The Contagion Principle versus Rights: The Mob Justice Phenomenon as Anthropo-Poietic Struggle

INTRODUCTION

On a dreary spring morning in late October 2006, two policemen drove their cruiser up Nkonjane Road in the K Section of KwaMashu, a former “Africans only” township about fifteen kilometers (9.3 miles) northwest of Durban. As the cruiser passed over K Section’s softly sloping hills, two men sat handcuffed together in the back. The officers parked the car in front of a house where a woman had reported being raped a few days prior. Leaving the two suspects in the car, the officers alighted and walked up to the home. After greeting the victim, they asked her to step outside to identify the men. The victim, upon seeing the two men seated in the squad car, loudly screamed that they were the rapists . . . The crowd rapidly grew in size to between 300 and 500 people as word spread that the rapists had been caught. As the crowd grew, people yelled for the suspects’ blood and demanded that the policemen hand them over. When the officers refused, the crowd began to throw stones and the panicky police, having sustained injuries, ran for their lives. As the officers fled, the crowd ripped the car open and dragged out the two suspects. A hail of stones, rocks, and bricks felled the two men.¹

The most common interpretation (on a journalistic, sociological, and politological basis) is the one that identifies the causes of mob justice as the lack and weakness of police and of legal state institutions to implement laws on national territory. This is what is defined by Angelina Snoodgrass Godoy as the “commonsense consensus of lynching,”² in her analysis of mob justice of South America. Lynching is described as a result and emblem of the citizens’ desperation due to the high crime rate they have to face and, simultaneously, to the lack of state institutions to find a solution to this situation: the single person feels forced to manage justice and violence individually.

The population thinks of and describes mob justice as an adversity, but a kind of adversity that appears to be completely understandable.³

On further analysis, there are cases of mob justice that are not included in this interpretation and that force us to re-question the whole issue. The case we presented at the beginning of this essay for example, is one of these. If we take into consideration the commonsense consensus interpretation, according to which lynchings are caused by institutional failure, how can this phenomenon occur even when the police successfully intervene? How can episodes of mob justice occur like the one that happened in Tembisa where a crowd of people paid the bail of an arrested man with the aim of lynching him?⁴

When a crowd of people kills a suspected criminal after he has been arrested or convicted, something other than or something in addition to institutional “failure” must be at work . . . How do we explain acts of lynch violence that occur in the context of institutional “success” like the lynching of suspects who have already been arrested? What tensions and contradictions in democratic law does lynch violence reveal?⁵

At this point it becomes necessary to deepen and problematize this issue further, to set aside the commonsense consensus, in order to find an interpretative theory that takes into account these phenomena as well.

The problem seems to be in the citizens’ perception of the role and actions of the State and its institutions. As we will see, the problem seems to come from the consistent body of constitutional rights that, protecting criminals or suspected ones, in citizens’ opinions appears to operate as a legislative body with the aim of protecting and defending criminals.

The mob justice phenomenon is the manifestation of a struggle within different conceptions of crime, and more deeply of humanity. When challenging state institutions that leave criminals unpunished, citizens appeal to moral practices and moral insecurity, which, despite institutional procedure, remain inside the community.

The violation of common moral practices is seen by the community as an...