The aetiological crisis in South African criminology

Abstract

Violent crime in South Africa has remained persistently high since the end of apartheid in 1994. Almost 16,000 murders at a rate of 31.9 per 100,000 of the population in 2010/11 attest to this. Violent crime remains a concern for government and has led one independent observer to describe South Africa as ‘a country at war with itself’ (Altbeker, 2007). This article argues that South African criminology has struggled to come to terms with the often brutal reality of the post-apartheid condition. Drawing on a notion first used by Young (1986) in relation to 1960s Britain, it suggests that stubbornly high rates of violent crime have given rise to an aetiological crisis in South African criminology. An analysis of the origins and nature of this crisis evident in recent writings on violent crime in South Africa is offered against the background of international debates about what criminology is for. A solution to the crisis is sought in work that connects history and biography (Mills, 1959) to reveal the causes, meanings and uses of violence, and point the way to a more relevant post-colonial South African criminology.

Keywords

aetiological crisis crime criminology South Africa violence

Introduction

In a recent report on the crime situation in the country, the South African Police Service (SAPS) noted that, for the first time since it was created in 1995, the number of murders had fallen ‘below the 16,000 mark’ (South African Police Service, 2011: 7). Despite a 28 per cent increase in the population, murders had decreased from 26,887 in 1995/96 to 15,940 15 years later – a fall of 53.2 per cent in the murder rate per 100,000 of the population. Imperfect though the data may be (Altbeker, 2008), this is a substantial achievement. Yet comparative data suggest that, almost two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africans are still more likely to die as a result of intentional homicide than citizens of all but a very few – mainly Caribbean and Central and South American – countries (UNODC, 2012). With a murder rate in 2010/11 of 31.9 per 100,000 and persistently high levels of other forms of what the SAPS (2011: 3 (Table 1), 5) identifies as the most serious forms of violent ‘contact’ crime, official concerns about crime and its impact on South Africa’s economic performance and the quality of life of its citizens, are acknowledged at the highest levels in government. A recent diagnostic study undertaken by the National Planning Commission offers this analysis:

Crime levels are high in South Africa. Violent crime, contact crime and property crime are so common that many South Africans live in fear. When people feel unsafe it makes it harder for them to pursue their personal goals, and to take part in social and economic activity. (National Planning Commission, 2011)

Other observers, less constrained by ties to government, tend to use more apocalyptic language. The title of Antony Altbeker’s (2007) influential book on ‘South Africa’s crisis of crime’ speaks of ‘a country at war with itself’. For Altbeker (2007: 48), like the ‘Harvard criminologist’ Chris Stone (2006: 4) whose work he quotes, ‘the distinctive feature of crime in South Africa is not its volume but its violence’. It may be impossible to say, as some have claimed, that South Africa is ‘the crime capital of the world’; but there are no grounds for doubting that murder rates, and the incidence of other violent crimes such as robbery, leave South Africans with ‘absolutely nothing to be proud of’ (Altbeker, 2007: 41).

The purpose of this article is not to add to Altbeker’s vivid account of the ‘crisis of crime’ or to offer an explanation for it. The aim here is, rather, to draw attention to, and attempt to account for, a closely related aetiological crisis in South African criminology. The notion of aetiological crisis is taken from Jock Young’s (1986) criticism of ‘mainstream’ Anglo-American criminology in the years after the Second World War when a long period of growing affluence and expanded social welfare provision coincided with a remorseless rise in official crime rates: ‘All of the factors which should have led to a drop in delinquency if mainstream criminology were even half-correct, were being ameliorated and yet precisely the opposite effect was occurring’ (Young 1986: 5–6). According to Young, the aetiological crisis in British post-war criminology – eclectic, pragmatic and wedded to both positivism and correctionalism – was at its deepest in the 1960s. A more radical criminology soon emerged in response to the crisis but, by the mid-1980s, ‘the Thermidor’ had set in with the emergence of a ‘new administrative criminology involving a retreat from any discussion of causality’ (Young, 1986: 4). And so, writing in 1986, Young felt able to claim that, ‘we have now a criminology that has well nigh abandoned its historical mission of the search for the causes of crime’ (Young, 1986: 4). In this paper I suggest that, since the end of apartheid, something rather similar has occurred in South African criminology. In much the same way as ‘mainstream’ social democratic criminology was confounded by the coincidence of inexorably rising crime rates with growth in real incomes, slum clearances, improved educational attainment and the expansion of social services in post-war Britain, so have those criminologists who looked forward to a new, democratic South Africa been nonplussed by the persistence of high levels of violent crime in a country freed from the economic, social and cultural fetters of racist autocracy. If, as Young argued, the aetiological crisis in British social democratic criminology prompted by the failure of welfarism led to the development of an administrative criminology uninterested in questions of causation, so too has the failure of constitutional democracy to stem the tide of violence that accompanied the end of minority rule been greeted by a no less striking reticence in South African criminology.

