Contradictions of Democracy:

Vigilantism and Rights in

Post-Apartheid South Africa Nicholas
Rush Smith
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/contradictions-of-democracy-vigilantism-and-rights-in-
post-apartheid-south-africa-nicholas-rush-smith/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature: South

Africa's Wounded Feelings 1st ed. Edition Mark Libin

https://ebookmass.com/product/reading-affect-in-post-apartheid-
literature-south-africas-wounded-feelings-1st-ed-edition-mark-
libin/

Migrant Traders in South Africa: Migrant Traders in

South Africa Pranitha Maharaj

https://ebookmass.com/product/migrant-traders-in-south-africa-
migrant-traders-in-south-africa-pranitha-maharaj/

Football (Soccer) in Africa: Origins, Contributions,

and Contradictions Augustine E. Ayuk

https://ebookmass.com/product/football-soccer-in-africa-origins-
contributions-and-contradictions-augustine-e-ayuk/

Summoning Knowledge in Plato's Republic Nicholas D.

Smith

https://ebookmass.com/product/summoning-knowledge-in-platos-
republic-nicholas-d-smith/
History of South Africa Thula Simpson

https://ebookmass.com/product/history-of-south-africa-thula-
simpson/

The Palgrave Handbook of Democracy, Governance and

Justice in Africa Aderomola Adeola

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-democracy-
governance-and-justice-in-africa-aderomola-adeola/

Handbook on Democracy and Security Nicholas A. Seltzer

(Editor)

https://ebookmass.com/product/handbook-on-democracy-and-security-
nicholas-a-seltzer-editor/

Education, Race, and Social Change in South Africa John

A. Marcum

https://ebookmass.com/product/education-race-and-social-change-
in-south-africa-john-a-marcum/

Gender and HIV in South Africa 1st ed. Edition

Courtenay Sprague

https://ebookmass.com/product/gender-and-hiv-in-south-africa-1st-
ed-edition-courtenay-sprague/
Contradictions of Democracy
OXFORD STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POLITICS
Clifford Bob and James M. Jasper, General Editors
Plausible Legality
Legal Culture and Political Imperative in the Global War on Terror
Rebecca Sanders
Legacies and Memories in Movements
Justice and Democracy in Southern Europe
Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Tiago Fernandes,
Eduardo Romanos, and Markos Vogiatzoglou
Curated Stories
The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling
Sujatha Fernandes
Taking Root
Human Rights and Public Opinion in the Global South
James Ron, Shannon Golden, David Crow, and Archana Pandya
The Human Right to Dominate
Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon
Some Men
Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women
Michael A. Messner, Max A. Greenberg, and Tal Peretz
Sex, Politics, and Putin
Political Legitimacy in Russia
Valerie Sperling
Democracy in the Making
How Activist Groups Form
Kathleen M. Blee
Women in War
The Micro-​processes of Mobilization in El Salvador
Jocelyn Viterna
 Contradictions
of Democracy
Vigilantism and Rights
in Post-​Apartheid South Africa
xwx
Nicholas Rush Smith

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Smith, Nicholas Rush, author.
Title: Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in
Post-Apartheid South Africa /​Nicholas Rush Smith.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024600 (print) | LCCN 2018028939 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190847203 (updf) | ISBN 9780190847210 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190847180 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190847197 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Vigilantes—​South Africa. | Crime—​Government policy—​South
Africa. | South Africa—​Social conditions—​21st century.
Classification: LCC HV9960.S6 (ebook) | LCC HV9960.S6 S65 2018 (print) |
DDC 364.9680905—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018024600

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada

Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
 Dedicated to Meg:
My life, my love, my amazing partner
 CON T E N T S

Preface  ix

Introduction  1
1. Vigilantism and the Contradictions of Democratic State
Formation  18
2. The People’s Justice: Historical Antecedents of Contemporary
Vigilantism  38
3. Spectacles of Statecraft: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
and Post-​Apartheid Lawmaking   57
4. Rights in Translation: Vigilantism and the Meanings of Institutional
Effectiveness and Failure   81
5. Taking Charge: The Contradictory Pleasures of Citizen
Crime-​Fighting   107
6. The Risks and Rewards of Vigilantism   130
7. The Racial Geographies of Criminal Panic: Protesting Crime
in the Suburbs   153
8. Against Vigilantism: Citizen and State Action to Combat
Vigilantism  170
9. Lawmaking and State-​Making as Vigilantism   191

