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While contemporary South African crime certainly carries the baggage of apartheid, in this chapter it is cast predominantly as a conflict about order in the New South Africa. As apartheid was dismantled, order declined significantly. Simply in the course of daily life, South Africans found more and more contexts in which no widely accepted patterns or procedures existed to guide their social interactions with others. In the absence of a working consensus, people were forced to negotiate new and, to some degree, mutually acceptable standards to govern their relationships. These negotiations continue to produce new social patterns and are an important mechanism by which South Africans collectively are building a new social order. In many respects, crime is the social conflict most central to these negotiations over the shape and direction of contemporary South African society. As a political issue, crime is an explicit, public discourse about order. This discourse manifests both White fears about the end of minority governance and assertions by relatively powerless Blacks about standards of material equity. Crime dominates the news in this media-rich society, and every South African seems to have both a personal story of crime and an opinion about the impact of crime on society as a whole. As such, the politics of crime provide a useful mechanism to explore the power of social identities in post-apartheid South Africa. People find it easy to talk about crime, and their opinions and explanations are windows into how they understand broader aspects of contemporary South African social reality. This chapter focuses on the discourse surrounding crime as a site where the politics of post-apartheid identity are negotiated and implemented. It begins with an overview of crime in recent history, discusses crime as a sociopolitical discourse, 133 Chapter Six Post-Apartheid Crime and then presents several arguments about the intersection of identity and crime based on the identity labels South Africans use to talk about and understand the issue. It concludes by fitting crime as an issue into the trajectory of South Africa’s broader social transformation. CRIME IN SOUTH AFRICA Crime and Apartheid In the heyday of apartheid, when its rules and interpretations held sway among the great bulk of the South African population, Whites defined what constituted a crime. Apartheid’s racism was manifested as a system of laws, and the state was very careful to maintain a philosophically defensible relationship between those laws and the public order. While increasingly out of step with globally dominant paradigms of governance, this system was consistent with an understanding of reality in which races were fundamentally different. South Africans, regardless of race, inhabited a world in which it was not only normal but also rational to behave as racists in everyday interactions. The discriminatory, repressive, and often violent practices that apartheid laws authorized made sense in that world. This internal consistency helped sustain the system for decades in the face of determined resistance. Within that system, law was more than just a tool for enforcing social consensus . A particularly powerful part of the White self-image was the label “civilized ,” and one of the most important standards of civilization was the public promulgation of and strict adherence to law. As a powerful delineation between the modern and the primitive, law commanded homage in White practice and demanded justification in its violation.1 Even at the height of international condemnation of apartheid, South Africa’s western system of law helped elites frame themselves as Western, civilized, and democratic. Law was the protector of White privilege, but it was also a safeguard for racial reality and, perhaps more important , White identity. Law was so integral to their understanding of the nature of self and other that Whites, and especially elites, had to obey the law, at least in the abstract. So they wrote racist laws that turned nonracial behavior into crimes. Apartheid reality allowed Whites to objectify Blacks, to treat them as important only for the potential impact they could have on White lives. Aside from the labor they supplied, Blacks registered as important because of the risks they were perceived to pose to White security, including not only threats to identity , but also the danger of physical injury, economic crime, rape, and employment loss, among others. The social order was designed to provide security for Whites, which often meant turning institutions of governance against Blacks. As a result, White South Africans experienced everyday life as essentially law-governed and orderly. Encased in the high, strong...

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