In more recent work, Young (2011: 111) has argued that declining levels of offending in the US, UK and elsewhere in the global north have prompted a second aetiological crisis. He has also suggested that criminology in these countries, with its gaze too firmly fixed on ‘those who are seen to inhabit special universes, economically detached, spatially segregated and morally reduced’ (Young, 2011: viii), needs to rediscover the imagination to ‘grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society’ (Mills 1959: 6). I will return to Mills later when I illustrate the nature of the aetiological crisis in South African criminology, provide some explanations for it, and suggest how we might be able to think about the problem of crime in South Africa in a slightly more imaginative way. But I begin by locating this discussion in wider debates about criminology, what it is and what it is for, both internationally and in the context of late- and post-apartheid South Africa.

What is criminology – and what is it for?

It may be because, as David Garland (2011: 302) has argued, criminology ‘lacks the intellectual core around which disciplines usually form’, that it is given to periodic bouts of nervous introspection. In any event, a recent spate of publications (Bosworth and Hoyle, 2011; Loader and Sparks, 2011, 2012; Young, 2011) devoted to the discipline (or, for some, non-discipline) of criminology and what it should aspire to be, attests to the appetite of criminologists for what outsiders (and some insiders too) might dismiss as mere navel-gazing. There is no need to add to the torrent of words here but some explanation of what is meant by ‘South African criminology’ is required before I try to substantiate the claim that it is indeed in a state of aetiological crisis. This is no easy task because, as Altbeker (an economist by training who has worked in government and the third sector as well as in academia) and his book (a wonderfully accessible volume crafted to fly off the shelves of suburban bookshops) demonstrate, the production of knowledge about crime and justice in South Africa is not constrained by the borders of South Africa. Nor is it limited to universities and the people who populate them or the endeavours of those who might identify themselves as criminologists, or be recognizable as such by virtue of their background or training. Taking criminology in its broadest sense to consist of ‘our organized ways of thinking and talking about crime, criminals and crime control’ (Garland and Sparks, 2000: 192), a glance at the literature reveals that South African criminology in the post-apartheid era is the product of many different hands working in a wide range of institutional and national contexts. It is as likely to have been published in Europe or North America as within the boundaries of the Republic, to have been produced by investigative journalists or freelance researchers with no particular disciplinary affiliation as by salaried academics with ‘in/of Criminology’ in their job titles, and to have emerged from non-governmental organizations such as the Institute for Security Studies or the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation as from universities. For present purposes then I take ‘South African criminology’ to encompass any and all work on South Africa that is concerned with crime, the means of controlling it and the process of criminalization, and is based on a systematic appraisal of relevant evidence while engaging with a wider literature on the subject(s) at hand.

The next question is: what is criminology for (Loader and Sparks, 2011: 5)? Here again I do not want to add my own answer, merely to note the responses of two sets of contributors to recent debates. The first of these is provided by Loader and Sparks (2011: 125–126) when they sketch out the role of criminology as a ‘democratic under-labourer’ in their book, Public Criminology? They argue that criminology has ‘three distinct but necessary ‘moments’ or dimensions’: the ‘moment’ of discovery involving the production of reliable knowledge; the institutional-critical ‘moment’ in which the subjects, objects and nature of knowledge are questioned; and, finally, the normative ‘moment’ when the uses of knowledge are evaluated in terms of justice, fairness, and so on. Their work has been criticized for focusing too tightly on the challenges faced by Anglo-American criminology (Christie, 2011; Walters, 2011) – something they tacitly acknowledge in a subsequent piece in which they concede that: ‘… it no longer seems good enough for criminologists to focus the overwhelming bulk of their attention on the domestic concerns of a handful of the world’s wealthiest nations’ (Loader and Sparks, 2012: 23).

