Abstract
This paper explores relationships between political actors, local governance and violence in a community, through the case of security provision in the township of Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town. It traces the actions of key actors including SANCO, the City of Cape Town and ordinary residents in respect of crime, taxi violence, xenophobic attacks, protection rackets and service delivery protests. The extensive and varied nature of violence in Imizamo Yethu is related to uneven political legitmacy. Further, this weak governance is attributable to a lack of legitimacy of both the City of Cape Town and informal community leaders. The latter are take the form of the local branch of a civic association, the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) allied to the national ruling party, the Africa National Congress (ANC). In Imizamo Yethu, SANCO is weak and riven by factionalism, but the legitimacy of the ANC remains high and there is no violent contest for local leadership positions. Social cohesion in IY is in flux, and violence is alternately used to shore up particular notions of social cohesion; while in other examples violence erodes social cohesion. In short, inadequate state governance and informal rule co-exist with high levels of political support for the ANC and its allies, high levels of violence and uncertain implications for social cohesion. This account runs against three common key assumptions. The first is that, under conditions of weak rule, violence is primarily about contests over political power. The pervasiveness of violence by a variety of social actors in Imizamo Yethu, but not so much by SANCO or the ANC, challenges this assumption. The second is that the violence is constitutive of informal rule in such contexts. However, in Imizamo Yethu the importance of party identification and ability to extract resources from the local state are more important to effective local rule than violent capacities. Lastly, the case of IY illustrates that effective local rule is not necessarily an important condition of party legitimacy, which is rooted in larger dynamics of national and race politics. Indeed, such is the extent of political adherence , as opposed to social cohesion, that violence forms no part of competition within the ANC family for local office and political control.
Highlights
That there had been an outbreak the previous night of ‘taxi violence’, involving two different factions of the local Imizamo Yethu taxi operators
What emerged on our first day in Imizamo Yethu was an indication of the complexities surrounding the pervasiveness of violence in the settlement, and the implications for social and political order: two taxi associations with uncertain links to competing factions of the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) local leadership; stories of episodic neighbourhood watches; and allegations of local linkages between all of these and the main political parties in Cape Town
Democratic Alliance (DA) governance desires ‘non-partisan’ community representation, an approach attempted in Imizamo Yethu by the SANCO leadership of 2007 until this undermined their relations with the local African National Congress (ANC), and they were eventually supplanted in 2015 by a clearly more partisan group. These dynamics, we suggest, are mostly driven by the larger logic of race and party politics in South Africa, and it seems likely that tensions between the DA province and city and SANCO will continue into the future, potentially undermining local rule in Imizamo Yethu, and leading from the current state of ‘aliocracy’ back down the path to disorder
Summary
Some influential recent literature on violence explores the linkages between micro-level analysis and mesoand macro-level analyses of conflict, in order to construct new arguments about the implications of violent conflict for wider political, economic and social processes,[2] and the extent to which violence is used by particular groups to establish political order.[3]. As Davis points out, this is a common phenomenon across the global South, in respect of economic control of local areas, for instance with drug gangs or militias.[6] The inability of the South African state to address endemic levels of insecurity in poor, urban settlements of South Africa, and the proliferation of actors pursuing violence, from gangs to vigilante organisations to moments of popular mobilisation such as xenophobic attacks, reveal the relevance of armed, non-state actors to local rule in South Africa With this in mind, we return to Arjona’s typology, where ‘rebelocracy’ refers to a high degree of intervention by armed groups in civilian affairs, and a sense of a social contract between the armed group and the local population. We have kept a close eye on the local media, both print and social, in relation to these themes
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