dynamic of violence emerged in the context of a liberation struggle waged against the brutality and violence of apartheid, to which the state responded with further violence.

The nature of violence in South Africa was not always as clean-cut as the bi-directional understanding suggests. As Fanon demonstrates the oppressed internalize the oppression which is so violently inflicted upon them and this can result in many different forms of horizontal violence. Vigilante violence is committed by the oppressed against the oppressed in the name of the state (Haysom 1986; Cole 1987). The state often engaged in brutal strategies of divide and rule, turning groups against one another, arming vigilantes to fight against their fellow community members who were engaged in forms of resistance to state rule. ‘Horizontal’ or ‘lateral’ violence is violence enacted by the oppressed against those they view as aligned with the oppressive regime within their own group (Fanon [1952] 1986; Sidanius 2001; Moane 2011). Horizontal violence is recognized by theorists of oppression and violence, and is reflected in the various forms of ‘necklacing’ (a form of public execution involving forcing a petrol-soaked tyre around the neck and chest of an enemy or betrayer and setting it alight), taxi violence (which refers to the turf wars fought by rival taxi associations, and often involved warring political parties or became intertwined with political interests), and other inter-community violence in black townships and settlements during apartheid (Foster and Durrheim 1998). However, far from being random or anarchic expressions of horizontal violence, these forms of violence against members of the oppressed are deeply politicized and connected to strategies of resistance and comrade cultures (Marks 2001).

In other words, the violence of apartheid came from all directions for black South Africans. They experienced it in the geographical and class structures which denied them basic human rights. They experienced it in the brutal violence of state forces and the environment of militarization which structured their everyday lives. They enacted violence in their communities against the occurrence of apartheid violence, but also against each other as a consequence of the internalization of oppression and the divide and rule tactics of the state.

1.3 Popular struggles and comrade identity

The different forms and directions of violence discussed above intermingle within the histories of Crossroads. However, the violence of resistance and the memories of resistant violence are a central feature of this case study. This section focuses on the studies which emerged from the literature on popular resistance and violent identities of popular resistance. A number of studies on resistance within South Africa emerged in the 1980s (Davis 1987; Murray 1987; Mufson 1990; Lodge 1991). Furthermore, an edited collection from William Cobbett and Robin Cohen (1988) reviewed the different forms of popular struggle and debates within the mass movement at the time. In addition, more recent studies have paid closer attention to the UDF, its connection to the ANC and the popular struggles from below (Ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• South Africa’s Struggle to Remember
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Histories of struggle and violence
• 2 Transitional justice memory frames
• 3 Unfolding a memory paradox
• 4 Narratives of struggle and violence
• 5 Narratives of transition: Disillusionment and dependency
• 6 Reclaiming people’s power in local memory
• 7 Hegemony and agency in memory narratives
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index