So we must look elsewhere for an indication of the part that criminology might play outside its traditional stamping grounds. Cuneen (2011: 249) provides a starting point with his call for the development of a ‘postcolonial perspective’ in criminology. His challenge is taken up in another chapter in the same volume by Shearing and Marks (2011) in which they put forward a number of questions that such a perspective might seek to answer. The seven questions they suggest span all three of Loader and Sparks’s (2011) ‘moments’, but only one – ‘Why are criminal acts so violent?’ – seeks an explanation for the often-fatal violence that has been such a feature of post-apartheid society and is so troubling to government and independent observers alike (Shearing and Marks, 2011: 127). All the others are directed either towards the nature of the post-colonial transformative project or the mentalities and institutional arrangements that are needed to govern security in a mixed economy of providers and ensure a just and democratic response to criminal behaviour. Admittedly, Shearing and Marks are primarily concerned with the need for ethnographic research in criminal justice and are sympathetic to the exercise of Young’s (2011) ‘criminological imagination’. But it is remarkable, nonetheless, that, given the scale and persistence of post-apartheid/post-colonial South Africa’s crime problem, they pass so quickly over the explanation of deviant behaviour to concentrate their inquiries on the quality and organization of social reaction. The ‘moment’ of discovery, at least as far as the criminal act, the biography of the actor and the historical conditions under which it takes place are concerned, seems surprisingly low down on their agenda for a post-colonial criminology. In terms of Garland’s (2002) account of the historical development of criminology, the project they outline is governmental rather than Lombrosian. It is directed towards the institutional field of the criminal justice state and the administrative task of crime control rather than the cause of science and the evolution of theory.

But Shearing and Marks are far from alone in emphasizing reaction rather than action, an administrative project rather than a scientific one. The thrust of their questions is entirely consistent with the central concerns of South African criminology more generally and speaks directly to the nature of the aetiological crisis it is facing after almost two decades of democratic rule.

South African criminology since 1985

There have been several attempts to survey South African criminology and suggest new paradigms for it to follow since Davis (1985: 7) launched what he described as its ‘voyage of discovery’ into the hitherto uncharted territories mapped out by the ‘new theoretical insights’ of Anglo-American critical criminology. Davis’s introduction to a ground-breaking collection of essays published almost a decade before the country’s first democratic elections in April 1994, was followed by a series of papers written from a similar perspective by other authors connected, like Davis, to the Institute (now the Centre) of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. Beginning with Dirk van Zyl Smit’s (1990: 1–2) account of the ‘intellectual conditions which have underpinned the South African criminal justice system’, these surveys detected three broad traditions in South African criminology – legal reformist, Afrikaner nationalist and what, in his first piece, Van Zyl Smit had called ‘a criminology for a democratic South Africa’ (Van Zyl Smit, 1999; Dixon, 2004a; 2004b). These authors’ aims were normative as well as descriptive and they made no secret of their sympathy for the third of these traditions – a commitment shared by those who went on to develop the critical, democratic tradition by looking, like Davis, to the global north in search of the conceptual tools needed to understand the post-apartheid condition (Dixon, 2001; Hansson, 1993; 1995).

Unremarked in all of this was a feature of South African criminology common to all three traditions: a tendency to concentrate on the operation of the criminal justice system, mechanisms of crime control and processes of criminalization at the expense of explaining crime itself and understanding the lives of those accused of committing acts defined in this way. South Africa’s history and the experience of criminal justice under colonial and apartheid rule make it easy to see why this has been the case. Given the legacy of oppressive state action bequeathed by apartheid (Brewer, 1994), and the widely held view that an unreformed South African Police (SAP) was a present danger to the African National Congress-led government elected in 1994 (Dixon, 2004c), the prominence of work on policing in post-apartheid criminology is eminently understandable (Van der Spuy, 2004). The quality of some of this work from Brogden and Shearing’s (1993) Policing for a New Africa, published on the cusp of democracy, to the ethnographic studies of subsequent efforts to create a new South African Police Service (SAPS) provided by Altbeker (2005), Marks (2005) and Steinberg (2008) is undeniable. Nor can the significance of the contribution made by Shearing and his collaborators to the reconceptualization of policing and the governance of security be doubted. Since first calling for an ordering system ‘located primarily in the institutions of civil society’ (Brogden and Shearing, 1993: 175–176), Shearing and others have used South Africa both as a case study of ‘networked nodal governance’ in operation and a source of ideas that have transformed the way in which policing is conceived when the state’s monopoly on the use of coercive force is challenged by other security providers (Johnston and Shearing, 2003; and see also Marks and Wood, 2010; Marks et al., 2009).