Epilogue  213
Bibliography  219
Index  239

( vii )
 PR E FAC E

Mustachioed in my memory, the campus security director made it clear that

the peaceable surroundings of the University of KwaZulu-​Natal were decep-
tive. Set in the modest provincial capital, Pietermaritzburg, in the Midlands
region of South Africa whose hills Alan Paton (2003, 2) famously remarked
are “lovely beyond any singing of it,” the campus had the idyllic feel of a
British boarding school, albeit with a considerably stronger sun. Silent be-
cause the school was on a break, the other members of the Fulbright-​Hays
isiZulu language program and I took in the lecture. With the bearing of a
former police officer, he told us that beyond the campus fence—​a fence
that stood solemnly, soldier-​like at the edge of the college—​the peace on
the campus gave way. As an example, I recall him relating the dangers of
using an ATM at the suburban Scottsville shopping center just across the
road. It was completely possible that robbers might pull up behind an un-
wary bank customer, he said, and mug them of their newly acquired cash.
I thought the fit between the stories and the likelihood of victimization
seemed out of joint, though I had no real evidence for that sense at the time.
Nonetheless, this seeming disjuncture had real consequences for how the
group saw the small world of Scottsville, affecting the willingness of at least
some of the fellows to go beyond the shopping center to explore the suburb
over the coming days. It was the first experience in South Africa that piqued
my interest in the politics of crime.
The second experience happened later on that same trip during a home-
stay in a nearby rural village. I spent my time there mainly roaming around
the area during the day with my host “brother” because we were roughly
the same age and got on well. We mostly stayed close to home during the
evenings though, partly because of the uncomfortable chill of the Midlands
winter nights, but also because of security. This became clear to me one eve-
ning after we had ventured out late in the day to visit a sangoma (traditional
healer) friend of his. We had stayed for several hours talking and because
our host had been kind enough to serve us an unexpected dinner of stewed
tripe and phuthu (mealie meal). By the time we were ready to depart, it was
dark. As we said our goodbyes, I started in the direction of the main road
( ix )
 ( x )  Preface

before my host brother caught me and steered me back to a smaller path

that appeared to veer away from our house. He told me that it wasn’t safe
to take the main road after dark because izigebengu (criminals) might ac-
cost us. I was surprised to hear this given that we were two relatively fit
young men and my host brother was popular in the village. Still, he knew
much better than me, so I shrugged and followed him on a tangle of paths
back home.
The sense of insecurity that these two incidents brought to the fore trou-
bled me emotionally, yet intrigued me intellectually. Like many others,
I had initially become interested in South Africa because of its remarkable
transition to democracy. I was particularly interested in the somewhat sur-
prising decline in local neighborhood committees (known as “civics”) in
the first decade following democratization, even though citizens were now
free to organize (see Adler and Steinberg 2000). After this trip, though, it
was apparent that the politics of crime and security were too prevalent to
ignore and yet too opaque for me to fully understand in those early days.
I determined I would learn more.
Over numerous subsequent trips totaling approximately twenty months
of research in South Africa ( June–​ September 2008, October 2009–​
October 2010, February–​April 2011, July–​August 2015, December 2016–​
January 2017), I threw myself into the politics of crime and punishment.
I explored a number of questions—​why crime was so high following de-
mocratization, how illicit markets operated—​before settling on trying to
understand why citizens so often turned to solutions outside of the state to
protect themselves. Although some of the means, like hiring private secu-
rity companies, were legal, many were not. In the press, stories of citizens
violently confronting criminals were common across the country. Why was
this happening, I wanted to know. As a student of political science, I had
been long schooled to think that the purpose of the state, and particularly
democratic states, was to protect its citizens. Why was that not happening
here, a place where citizens had long struggled for a democratic legal system
and the protections it supposedly provided? Was the apparent fecklessness
of the police a sufficient explanation? How should a state respond to wide-
spread resistance from citizens to its protection? And what do the some-
times violent ways citizens protect themselves tell us about how states
establish (or fail to establish) fidelity to democratic law?
To answer these questions, I shifted away from the Midlands region and
focused my energies primarily on two townships: KwaMashu, about 15
kilometers outside of Durban, and Sebokeng, about 60 kilometers south
of Johannesburg (I explain why I worked in these areas in the introductory
chapter). I divided my research time between roughly seventeen months
of ethnographic fieldwork and three months of archival research. I worked
 Preface  ( xi )

