Cape Town after Apartheid: crime and governance in the divided city by Tony Roshan Samara (review)

In this book, Tony Roshan Samara, assistant professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department of George Mason University, proposes a critical reading of the link between urban development and security policies in Cape Town at the intersection between critical urban studies, global affairs studies and policing studies. The work draws on rich and original fieldwork based on interviews with social workers, local press stories and an extensive grey literature. It was carried out in the early 2000s, at a time when the urban regeneration policies implemented by the Cape Town Partnership were spectacularly transforming the CBD and when the gap between the rich, gentrified centre and the poor outlying townships was widening.

Brought to Cape Town by his interest in the prison issue, Tony Samara quickly moved on to explore the links between social control, police practices and the neo-liberalisation of urban policies. The central thesis of the book is that there is a continuity between police repression under apartheid and the ‘post-apartheid hard policing’ linked with neo-liberalisation (the security aspect of urban regeneration policies). Neo-liberalisation is defined as a transnational ‘rule’ that is impose locally in the form of entrepreneurial requirements to pursue urban competitiveness, in a conception very close to that proposed by David Harvey (1989). On this account, the rise in violence in South Africa’s cities since the 1990s is due not to a moment of temporary anomie linked with the post-apartheid transition, but is the direct outcome of the neo-liberal trend of public policies. This hypothesis is advanced throughout the book, via an analysis of what the author calls ‘neoliberal governance’ and the ‘transnational security networks of neo-liberal urban governance’ that underpin it.

The first chapter gives a contextual account of neo-liberalisation and security issues in South Africa, then in Cape Town and the Western Cape Province. It shows that the neo-liberalisation of public policies contributes to the construction of criminality as a problem, by characterising insecurity as a major obstacle to development, which leads to a rise in repression as a corollary of local development policies. Chapter Two focuses on the street children living in the city centre. It shows how these children, although very few in number, have been used by the local government to construct a social scapegoat of ‘young people of colour’, and to drive a ‘racially coded moral panic’ which is exploited to banish manifestations of poverty from the city centre.

Chapters Three, Four and Five, which concentrate on the Cape Flats, constitute the most original part of the book. Chapter Three describes the history of gangsterism and the rise of vigilantism with PAGAD, then analyses the links between the Cape Flats Renewal Strategy and the struggle against gangsterism. As in the city centre, insecurity (here linked with the criminal economy) is described as a major obstacle to development, which justifies the escalation in police repression. Chapter Four describes the deterioration in relations between the police and the communities living in these districts, the erosion of trust, and the impossibility of building partnerships between the two; it condemns the limitations of official ‘social crime prevention’ measures, which it perceives as pure window dressing. Chapter Five develops this final point by returning to the roots of the problem. It contends that gangsterism in the Flats is fed by poverty and inequality. Gangsterism is the only thing that offers young people economic and social opportunities, whereas the state, with its simplistic reaction of repression and security, abandons them to a future of prison which normalises the gang system (a spell in prison becomes a common fate for the young) and destabilises the communities (former prisoners always return to their old neighbourhoods).

It is a bold thesis: it implies that the change in the nature of the political regime (and the national policing reforms it entailed) has made no difference, that the South African state, which claims to be combating inherited...