Having said all of that it can still be argued that, in focusing on the resources to be mobilized in responding to criminal violence, sight has been lost of those who use it, and the task of understanding why so many people continue to deploy it so promiscuously has been neglected. In the next section I illustrate some of the difficulties South African criminology has had in coming to terms with the country’s persistently high rates of violent crime by referring to three pieces of work that draw attention to the explanatory void without managing to fill it.

The aetiological crisis

The following passage from the opening chapter of a book on house robberies illustrates South African criminology’s preoccupation with preventing and responding to violent crime:

This book describes in detail the methods used by house robbers. My hope, in sharing this information, is to help the police achieve a more effective rate of arrests, and to assist householders to improve their security and safeguard their lives in the event of a violent robbery. (Zinn 2010: 2–3)

The book is based on 30 interviews with incarcerated offenders and draws on research undertaken by the author in the course of his studies for a doctorate in police studies at the University of South Africa (Unisa) (Zinn, 2010: x). Yet, like Altbeker’s (2007) earlier work, its attention-grabbing title, Home Invasion: Robbers Disclose What You Should Know, and its cover illustration of a well-appointed detached house marked up in red to show its vulnerability to would-be robbers, advertise it as a book aimed at the millions of anxious suburban homeowners across South Africa. Zinn’s priorities are clearly stated: he wants to help the police put more house robbers behind bars and give homeowners practical advice on protecting themselves from their predators. His investigation of who these robbers are, where they come from and why they rob is no more than a means to these ends. Only rarely does he hint at the stories behind the actions of men (we are left to assume that his research subjects were all men) who very deliberately target homes that are occupied and use violence, or the threat of it, to overpower their victims. This is what Zinn (2010: 22) has to say about one of these men, ‘the professional shooter’:

He explained how he had called together his relatives who had previously ‘looked down at him and made him do hard manual labour before they were willing to give him and his orphan brother even a piece of bread’ and shown them his five firearms ‘to prove to them that he is now a man’. He described also how shocked they were and interpreted this to mean that they now respected him. Throughout my interaction with this young but hardened robber it became clear how the early death of his parents, the ensuing rejection and exploitation by his relatives, and a system that failed to help him and his brother, contributed to his becoming a criminal.

Here, fleetingly, from beneath the violent carapace of the home invader emerges a more complex figure, an orphan who had taken on the responsibility of caring for a younger sibling at an early age only to be treated with contempt by his relatives and indifference by the public authorities that might have been expected to care for them.

This passage comes at the end of a section on how robbers obtained the usually unlicensed firearms that 93 per cent of them considered to be the essential tools of their trade, and it is all that we are told about the men behind the guns. Unfortunately Zinn’s ability to adopt the perspective of his other respondents – to take their ‘side’ in Howard Becker’s (1967) famous formulation – is as limited as his interest in the biography of the professional shooter. As the following quotation from later in his book suggests, he is unable to follow Mills’s (1959: 8–9) injunction and see their behaviour not only as the ‘troubles’ of individuals and their immediate relations with others, but also as a wider ‘issue’ to do with the culture of post-apartheid society:

Unemployment and deprivation may well have been the trigger mechanisms, but once their life of crime had begun the respondents continued to commit crime even though they had already earned large amounts of money. Further research is needed to explore why robbers are willing to commit serious and violent crime only to spend the proceeds on luxuries. (Zinn 2010: 86)

The book by Antony Altbeker (2007) referred to earlier is another case in point. It begins in the most dramatic fashion with the story of the author’s encounter with armed robbers. Eating steak rolls and hot chips with a female companion in a Johannesburg fast food restaurant on a winter evening in 1997, Altbeker is suddenly confronted by a nervous teenage robber with a toy gun and an older, more confident man with a real one. He describes the latter thus:

Despite the cold, his shirt had no sleeves and his muscles looked as hard and raw as tendons. He wore a skullcap made of thinly-striped blue cloth that framed a narrow, strangely reddish face with high cheekbones and that came to the sharpest, pointiest chin I have ever seen. (Altbeker, 2007: 19)

