Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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the postapartheid fictional terrain dramatises a reconfigured contest over law and order in which the borderlines of legitimate and illegitimate are frequently under erasure. So pervasive is crime that neither the state nor any civil grouping has a monopoly over violence or legitimacy. The terrain is one of moral ambiguity, where newly validated cultural ‘difference’ becomes complicit in a gory inversion of the rule of law.
Postcolonial law and (dis)order
Rita Barnard draws attention to the manner in which the postapartheid state has brought with it ‘new patterns of inclusion and exclusion, new meanings of citizenship, and new dimensions of sovereignty and power’ (Barnard, ‘Tsotsis’ 561–562; see also Steinberg, ‘Crime’). One aspect of this newer set-up, according to Barnard, is that ‘minimal government, under pressure from a frightened citizenry (redefined as consumers and victims), can readily turn into its authoritarian opposite’ (‘Tsotsis’ 565). For Jean and John Comaroff, the former colonial state evinces a particular preoccupation with the law, amounting at times to a fetishisation of legality. The preoccupation with law and legality, write the Comaroffs, runs deeper than ‘purely a concern with crime’ (Law and Disorder 32). This is an important consideration, since ‘crime’ in South African discourse is a problematic signifier, capturing very incompletely a more generalised scene of social instability. It has to do, the Comaroffs argue, ‘with the very constitution of the postcolonial polity’, since the ‘modernist nation-state appears to be undergoing an epochal move away from the ideal of an imagined community founded on the fiction, often violently sustained, of cultural homogeneity, toward a nervous, xenophobically tainted sense of heterogeneity and heterodoxy’ (32). The rise of neoliberalism, the authors continue, ‘has heightened all this, with its impact on population movements, on the migration of work and workers, on the dispersion of cultural practices, on the return of the colonial oppressed to haunt the cosmopoles that once ruled them and wrote their histories’ (33). Such effects ‘are felt especially in former colonies, which were erected from the first on difference’ (33).
Now, difference strikes back at the former colonies: ‘[P]ostcolonials are citizens for whom polymorphous, labile identities coexist in uneasy ensembles of political subjectivity’; such citizens tend not to attach their sense of destiny to the nation, but rather to ‘an ethnic, cultural, language, religious, or some other group’, despite the fact that subjects such as these do not necessarily reject their national identity (33). What are often labelled as communal loyalties (Abahlali baseMjondolo15 for example, or migrants from other parts of Africa who have been the subject of xenophobic attacks) ‘are frequently blamed for the kinds of violence, nepotism, and corruption said to saturate these societies, as if cultures of heterodoxy bear within them the seeds of criminality, difference, disorder’ (33).
It is worth backtracking to give a more complete account of how the Comaroffs reach the rather startling conclusion that cultures of heterodoxy produce criminality and disorder as correlates of difference. How has it come about that the role of cultural difference, such a critical factor in the history of many postcolonies, could have shifted so drastically from a perceived virtue to something resembling a matrix for criminality?
The first step is to sketch the context in which such a keen preoccupation with the law, legality and its abrogation in the postcolony might be found – most recently, postapartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of case studies and ethnographic scholarship, the Comaroffs find that ‘law and disorder’ are constitutive of a social base in which legality and criminality depend on and feed off each other in an enhanced, or accentuated, manner. ‘Vastly lucrative returns ... inhere in actively sustaining zones of ambiguity between the presence and absence of the law’; in this way, value is amassed ‘by exploiting the new aporias of jurisdiction opened up by neoliberal conditions’ (Law and Disorder 5). In this environment, one might add, law enforcement officers feel at liberty to collaborate with underworld agents, helping to sustain sex-slavery rings in Cape Town amid a chaotic and often dysfunctional criminal justice system, as Noseweek’s 2009 report indicates (‘Trapped in Pollsmoor’ n.p.).
