Understanding collect violence in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

The primary aim of this article is to explore some of the patterns of political violence that characterised the apartheid and post-apartheid periods in South African history, as well as the attempts to deal with the sequelae of these patterns of violence. Secondly, the article endeavours to illustrate how the statistics that we are wont to rely on in making sense of political violence, frequently only present a partial glimpse of and in the process lead to misrepresentations of the phenomenon. Thirdly, the article attempts to examine two of the key interventions initiated by the post-apartheid government to deal with the violence in South Africa's past and present, namely the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission and the Reconstruction and Development Programme. The article concludes with the observation that, despite their many merits, interventions such as these could not be adequate to deal with past and extant patterns of political violence.