closely with three different research assistants for much of this time (two
in KwaMashu and one in Sebokeng) who could make introductions and
help break down the barriers of race, class, and nationality that come with
being a middle-​class, white American working in highly unequal African
neighborhoods with long histories of racial oppression. IsiZulu language
skills also helped me engage people who might otherwise be wary of
researchers.
Consequently, in each field site I participated in wide-​ranging practices.
For example, I patrolled with anti-​crime groups, attended anti-​crime
protests, and observed community justice initiatives. I interviewed com-
munity policing officials, traditional healers, small business owners, taxi
owners, former policemen, and political officials. I spent time with young
men who earn a living illegally, as their insecurity is acute. Although some
may commit acts of violence, they are also possible targets of violence—​
both from vigilante citizens and from the police. More generally, I engaged
in quotidian activities like meals, celebrations, and funerals to couch my
understanding of vigilantism in larger structures of meaning. In short, I ate,
drank, and often slept in KwaMashu and Sebokeng to understand the poli-
tics underlying vigilantism.
However, while my work was centered on KwaMashu and Sebokeng, it
became apparent early on that I could not segment the townships off from
larger processes of political, economic, and cultural circulation. KwaMashu
and Sebokeng residents constantly move between neighboring townships,
informal settlements, and cities, along with various destinations across
the country from major metropolises to ancestral villages. An incredible
range of media also circulate through the townships: newspapers, televi-
sion, music, movies, cell phone videos, and rumors. As my interlocutors
circulated, so did I. As my interlocutors consumed information, so did
I. The result is that the arguments laid out in this book are not exclusively
drawn from observations made in these two sites, nor are they reducible
to these two sites. For instance, I worked in areas that border my primary
field sites, including Ntuzuma, Inanda, and Phoenix near KwaMashu and
Evaton, Sonderwater, and Sharpeville near Sebokeng. I also did research
in places like Soweto near Johannesburg, Wentworth in Durban, the pre-
dominantly white suburbs of Durban and Johannesburg, and rural areas
in KwaZulu-​Natal and Limpopo provinces, as opportunities allowed. In
short, even though KwaMashu and Sebokeng form the bedrock for my
arguments, the arguments are not limited to these two places, even as the
processes I identify in the book that follows may operate somewhat differ-
ently in other areas.
The arguments are also not anchored solely in my ethnographic prac-
tice. Early in my ethnographic research, I realized that post-​apartheid
 ( xii )  Preface

vigilantism has deep historical roots. So, to understand these com-

plex patterns of structure and change, I spent roughly three months
conducting archival research in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, and
Pietermaritzburg. The Mayibuye Archives at the University of the Western
Cape in Cape Town provided access to primary documents showing how
the African National Congress put forward its moral and political claims.
It also contained an important set of papers (the Janine Rauch Papers)
with primary documents on police reform during the transition years. In
the University of Witwatersrand Historical Papers Collection, I collected
important material on the transition-​era conflicts in Sebokeng, vigilantism
and self-​defense units broadly, court cases on vigilantism under apartheid,
and the records of numerous political organizations and law firms en-
gaged in the fight against the apartheid state. Also housed at the University
of Witwatersrand, the South African Historical Archive provided crucial
material on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The same
was true of the National Archive in Pretoria where I obtained copies of the
video recordings of several notable TRC hearings. Similarly, the Alan Paton
Centre at the University of KwaZulu-​Natal in Pietermaritzburg yielded
invaluable newspaper clippings about violence in KwaZulu-​Natal under
apartheid and during the transition (the Gerard Mare Collection was a par-
ticularly useful resource). The archivists at each of these institutions were
extraordinary in suggesting relevant materials I would not have otherwise
known to look for without their expertise.
The effect of conducting this in-​depth historical research, interacting
with a wide range of individuals, and performing ethnographic work,
I believe, is that the claims about vigilantism that follow in the book are
contextualized in an understanding of the anxieties and insecurities that
challenge many South Africans. With that said, understanding these anxi-
eties makes me concerned about how to represent violence in areas whose
residents have long experiences of repression or marginalization. One ob-
vious challenge is how to protect interlocutors while researching practices
that may involve violence (Wood 2007; Fujii 2012; Parkinson and Wood
2015). Conscious of such challenges, in what follows I have anonymized
interviews and created pseudonyms for individuals who spoke to me. In
some instances, I have purposefully kept locational or practical details
vague to provide an additional layer of protection. At the same time, much
of the research that follows relies on archival, governmental, or journalistic
material that is cited in the text or footnotes. Particularly when focusing
on historical events, it made little sense to anonymize the details of organ-
izations, locations, or historical actors because details of those events are
discussed in publicly available materials. In some of these cases, like the
historical events that comprise the primary material for Chapter 3, other
 Preface  ( xiii )