This, sadly, is almost all we are told about a man Altbeker (2007: 22) dubs ‘Pointy Face’, a man who simply ‘walked out of the night’ to threaten his life and steal his jacket, his money and his phone. Beyond the unseasonably scanty clothing and the intimidating physique, Pointy Face remains an enigma. ‘I am just doing my job,’ he tells Altbeker in an incongruously matter-of-fact way (Altbeker, 2007: 22): but why this ‘job’? Where did Pointy Face come from? Who was he? How did he feel that evening entering a world of suburban leisure-seeking as alien to him as his inscrutable violence was to Altbeker and his fellow diners? What kind of life had led him to the point where he was prepared – or so Altbeker believed – not just to rob but to kill? And what does the existence of Pointy Face and men like him tell us about crime in post-apartheid South Africa? These questions remain unanswered and, by the end of Altbeker’s account, Pointy Face seems to be little more than a metaphor for an incomprehensible, frightening other, a symbol of the bitter legacy of apartheid and the growing awareness of the challenges facing South Africa’s new democracy.

Although Altbeker (2007) remains oddly lacking in curiosity about his assailants as individuals, he does offer a more general explanation for ‘South Africa’s crisis of crime’. He begins by arguing that criminogenic socio-economic conditions alone ‘cannot tell us why South African crime is as pervasive and violent as it is’ (Altbeker, 2007: 130). For him, the explanation lies in the choices people make and the context in which they are made:

[A]n individual’s decisions are shaped not by his or her values alone, but by the behaviour of other people around them and the context this creates. The gist [of my argument is] that, as more people break a social norm, others are drawn into doing the same. (Altbeker, 2007: 113)

To illustrate his point, Altbeker refers to two everyday situations: sitting in a traffic jam and going to a party. In both cases he suggests that our behaviour is influenced by the actions of others. So, when we see other drivers using the emergency lane to avoid joining a queue of stationary vehicles, we are more likely to do so ourselves. Similarly, if we lack confidence on the dance floor at parties, we may well need someone to give us a lead. In short, he maintains that South Africa’s crime problem:

… is the result of a chain reaction that has seen high levels of criminality lead ever more people copycatting others into crime. This has turned what would have been a serious crime problem into one that has turned violence into something approaching epidemic proportions, a problem bigger than can be explained solely by the factors – whether historical, social or economic – that are usually deemed to be the ‘root causes’. (Altbeker, 2007: 130)

There are hints of a less simplistic analysis elsewhere when he talks about the relative youthfulness of South African society and the inadequate socialization of a generation of young men reaching adolescence in the first decade of the 21st century whose parents (the so-called lost generation) had been at the forefront of the fight against apartheid (Altbeker, 2007: 116–119). He also refers to violence as ‘a cultural phenomenon’:

… a form of behaviour driven by its own logic and attractive in its own right, one that is, for a significant minority, an expression of their selfhood, something towards which young men are drawn by the ‘enticement, or incitement, of peer-group prestige’. (Altbeker, 2007: 119)

These are thought-provoking ideas but they are unsupported by empirical evidence and the implicit behaviourism of Altbeker’s central ‘copycatting’ thesis is conceptually unsophisticated in comparison with the more familiar notion of differential association (Sutherland and Cressey, 1960: 77–79). It also leaves important questions unanswered: is the analogy between armed robbery, emergency lane driving and dancing for pleasure a good one; and how and what do Altbeker’s ‘copycat’ criminals learn, from whom, and in what social situations?

The empirical and theoretical moorings of the third piece are considerably more secure. In a tradition dating back 70 years to the first Chicago School, Breetzke and Horn (2006: 181) locate their work ‘in the neglected area of environmental criminology’; they are interested in the ‘spatial-ecological’ investigation of the location of offences and offenders and the social and economic conditions of urban neighbourhoods. Using data on the residential addresses of 1870 sentenced offenders in five correctional centres serving the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, Breetzke and Horn (2006: 183) set out to relate ‘spatial patterns of offender residence to socio-economic variables’ in an effort to explain ‘the spatial pattern of offending’ in the city and ‘the reasons that contribute, in part, to why the individual decides to offend’. Aggregated to the suburb level, the residence data revealed four main concentrations of offenders: in the informal sections of towns bordering the ‘homelands’ created under apartheid; in settlements close to the city centre occupied by recent migrants; in three well-established ‘black’ townships; and, finally, in ‘impoverished white areas’ on the periphery of the municipality and in two distinct suburban clusters (Breetzke and Horn, 2006: 184). From these preliminary results they uncovered ‘a first empirical clue that crime in Tshwane is a poverty related and multi-racial phenomenon’ (2006: 184). Correlating the address data with a set of 91 census variables revealed that high concentrations of offenders were linked to the ‘spatial incidence’ of ‘low social status and income, a large and young family, unskilled earners and high residential mobility’ (2006: 187).

