Abstract
It is ‘remarkable’, writes McMichael, ‘how much the weight of colonial and apartheid domination still presses down on the present. The “skop, skiet and donner” tactics of the past continue into post-apartheid society, with the battles of the whip and the bullet rewritten in letters of blood on a daily basis.’ Thus, this cultural critic, political commentator and abolitionist sums up his accumulated insights on policing and power in South Africa – in a slim volume which packs a mighty punch!
From the start, he takes a wide-angle lens to his subject; policing in South Africa is not the sole focus. The racial dispossession that developed in white-settler societies like South Africa is today mirrored in the exclusions of neocolonialism and neoliberalism. In the first and final chapters that buttress the historical content of the book, dealing with the function and alternatives to policing respectively, comparisons are made to other societies where Europeans settled, such as India, Jamaica, the US and Latin America. Once readers get used to the focus, the value of capturing an expansive background in order to magnify the significance and global relevance of the South African experience of policing, is evident.
The historical substance of the book is contained in the central five chapters that deal firstly with the colonial beginnings of policing in paramilitarism and vigilantism, and the amalgamation of various institutions of colonial policing into the South African Police (SAP) in 1913. The Union of South Africa ‘uniting warring Afrikaner and English whites against people of other races’ had been established three years earlier. Next comes a consideration of the policing of apartheid and post-apartheid evolutions since 1994, with the latter linked to extreme levels of violence, and new patterns of segregated living in neoliberal cities characterised by gated communities and lifestyle estates. McMichael shows well that the history of policing in South Africa encapsulates the history of South Africa itself. For example, the SAP was formed when land expropriation and racial dispossession was intensifying via the Natives Land Act which barred Africans from owning land in 87 per cent of South Africa.
Although the SAP might have been the first attempt at a national police force, private policing, vigilantism and paramilitarism long pre-dated it. While the first British settlers built on the paramilitary model of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in its Irish colony, the Dutch East India Company, which in 1652 established a permanent settlement in the strategic port of the Cape of Good Hope, had already established a draconian new legal code enforced by private soldiers hired from Europe’s impoverished classes. As Europeans pushed further into the interior of the Western and Eastern Cape, the Dutch East India Company began to rely on localised commandos made up of trekboers (frontier farmers) under the control of local landrosts (rural magistrates) also implementing the proto-police force the burgerwacht (neighbourhood watch), with settlers expected to act as private vigilantes. The basskap mentality making settlers informal deputies in policing white supremacy, using fists, dogs, whips and guns to terrorise slaves and workers for the slightest act of subordination, also intensified. Violence came to be seen as a way to impose civilised order on an untamed wilderness – all necessary to maintain the authority of the nascent colonial state.
In Chapter 3, on ‘Policing segregation and capitalism’, McMichael considers the period from 1800−1948. Here the impact of the discovery of vast mineral resources in the late nineteenth century intensified the battles between the British and Boer Republics and led to rapid industrialisation, urban segregation and the creation of mining compounds to control the movement of African labour. Privately hired compound police ruled with sjamboks (whips) and a system of informants. As the Boer authorities felt overwhelmed by migrants flocking to cities like Johannesburg, the state established the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek Politie (ZARPS) to replace the outmoded landsrost and burgerwacht. The British oligarch and arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes established the mercenary paramilitary British South Africa Police, which at that time operated primarily in southern Rhodesia, and, later, the British used the rural paramilitary South African Constabulary, under the leadership of Baden-Powell, to act as a ‘second army’. Here, McMichael also shows how the resource wars between Dutch and British settlers (leading to ethnic cleansing and the internment of Boer refugees by the British in fenced-off, fortified communities) provided the template for concentration camps, as well as colonial policing models that were to develop under apartheid.
Having set the scene, McMichael is ready to discuss the apartheid police (1948−1994) and the web of laws that were used to ‘criminalise all people of colour and forcibly remove millions of people into bleak homelands or Bantustans’. Today’s abolitionists seeking to increase their understanding of the international history and global connections of modern policing, will find McMichael’s Chapter 4 (‘The apartheid police’) particularly useful for its holistic race and class analysis. McMichael demonstrates that it was the attack on both the ‘black and red menace’ that defined policing in twentieth-century South Africa. By so doing he inadvertently draws attention to the historical inaccuracy and weakness of some contemporary theories that sever the links between race and class, between the fight against racism and the fight against capitalism. When the SAP was formed in 1913, it was expected to enforce not just the colour bar but repress working-class organisations in rapidly urbanising cities. And, later, with the growth of anti-colonial liberation movements throughout the world, the official justification for state repression became ‘anti-communism’, the shibboleth that allowed white supremacists to continue colonial policing. The 1956 Treason Trial which dragged on until 1961 was, after all, justified by the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) which McMichael characterises as ‘the key instrument of legal repression’ in the apartheid era. Communism was defined under the Act as anything that encouraged ‘feelings of hostility between the European and the non-European’.