scholars have written about the same or similar events. In other instances,
like the historical events that comprise Chapter 2, little scholarly litera-
ture exists on them and the arguments make novel empirical and theoret-
ical contributions to our understanding of apartheid-​era violence. In these
instances, describing the specific groups, as historians typically do, made
sense given the voluminous archival material the chapters draw upon, even
as I anonymize the specific people I interviewed about the conflicts.
Outside of the specific protections for research interlocutors, though,
there is a second set of ethical challenges having to do with the represen-
tation of historically marginalized areas. In particular, there is a danger of
focusing on an area’s violence, while ignoring or overlooking the other
daily experiences residents have unrelated to this violence, many of which
are quite joyous. Particularly in places like South Africa’s townships that
have long histories of being stereotyped as violent, there is a danger of
reproducing these stereotypes. How can one depict serious concerns
about insecurity that residents have without sensationalizing an area’s vi-
olence? This presents a complicated challenge, to say the least. I have tried
to address it in a variety of ways, though none may ultimately be satisfac-
tory to readers or to residents of KwaMashu and Sebokeng. First, by using
the two townships in comparison, I show that townships have important
differences from one another, even as the similarities between KwaMashu
and Sebokeng help draw out a larger narrative about vigilantism and dem-
ocratic state formation. By considering the two places in comparison to
one another, I hope to avoid using one township as representative of all
townships, a problem that attends many studies of crime or policing in ra-
cially marginalized places (Small 2009, 9–​10). Second, the arguments are
drawn from places beyond KwaMashu and Sebokeng. We will see, for in-
stance, how residents of Pretoria’s predominantly white suburbs exhibit
surprisingly similar anxieties about South Africa’s rights regime as residents
in predominantly black townships, despite their living in statistically much
safer areas (Chapter 7). We will also ask how opponents of vigilantism have
mobilized against it (Chapter 8), so as not to suggest that support for vig-
ilantism is universal in South Africa. Lastly, in each of the chapters, I try
to bring out tensions embedded within the politics of KwaMashu and
Sebokeng in order to show the contradictions built into democratic citizen-
ship that enable vigilantism. After all, it is the contradictions of democratic
citizenship and state formation—​a set of universal questions for demo-
cratic politics—​that motivates this book, rather than the violence vigilan-
tism often entails.

In writing a book, one incurs many debts and in the case of this book, those
debts are deep. It began life as a dissertation completed in the political
 ( xiv )  Preface

science department at the University of Chicago under the direction of Lisa

Wedeen, John Comaroff, Dan Slater, and Steven Wilkinson, an extraordi-
nary group of scholars under whom to learn and to whom I will be forever
indebted for taking me on as a student. From as early as her advisement
of a long-​ago master’s thesis, Lisa has been a model of how to pursue ac-
ademia as a vocation, both as a teacher and as a scholar. John continues
to provide his astute guidance on all things South Africa, a role as a South
African national treasure he is uniquely well-​suited to play. Dan has been
both a friend and a co-​author, who has engaged every project I have ever
worked on with the same generosity of thought and spirit, even when he
disagreed with what I had to say—​the mark of a true mentor. Steven has an
uncanny ability to see if there is a weak fit between empirical and analytical
claims, having an astute eye for argument and detail, trained through years
of historically informed work—​an eye through which I have tried to see in
writing this book. I only hope that the material that follows in the book lives
up to the work each of these extraordinary scholars has put into it and into
training me over many years.
My debts extend well beyond Chicago, though. Indeed, they are trans-
continental and are owed most deeply in South Africa. Within South
Africa, those debts are owed, first and foremost, to Kwazi Manzi, Mxolisi
Motsepe, and Ayanda Sithole. In many ways, the work produced here is as
much the product of their hard work as it is of my own. I spent countless
hours with each man roaming around townships, city centers, suburbs, in-
formal settlements, and rural villages, as we collectively explored the com-
plexities of post-​apartheid South Africa. The debt I owe to each is a lifelong
one for this book could not have been produced without them. I hope they
are proud of the hard-​fought and too often delayed final result. I owe a sim-
ilar debt to the Sithole family of KwaMashu and the Khumalo family of
Sebokeng for welcoming me into their homes and for their willingness to
form bonds of fictive transcontinental kinship. Sadly, each family has lost
members over the years it has taken to complete this book. I prefer to think,
though, of the ways in which each family embodied the best spirit of ubuntu
by putting up with a stranger’s eccentricities with grace and kindness that
has been life-​changing in the best possible ways.
Academically, I also owe debts in South Africa. During the longest stretch
of my fieldwork, the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-​
Natal proved an ideal place for a young fieldworker to be based. Under Patrick
Bond’s leadership, the Centre fostered an extraordinary collection of organic
intellectuals knowledgeable about community-​ level politics in Durban.
Though they are no longer at the Centre, without the help of MaDudu
Khumalo, Orlean Naidoo, and especially Faith Manzi and Oliver Meth this
project would have been impossible to get off the ground. The sadly departed
 Preface  ( xv )

