The News: Better to Capture a State in Hell Than Serve Time in a Democracy

Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe

South Africa is reeling today after almost a week of looting and violence following former president Jacob Zuma’s reluctant surrender to authorities after a conviction on contempt of court charges.

The details underneath the surface are complex. The primary rioters at the start of the uprising likely have ties of some kind to Zuma’s networks. Whether he or close associates directly ordered the violence or simply inspired it with inflammatory rhetoric will never be possible to cleanly determine.

On the whole, I agree with David Everatt of the University of the Witwatersrand: there’s good reason to think that Zuma and his close associates have some kind of direct responsibility, gambling that proving their strength would prevent the government from continuing to prosecute Zuma for his numerous criminal activities during his time as president.

Americans reading these analyses will doubtless see some resemblances between South Africa’s situation and their own, and there are some real parallels (as there often are between the two nations). In some ways, you could look at South Africa since Zuma left office and think that the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has been testing out the program of action that many American progressives desperately wanted Joe Biden’s administration to pursue in the US. As Everatt observes, Ramaphosa has been aggressively resuscitating the state’s ability to investigate and prosecute corruption within its operations and has taken the brakes off of judicial investigations of Zuma and his allies. You could also thus look at the last week’s events and wonder if Trump and the people who would likely go under with him is contemplating the same kind of unleashing of the same networks of people who rioted at the Capitol building on January 6th.

Even if he is, that’s where the parallels would likely end, because the sociohistorical infrastructures that Zuma and Trump have access to and would mobilize through are quite different. Whatever Trump supporters might do to create large-scale disorder and attack democracy would be different.

The complexity of events in South Africa right now is that whatever the initial instigation of the last week’s destructive uprising, it was quickly overlaid by the general desperation of the many people trapped in unchanging structural poverty and with the opposing solidarity of many other people determined to keep the fabric of their communities intact despite the chaos. South Africans want life to get better and so far democracy as it was practiced after 1994 hasn’t done much for that aspiration. But many South Africans are also determined to protect the democracy that took so many decades to achieve, and know that Jacob Zuma must face justice for that goal to be achieved. It’s not just South Africa: real, bottom-up democracy is what people all over sub-Saharan Africa want. No one should look on these riots and say that they represent a majoritarian disdain for democracy in favor of a desire to get paid. People want both.

But that’s where our political imaginations also fail us in interpreting these moments. Or perhaps more to the point, we look for explanations that we imagine give us (or someone) meaningful political agency. We look on and hope in some sense that these events were orchestrated by a small group of malevolent leaders in part because it is possible to imagine a response that cuts the head off the dragon once and for all. We look on and hope that this is proof that a democratic South Africa has to be an economically just South Africa, and that the state needs to regard the thorough reconstruction of South Africa’s socioeconomic systems as its most urgent priority. So the argument various observers end up having is about whether this is top-down or bottom-up event, and the truth they settle for is usually that it’s both, and that what’s needed is both criminal justice (send Zuma and his people away for good) and economic justice (start a thorough and sustained redistribution of the wealth that South Africa still retains in great measure before it’s finally too late).

What gets squeezed out is a more depressing and difficult thought. It is not that these events are result from some lack of ability to live democratically (that’s the old racist, colonial, settler discourse that is always bubbling up with its foul odor somewhere) nor that this is some abstractedly universal move to disorder the moment that the sovereign is distracted or divided. It is more that the people who are in some sense most readily mobilized by Zuma have a very specific history being mobilized in precisely this way, with precisely the malevolent desire to smash anything containing democratic possibilities and loot whatever meager coins fall out from inside the piggy bank.

After his early arrest by the apartheid government and a prison term in Robben Island with other ANC members, Zuma returned to Natal and built the ANC’s underground in the province. While it may be that the generation of ANC leaders who planned for the organization to become an underground party with a military wing understood perfectly well the danger that this approach to political organizing might pose later on for democratic practice, that danger is far more clear in retrospect. It might seem a luxury now to judge choices made under desperate circumstances then, but over the long haul of the struggle against apartheid, most of what passed for the “armed struggle” planned by the ANC was at most useful as a futureward threat to bring pressure for a negotiated solution than it was at actually sabotaging the South African state. Most of the actual blood shed in the struggle against apartheid was shed in the open after 1976, without the elaborate organizational hierarchies and operational doctrines that obsessed the ANC while the youth fought the state more spontaneously and made the country ungovernable.

Both modes of struggle had some long-term implications that have been issues for post-apartheid South Africa. Discovering that if most of the people of a township take to the streets (and hector those who would rather not into joining the unrest) that there is little any government can do to stop you (especially not one that is supposed to be on your side rather than being the instrument of a small racial elite) has been a power used since 1993 for good on occasion but also to murder resident foreigners and threaten people trying to build deeper roots and better solidarity for all.

But more importantly, think about Zuma in his post-prison work for the ANC. Natal was the site where the apartheid state perfected systems for the secret mobilization of proxy forces whose primary purpose was the destruction of public order and the intimidation of any potential enemies. Zuma, ostensibly, was one of the people who had to coordinate the ANC’s response to being attacked by apartheid’s “third force”, most of whom had some association with Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Party. At the least, it feels likely that he learned a lot of lessons in organizing from his enemies—all the wrong kinds of lessons—and the murky ground of interactions between apartheid intelligence and anti-apartheid intelligence leaves room to imagine a host of destructive if often indirect or one-step-removed transactional interactions.

No specific conspiracy is required to simply say this: what is happening now is not just a presentist response either motivated by loyalty to Zuma or anger at impoverishment and exclusion. It is a history in which both the apartheid state and the ANC collaborated.

The apartheid state after 1976 dropped into the fantasies that covert action and sabotage allow to the powerful who have discovered the hard material limits of their dominion: that somehow they will find through secretive action a mysterious efficient form of control that will extend their power forever, in defiance of the material limits on armed force and legal sovereignty. They will keep their enemies forever divided and confused, they will arrest and torture the leaders who matter and leave the incompetents and weaklings alone, they will assassinate here and there, blow up a key bit of infrastructure, deliver menace that is deniable. As that covert fantasy evolved into the negotiations and the transition process, it turned more and more to the mobilization of proxies and an unspoken threat of mutually assured destruction if the final redoubts of white power were threatened. Exemplary burning and murder made the threat real.

The ANC of the 1980s, feeling the struggle step around their structures, feeling still faintly ridiculous over the amateurishness of its first attempts at sabotage and the performative emptiness of the armed struggle off in Tanzania, committed to its own vision of covert action and secret violences, moving money and people and orders around beyond and outside of formal and visible structures. The only thing the ANC had left going for it heading into negotiations was is structural legitimacy, its sovereignty-in-waiting, but people like Zuma were busily gnawing away at all that long before the ink on the constitution dried.

What lies in ruins today is not random. The target list and the objective of holding a democracy hostage were drawn up in the 1990s and perhaps before. It’s not about protecting the last redoubts of an exclusively racial power now, but the threat and the method are the same. It is about offering a bargain: let us hold on to some of what we captured, let some of us get a taste of the action, and we’ll let you be down at your end of the sovereignty. Refuse and watch the mosques and community centers burn, the businesses die, the possibilities for a better South Africa vanish for generations to come.

So as always, the people trying to hold the line are not just facing a situation where they can bargain with a few or offer hope to the many. They are facing a history that was built to destroy hope and that today stands on the brink of succeeding.

Image credit: "President Jacob Zuma attends National House of Traditional Leaders meeting, 7 Apr 2016" by GovernmentZA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0