Unlike Altbeker, Breetzke and Horn are circumspect in their response to this finding: they do no more than note an ‘association’ between offender location and these four broad factors, describing claims that they are ‘criminogenic risk factors’ as ‘presumptuous’. Yet they too leave many questions unasked and unanswered when they conclude that human behaviour – though occasionally ‘capricious’ – may also be ‘driven by causal mechanisms existing within the individuals’ community’ (Breetzke and Horn, 2006: 192). How is the ‘drive’ to criminal behaviour generated by environmental factors articulated with individual ‘decisions’ to offend? What lies behind the ‘caprice’ of some (perhaps much, and more than Breetzke and Horn seem willing to allow) human behaviour? Why is it that most men and more women living in even the most deprived neighbourhoods do not offend? And, from a methodological point of view, who is to say that the spatial distribution of offenders is not at least partly an artefact of a concentration of police and correctional resources on detecting and sanctioning the infractions of the poor and powerless? While Breetzke and Horn provide some evidence of a link between social and economic deprivation and the distribution of certain kinds of offender, the nature of that link, and the lives of the offenders and non-offenders who inhabit deprived neighbourhoods remain largely unexplored and unexplained.

Explaining the crisis

In much the same way as ‘South Africa’s crisis of crime’ defies simple explanation, so too does the inability of criminology to account for it. Here I suggest some of the factors that may have contributed to the impasse. Perhaps the most important was referred to earlier and lies in the practical and ideological commitment of many criminologists to the transformation of South African society and their belief in that transformation as the principal means by which levels of violent crime could be brought down to those prevailing in the developed democracies of the global north. Evidence of these convictions is not hard to find. It is clear in the courage shown by Don Foster and others in researching and publishing an incendiary report on the use of torture in police detention in 1987. It is present too in Dirk van Zyl Smit’s introduction to a collection of essays published in 1990 in which he expressed ‘the fervent hope of the editors that … this volume will make its contribution towards justice in South Africa’ (Van Zyl Smit, 1990: 14, emphasis in original), and in the optimism with which Mike Brogden and Clifford Shearing (1993) looked to the future in Policing for a New South Africa, which appeared three years later. Academics and activists also made significant contributions to making and maintaining the fragile peace that prevailed between the announcement of negotiations on a political settlement in February 1990 and the elections held in April 1994, to investigating the abuses of the past under the auspices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and to shaping the policies and practices of successive post-apartheid governments in policing, crime prevention, youth justice, correctional services, and violence against women (to name but five areas of activity). In short, there can be no doubting the extent to which South African criminologists from a variety of backgrounds were committed to supporting the transition to democracy and bringing about the changes need to establish a system of criminal justice worthy of the ‘new South Africa’.

What is more, even the most superficial reading of major policy statements such as the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) (African National Congress, 1994) and the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) (Department of Safety and Security, 1996) reveals that the more or less explicit assumption underlying the transformation project was that crime and violence could only be tackled if their root causes in the deep economic and social structures of apartheid society were addressed (Dixon, 2004c; 2006). Security forces and a criminal justice system long in thrall to ‘racist ideology’ would have to be reformed to ‘reflect the national and gender character of our country’, to be ‘non-partisan [and] professional’ and to ‘uphold the Constitution and human rights’ (African National Congress, 1994: para. 1.3.4). Some of the causes of crime were ‘deep-rooted and related to the history and socioeconomic realities of our society’ (Department of Safety and Security, 1994: section 1); to reduce levels of offending it was necessary to ‘transform and reorganise government’ and ‘weave a new social fabric, robust enough to withstand the stresses of rapid change in a new-born society’. So, when structural reforms of the kind contemplated in the RDP and NCPS proved hard to achieve and failed to produce the desired effects on rates of violent crime (Marais, 2011), it is hardly surprising that criminologists who had supported this approach found it difficult to explain why the institutionalization of democracy had not been the panacea they had hoped for.