Given the author’s impressive grasp of history, his description of the influence of Afrikaner nationalism and European fascism on policing in the 1930s and ’40s, on the foundation of the savage police state of the apartheid era, is key. Here we learn about the Special Staff, later to become the notorious SAP Security Branch, which would maintain a regime of state terror during the apartheid era. The activities of the highly secretive Bureau of State Security (BOSS) which was linked to political surveillance of ANC exiles and is believed to have established the first clandestine police death squad specifically tasked with organising targeted killings of political opponents is also delineated.
But what about post-apartheid policing? In chapters five and six, McMichael is scathing about the ANC’s failure to build on the constitutional settlement of 1995, when the SAP was reformed to amalgamate police and former guerrillas and officially recalibrated from a ‘force’ into a ‘service’ (hence the acronym SAP changes to SAPS). Particularly since 2009, the ANC has gone out of its way to support police repression promising to make SAPS tougher in every respect and even reintroducing a military-style ranking system dropped at the end of apartheid. For him, Police and state repression have recalibrated since 1994. For one, the class domination aspects of policing have become even more overt as formal racial laws have ended . . . the main targets of state terror remain the masses of poor black people, who not only have to rely on the informal sector for survival, but are seen as superfluous waste by the authorities.
The neoliberalisation of the city and the nihilistic pursuit of power and wealth for its own sake lie behind the political regression. ‘Fortress urbanism’, gated communities and lifestyle estates encourage a ‘hawkish attitude towards urban space’. This use of militarised police units and private security forces to combat ‘disorder’ is not unique to South Africa. This is where McMichael’s wide lens and expansive background comes into its own. Operation Clean Street in Johannesburg, in 2013, for instance, where police attacked street traders, beating them with whips and impounding their stock can be compared to Operation Clean up Rubbish in Zimbabwe in 2005, when hundreds of thousands of shack dwellers and informal traders were displaced in the name of enforcing public ‘hygiene’.
This remarkable book demonstrates the power of an abolitionist text to speak to readers across borders. We now have a global vernacular and emerging analysis that allows collective movements to speak to both the local and the global. This becomes clear in some of the solutions the author advances. Abolitionism is a living politics, he feels, that must be tailored to domestic contexts. He cautions against importing the US abolitionist model wholesale to South Africa, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world. While the concept of defunding the police accurately reflects how police departments receive funding at the expense of social services in the US, it does not have the same resonance in South Africa, where private police are more ubiquitous and police stations chronically underfunded. The primary emphasis in challenging police impunity, he believes, lies in ‘building living alternatives’ to segregation, degradation and the militarisation of social life, above all de-linking from ‘authoritarian and statist models of safety’.
But why, I kept wondering, did McMichael choose the title Shoot to Kill when the book does not set out to detail all police shootings in South Africa. Perhaps the answer lies in understanding the wide angle of his lens. There are stories in these pages that will never leave you, stories that encapsulate the history of land expropriation, racial dispossession, urban segregation, and speak to white supremacy’s fear of interracial solidarity. In August 2012, responding to a strike on the platinum belt, SAPS special units opened fire and killed thirty-four miners, leading to the Marikana Commission of Inquiry. The police also responded to the 2012/13 farmworkers’ protests in the Western Cape winelands by shooting at demonstrators and killing three. Teenager Nobile Nuzzi died after being shot in the back of the head at an eviction protest in Durban. Natnael Julies, a 16-year-old boy with an intellectual disability, was shot in the head during a SAPS anti-gangs operation in Johannesburg because he could not answer questions quickly enough. Shoot to kill is inevitable in a South Africa still shaped by the legacy of apartheid, a ‘garrison state dominated by a military industrial complex’, where the ‘paranoid policing models of colonialism and apartheid’ have been ‘reincorporated’ into society.