Central to the Comaroffs’ discussion about the consequences of neoliberalism in the postcolony is not only what one might call prevailing conditions of ‘lawlessness’, but also the widespread media representation of such conditions as ‘bad’. Media versions of a venal, predatory approach to the ‘free market’ take their lead from an older, more equitable liberal rationality. Egalitarian political theory in South Africa, as expressed in a progressive liberal-democratic Constitution, exists in a state of disjuncture with socio-economic practice. The conjunction of ‘neo’ and ‘liberal’ creates a paradoxical nexus in which it is possible both to be part of a (benignly) liberal dispensation in the more traditional sense of this term, and to be part of its subversion – whether in the form of a corrupt police commissioner, or as an entrapped subject, caught in what is an essentially inequitable order of things. The crime writer often takes up the position of the galled citizenry, observing dirty doings in a newly created ‘democratic’ order that seems to belie, in its (reported) behaviour, every tenet of its underlying (liberal-democratic) ethos. Further, in the more reflexive writers’ work, there is an awareness that the citizen so entrapped in witnessing widespread neoliberal quashing of what might be termed classical liberalism16 is, willy-nilly, part of – i.e. caught within – the same system.17 This kind of tension between an idealised notion of fairness and actual justice is consistently invoked in public discourse, such that it is almost a leitmotif. The persistent cancellation of the ideal of justice by practices that are essentially unfair typifies the postcolonial law/disorder condition in a similar way to that in neoliberal environments – though the edge is perhaps a little sharper, and the grain rougher, in the postcolony.
Ironically, in such conditions the law is fetishised, ‘even as, in most postcolonies, higher and higher walls are built to protect the propertied from lawlessness, even as the language of legality insinuates itself deeper and deeper into the realm of the illicit’ (Law and Disorder 22). Law and lawlessness, assert the Comaroffs, ‘are conditions of each other’s possibility’ (21). And so, too, are these two leitmotifs of the postcolony inextricably linked in fictive imaginaries: citing Rosalind Morris, they write, ‘[m]ass mediation gives law and disorder a “communicative force” that permits it to “traverse the social field”’ (21). These arguments appear to support Margie Orford’s opinion18 that crime fiction allows ordinary citizens imaginatively to traverse zones of law, and of the erasure of such laws; these are zones that are not generally open to anyone other than policemen and journalists. The ‘crime’ story is thus a ‘communicative force’ in which bolted-in, apprehensive citizens of the neoliberal postcolony can ‘get out’ and ‘see’ what might actually be going on in the dark of night, and in the clear light of day, too, in the frequently bewildering, unreadable postapartheid topography (see also, in this regard, my discussion of a ‘wound culture’ in Chapter 6).
Morris comments on the phenomenon of mediated ‘crime’ in South Africa: ‘Transmitted along a myriad vectors, in televisual serials, newspaper columns, radio broadcasts, and music lyrics, crime is the phantom that haunts the new nation’s imaginary’ (61). Crime is both an event in the real world and a mediated condition feeding other fears and insecurities: ‘Macabre tales of heavily armed robbers and single-minded carjackers, of remorseless murderers, and – most remarked of all – pedophilic rapists feed a national press that is insatiable for news of personalized catastrophe with which to signify or prophesy political failure’ (61). Similarly, Gary Kynoch (‘Fear and Alienation’) argues for a deep preoccupation with narratives of lawlessness amid mounting political threat among whites in postapartheid South Africa.
‘Crime’ as an allegory for the sociopolitical
Understanding, interpreting, describing and responding to ‘crime’ in the ‘new’ South Africa therefore appears to be an everyday allegory for the sociopolitical terrain in a broad sense, speaking urgently to anxieties about very real conditions of social disorder.19 ‘[T]he causes of crime’s transformation are ... usually construed in political terms,’ argues Morris. ‘Crime marks the boundary of the polis as much as any other wilderness,’ she adds (61). Within such a sociopolitical milieu,