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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Local politics is the cornerstone of democracy
Don’t plan cities, negotiate them
Working with Pakistan’s civil society
Street law: crime and policing in a South African township
Sources of conflict: water provision in Bolivia
8-9/2006 |
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Street law
In the black township of Khayelitsha near Cape Town, crime rates are high and the police are weak. During apartheid, non-state institutions provided a provisional form of public order and justice. In the meantime, they have also lost authority. As the state is unable to maintain law and order, a dangerous vacuum has emerged.
[ By Tillmann Elliesen ]
The German tour operators were exploring new tourist destinations in South Africa. Just as the 40 men and women were boarding their bus, the robbers attacked. Brandishing guns, they demanded money and valuables. A few minutes later, they were gone. This episode occurred at the end of November 2005 in Khayelitsha, one of several black townships south of Cape Town. The robbery was even reported on South African television.
The Germans were simply unlucky. Normally, visitors only learn through hearsay, or the media, about Khayelitsha’s appalling crime rates. In late March, the Cape Times declared the township to be the Western Cape Province’s “rape capital”. According to a study, more women and girls were raped here than anywhere else. A little earlier, a young woman from Khayelitsha had appealed for help in the weekly Mail & Guardian. Her mother had been mugged twice in only six weeks – in broad daylight. The woman complained that nobody seemed to care about the “hell on earth” that is Khayelitsha.
Khayelitsha is the youngest of Cape Town’s townships, but it is also by far the largest, with about a million inhabitants. In the early eighties, the apartheid regime cleared the land and forced inhabitants of other townships, which were over-crowded, to settle there. Ever since, new migrants from the rural areas have been arriving in Khayelitsha daily, to try their luck in the city. Most are unemployed or struggle along as day-labourers, living in small shacks of wood or corrugated iron. Others live in more comfortable brick houses. A small upper-class can afford villas surrounded by high fences, such as otherwise are seen only in South Africa’s white residential areas.
The high level of crime and violence has many reasons in South Africa. They include poverty and the lack of prospect, which most blacks continue to experience twelve years after the end of apartheid, but also a distorted perception of what it means to be masculine following years of being humiliated by whites, as well as the weakness of the government’s crime prosecution.
The police are weak
During apartheid, state-presence in the townships principally meant oppression, rather than guaranteed security or defence of law and order. People in the townships set up their own institutions for such purposes. So-called street committees would settle disputes, take action against serious crime, and impose punishment. Even today, the state does not wield a monopoly of force in the townships. The police are weak, and the old informal institutions for maintaining order still exist.
However, the street committees are by no means as powerful as they used to be. Khayelitsha, like many other townships, has been left with a security vacuum, which the state plans to fill with a range of initiatives geared to preventing and combating crime. Such government initiatives, however, are causing friction with the street committees.
Tembele Ernest comes from a village in the Eastern Cape and has been living in one of the corrugated iron shacks in Khayelitsha since 1997. He has a wife and small daughter and is selling sweets and household goods to make a living. He stores his merchandise in a supermarket cart in his shack. Adolescents have kicked in his door several times, to steal his stock, Ernest reports. He has reinforced the lock only recently. “The police is making things even worse,” he grumbles, indicating a makeshift repair job on the door frame. “Not long ago, while chasing a robber nearby, the police rammed their car into my house. When I went to the police station about it, nobody wanted to know. You have to look after yourself in Khayelitsha.”
Khayelitsha has three police stations and a total of 600 police officers. As a comparison, Frankfurt, with a population of around 600.000, has more than 3000 police officers. In particular, the lower ranks of the South African police are poorly equipped, under-paid and unmotivated. Moreover, an informal transfer system makes sure that the least capable policemen end up in the toughest areas. Those who fail at work are threatened with transfer to so-called “punishment stations”, which are mainly situated in the townships. This practice, of course, is hardly conducive for the police to overcome the violent legacy of apartheid.
Nonetheless, the situation has improved noticeably since 1994. “Khayelitsha was virtually a no-go area for the police during the early nineties,” recalls Gerrit Nieuwoudt. The sturdy 49-year-old has been with the force for almost 30 years, he was stationed in Khayelitsha from 1996 to 2004. “When I started, there was only one police station with 250 officers. The people used their newly-won freedom to stage rallies and protests. And the police, as visible representatives of the state, were on the receiving end of all that pent-up rage.”
Community-based bodies
Nieuwoudt helped to establish the Community Police Forum of Khayelitsha. Representatives of the police and the local people, of churches and other civil-society organisations come together to identify and discuss problems in their community. Such forums sprang up all over the country after apartheid collapsed. The purpose was to improve police-community relations, and to give the police better access to the black residential areas.