Moreover, as crime policy came to be formulated in an increasingly hot political climate – to use the meteorological metaphor favoured by Loader and Sparks (2011) – the pendulum gradually swung back towards the skop, skiet en donner (kick, shoot and beat) traditions of apartheid law enforcement. As early as 1999 the late Steve Tshwete thought it necessary to promise on his appointment as Minister for Safety and Security that criminals would be treated ‘in the same way a dog deals with a bone’ (Gifford, 1999). A dozen years later the message was much the same with the newly installed Acting National Commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi reassuring journalists that the SAPS would ‘meet fire with fire’ in fighting crime (South African Press Association, 2011). The response among South African criminologists to the heating up of the policy climate, fuelled by the persistently high levels of violent crime, has varied. Some, like Antony Altbeker (2007: 34), have chosen to echo the rhetorical flourishes of the politicians and policemen by calling for ‘a criminal justice system that comes down like a ton of bricks on people who commit violent crime’. Others have sought to defend the changes made in the early years of democracy by arguing for a ‘“minimal” and “minimalist” public police’ and warning against the ‘remilitarization’ of the SAPS (Marks and Wood, 2010). Unsurprisingly perhaps, very few have been tempted to indulge in cool contemplation of the causes of violent crime in an effort to discover why, for many of its citizens, the new South Africa is, or may seem, as dangerous as the old one.

A final explanation for this reticence may lie in the inability of South African criminology to democratize itself. Attend a conference or seminar on crime and justice in South Africa and the whiteness of the faces is striking. Pick up a local criminology journal and the English and Afrikaans names leap off the pages. This is not to say that a less white criminology would necessarily have responded more readily to the challenges that have emerged since 1994, still less that an aetiological crisis could have been avoided. But the suspicion remains that white criminologists – even those whose sympathies with the governments elected since 1994 have gradually dissipated – may have been reluctant to attract accusations of ‘afro-pessimism’ by adding to the clamour of voices ready to take the state’s shortcomings in dealing with violent crime as proof of, at best, a shocking degree of incompetence and, at worst, a malign disregard for the safety of its citizens. Apart from being politically disabling, the whiteness of South African criminology also presents practical problems. Shearing and Marks (2011: 127) maintain that a post-colonial South African criminology should investigate ‘the divergent meanings that the range of actors (both those with power and those more marginalised) give to crime, violence and transitional justice’. The work by Zinn (2010), Altbeker (2007) and Breetzke and Horn (2006) reviewed earlier suggests that this task may be beyond the compass of all but a few white Afrikaans and/or English-speaking researchers. Faced with the difficulty (not to mention the possible dangers) of, say, ethnographic work in the vernacular-speaking informal settlements from which Breetzke and Horn’s (2006) study tells us many offenders originate, researchers have tended, with some remarkable exceptions such as Marks (2001) and Steinberg (2002), to gravitate towards studies involving subjects who speak the same language(s) and are easily accessible, either as members of disciplined organizations like the police or as inmates of the prison estate. In as divided a society as South Africa the challenges of carrying out research across the lines drawn by ‘race’ and class mean that only the most skilled and determined are able to bypass the powerful and gain access to the life worlds of the marginalized.

Conclusion: Resolving the crisis?

The picture painted of South African criminology thus far has been rather gloomy. To allow it to remain so would be both inaccurate and unfair. So I conclude by referring to some of the attempts that have been made to heed the urgings of Mills (1959: 8) and Young (2011) by making the connection between biography and history, ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’, before suggesting how South African criminology might begin to resolve the aetiological crisis in which it finds itself. The disciplinary and institutional origins of the more imaginative work published over the last 18 years reflect the diversity of South African criminology, and range from the rich ethnographies produced by anthropologists such as Ashforth (2005) and Jensen (2008), through the critical historiography of the likes of Glaser (1998), Kynoch (2008) and Van Onselen (see 2010 for a recent addition to a body of work stretching back over 30 years) and the pioneering investigations of Steinberg (2002) and Weiner (2011), to the more mainstream criminologies of Dixon (2001), Marks (2001) and Holtmann (2008). Somewhat arbitrary though it may be to focus on just two projects (both the products of prison interviews) for an indication of the way forward for South African criminology this is what I will do here.