During apartheid, it was not the hated state that ensured people’s safety in the townships, but a range of self-help organisations, mainly the street committees. These committees consist of elders and other respected people in the community. Even today, they still resolve conflicts and maintain order. Each committee takes responsibility for 50 to 250 households. In their heyday in the eighties, the committees presided not only over justice and the law, but also all other problems township inhabitants faced, including those of health care, education and credit.
Since 1994, however, the street committees have been struggling to justify their existence. In democratic South Africa, the state is claiming a legitimate monopoly of force, leaving no room for self-help action any more. Officially, the committees cooperate with the state authorities, but there is frustration at grassroots level. “The street committees were pretty annoyed when the police started to search for suspects in their districts,” recalls Gerrit Nieuwoudt.
David Hempe makes no secret of remaining apprehensions. Clearly older than 60, Hempe chairs a 15-member street committee in Khayelitsha. “Boys from a neighbouring district mugged a woman here recently,” he says. “We wrote to the committee there about the matter, and now they are handling it.” Normally, however, the committees deal almost exclusively with minor matters such as late-night noises or neighbourly disputes, according to Hempe. “We used to be able to punish criminals, but not any more,” he adds wistfully. “Today the young people punish us.”
There is no doubt in Hempe’s mind that one reason for the increase in crime in Khayelitsha since the late nineties is that the street committees no longer have the power to get tough: “The police are incompetent and release suspects too soon.” Offenders were no longer deterred – unlike when the street committees imposed draconian punishments such as public whippings. Hempe is sceptical about local cooperation with the police in the context of the Khayelitsha Community Police Forum. In his opinion the forums were good for a while, but their value has gradually diminished.
Senior Superintendent Johan Ellmann is the chief of one of the three police stations in Khayelitsha, and his assessment is not quite so negative. In his view, the relationship between township citizens and the police has improved considerably. He does, however, concede that participation in the forum could be better. “Motivation has decreased,” he says.
Gerrit Nieuwoudt, who has been heading a police station outside Cape Town for the past two years, sees faults on both sides. The local representatives on the forums have not always been reliably reporting back to their base, he argues – with a negative impact on police-community relations. On the other hand, many police officers remain insensitive to the hardships township residents face and are largely unfamiliar with the social structures there.
Every day, Nieuwoudt and Ellmann see how much the police depend on the collaboration of local communities in the fight against crime. The South African state, however, does not want to release any of its control and is trying to dominate the citizens’ initiatives. As the street committees lose their influence, national government and the provincial governments are constantly inventing new approaches to citizen-focused police work in the Western Cape. For three years, the police have been experimenting with so-called Sector Crime Forums, which equate to the Community Police Forums, but cover smaller areas to improve the exchange between the police and the people. Similarly, Community Safety Forums have been set up in the Western Cape, which involve not only the police, but also other state authorities that are relevant for crime control and prevention. In early 2003, the provincial government started a large-scale crime prevention programme, which relies heavily on volunteer aides for the police.
A matter of wallet size
The success of such initiatives depends on what role the state will concede to established civil-society institutions such as the street committees. A draft law, designed to regulate the collaboration between state and non-state organisations on questions of justice and dispute settlement, has been lying on a shelf of the South African Law Reform Commission for years. Immediately after apartheid’s demise, the government was very interested in engaging civil society, according to Wilfried Schärf, a criminologist from the University of Cape Town who helped to draft the reform paper. If it was up to him, the state would allow the street committees a certain degree of autonomy, supervise what they do, and make them pledge to uphold the South African Constitution. Unfortunately, little remains of the government’s earlier commitment today. “I now doubt whether the draft will ever become law,” says Schärf.
For the time being, therefore, it remains unclear who will be in charge of township security in the future. On its own, the state is not up to the task; and the traditional institutions no longer have the jurisdiction. There is a risk of the gap being permanently filled by people whose idea of law and order primarily serves their personal interests. In Khayelitsha, such a group of veteran freedom fighters and ex-soldiers has already become established. Residing in an old container on a taxi-stand in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods, they wait for customers. For a fee, they will recover debts, catch suspects, or sort out “other difficulties” that require men who can handle a gun and are not too squeamish. With such custodians, enforcement of law and order will simply become a question of wallet size.
Tillmann Elliesen
works as an editor at E+Z Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit / D+C Development and Cooperation. euz.editor@fsd.de
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