The first of these is Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s (2003) account of her conversations in Pretoria’s maximum security prison with the former apartheid security policeman, Eugene de Kock – the man known to many South Africans as ‘Prime Evil’. Apart from the remarkable way in which Gobodo-Madikizela reflects on her own reactions to de Kock – her description of the moment when she reaches out and touches his hand to comfort him, and how the recollection of that moment steals up on her as she prepares to meet him again, is particularly evocative – what she has to say about him as a man of his time puts the connections between biography and history, milieu and social structure, at the centre of her analysis:

When, in addition to his own feelings of vulnerability, an individual is plunged into a system in which his career is defined by violence, then the issue of choice may not be as easy as it seems. Violent abuse damages – and, yes, even corrupts – the individual’s psyche. It intrudes upon and invades the victim’s unconsciousness so that, in an environment that rewards evil, there are few resources on which the person can draw to resist it. (Gobodo-Madkizela, 2003: 57–58)

Much less detailed and searching in its reflexivity, but more obviously suggestive of ways in which the meanings of crime and violence may be understood in the interplay between the inner and outer worlds of complex, historically-situated individuals is the story of a man, identified only as Mandla, in one of a series of studies of violent crime co-ordinated by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) for the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Sub-Committee of the South African Cabinet (CSVR, 2008a). The background to the tantalisingly short ‘case history’ of Mandla is provided in another volume in the series, written, in less demotic mode than his earlier work, by Antony Altbeker (2007; CSVR, 2008b). In the second CSVR report it is argued that the roots of South Africa’s crime problem lie not only in the ‘systematic exclusion of millions of people from participation in the labour market’ and the striking inequalities that result from it, but also in how the gap between ‘the implicit and explicit promise of equality, on the one hand, and the reality of deeply entrenched inequality on the other’ is interpreted and experienced (CSVR, 2008b: 49). This disjuncture between the ANC’s vision of ‘a better life for all’ and the profane reality of the political economy of early 21st-century South Africa documented by Hein Marais (2011), ‘drives crime through the psychosocial fallout of inequality’:

[T]he frustrations and grievances that result are magnified by the fact that they are based on exclusions, the roots of which lie in the injustices of the past and, for that reason, are even more likely to be seen as an affront to the human dignity of the poor. (CSVR, 2008b: 49)

Returning to Mandla, a 29-year-old man five years into a 10–15-year sentence for attempted murder, we see how his family were affected by the spatial and cultural dislocations of apartheid and the ravages of the AIDS pandemic. One of three siblings each with different fathers, Mandla grew up in the final years of apartheid in Soweto, the vast ‘black’ township south-west of Johannesburg. His life is marked by a sense of loss: of the father he never knew; of the ‘cultural heritage and ancestry’ that he believes would have enabled him to succeed as a man; of a sister who died (‘probably as a result of HIV/AIDS’) while he was in prison; and of a mother’s love withdrawn (as he remembers it) when his sister became pregnant, never to be reignited because of his involvement in crime (CSVR, 2008a: 114–115). Driven from his home aged 14 by violence between family members, Mandla robbed and stole to support himself, often targeting migrants (‘amashangaans’) whom he and his associates calculated would be less likely to report their victimization to the police. But – like the interviewees who baffled Zinn – he also spent his ill-gotten gains on maintaining a hedonistic lifestyle of drinking, drug use and the ‘fashion style’ needed to impress his peers and attract ‘girlfriends’ (CSVR, 2008b 116–117).

The denouement to Mandla’s story is reminiscent of Altbeker’s confrontation with the mysterious Pointy Face: he is arrested, tried and sentenced following a shoot-out in a restaurant that he and two other men had attempted to rob. Yet the picture of Mandla that emerges from the case study is so much fuller and more human than the rough sketch of his sharp-featured and muscular assailant drawn by Altbeker (2007) or the blurred portrait of the professional shooter in search of respect painted by Zinn (2010). Also evident in the CSVR study are the connections between Mandla’s life and the wider problems of contemporary South Africa, the deeply ambivalent attitudes towards immigrant ‘others’, the significance of consumption in the creation of identity in a society where so many struggle simply to survive, and the longing for a connection through lost paternal ‘ancestors’, with a countervailing sense of self fortified against the ephemeral lure of wealth and ‘fashion’. Here, where history and structure are given meaning in the lives and psyches of human beings, in the de Kocks and the Mandlas, may lie the solution to the aetiological crisis, and a way forward to a South African criminology attuned to the post-colonial condition.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Some of the arguments advanced here were sketched out in an earlier paper, ‘Understanding “Pointy Face”: What is criminology for?’, published in South African Crime Quarterly (Dixon, 2012). The author would like to thank Ronnie Lippens, Chris Phillipson and Anne Worrall for comments on this article in draft form.

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