Bobo Makhoba, of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, similarly made

several crucial introductions in Soweto and the Vaal that facilitated my re-
search in Sebokeng. Though I was not officially affiliated with the University
of Witwatersrand, I found a welcoming community of scholars there while
conducting fieldwork in Gauteng, particularly through Kelly Gillespie and
Julia Hornberger. In a similar spirit, numerous friends in the field kept my
spirits bright during the inevitable challenges of fieldwork. Al Duncan,
Lauren Jarvis, Tayo Jolaosho, Jill Kelly, Tim Gibbs, Dan Magaziner, and Jon
Soske all provided happy company at various points during research. A host
of crime and policing researchers, including David Bruce, Monique Marks,
and Peter Gastrow, generously shared their insights. In this regard, Jonny
Steinberg deserves special mention. Jonny was an incredible supporter of this
project from even before I began my fieldwork. He has been consistently gen-
erous with his time, insights, support, and, along with his husband Lomin
Saayman, friendship throughout research and writing.
Back in the United States, friends and colleagues at a number of institutions
and commentators at a number of conferences have had an enormous im-
pact on the development of this project. Emma Jacobs, Dan Magaziner,
Zachariah Mampilly, Michael Pfeifer, Stephanie Schwartz, Jillian Schwedler,
Anastasia Shesterinina, and the sadly departed Lee Ann Fujii provided amazing
comments on the first complete version of this manuscript at a book workshop
at the City College of New York in 2016. Over many years, either in serving
discussant duties at conferences or workshops, through participation in shared
writing groups, or through sheer kindness of heart, I have received amazing
feedback on portions of the manuscript from Leonardo Arriola, Emily Bello-​
Pardo, Jonathan Blake, Nick Cheesman, Killian Clarke, Sarah-​Jane Cooper-​
Knock, Adam Dean, Youssef El-​Chazli, Stephen Ellmann, Chris Haid, Jack
Goldstone, Jeff Goodwin, Yanilda Gonzalez, Daragh Grant, Sheena Greitens,
Mark Gross, Anne Holthoefer, Sana Jaffrey, Corinna Jentzch, Diana Kim,
Jennet Kirkpatrick, Kathleen Klaus, Heinz Klug, Gary Kynoch, Milli Lake, Faith
Manzi, Kwazi Manzi, Eleonora Mattiacci, Lauren McCarthy, Jeremy Menchik,
Nosipho Mngomezulu, Jonathan Obert, Jeffrey Paller, Sarah Parkinson,
Mary Robertson, Franziska Rüeedi, Josh Rubin, Gema Santamaria, Suzanne
Scoggins, Jeremy Seekings, Erica Simmons, Matthias Staisch, Jonny Steinberg,
Harold Trinkunas, Manuel Viedma, Rosa Williams, Susan Woodward, Michael
Yarbrough, and Deborah Yashar. Timothy Pachirat, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea,
and Dvora Yanow provided important counsel on questions of method.
Similarly, audiences at lectures or academic conferences, both in the
United States and South Africa, have made the book better by taking se-
riously less polished versions of chapters contained within. These include
audiences at the universities of Chicago, Cape Town, Florida, KwaZulu-​
Natal, and Pennsylvania along with Bates College, the CUNY Graduate
 ( xvi )  Preface

Center, George Washington University, John Jay College, New York Law
School, Northwestern University, Yale University, Vassar College, and the
City College of New York, as well as audiences at the annual meetings of the
American Political Science Association, the African Studies Association,
the Midwestern Political Science Association, the Western Political Science
Association, and the Northeastern Workshop on Southern Africa.
Without the assistance of several funding and archival organizations,
this project never would have been possible. An International Dissertation
Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council funded a
year of fieldwork in South Africa for which I am thankful. Funding from
the Provost’s Office, the Division of Social Sciences, and the Department
of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and the Provost’s Office
at the City College of New York enabled additional research. The Faculty
Fellowship Publication Program and a Book Completion Award, both from
the City University of New York, provided valuable course releases or funds
to finish production of the manuscript. Fellowship and grant support from
the Foreign Language and Area Studies program of the U.S. Department of
Education, the Group Project Abroad program run by Fulbright-​Hays, and
the African Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago enabled isiZulu
language study.
The City College of New York, my current academic home, has been
an incredible place to write this book. The Colin Powell School of Civic
and Global Leadership within the college—​under the leadership of both
Vince Boudreau and Kevin Foster—​hosts a range of dynamic scholars who
have pushed my thinking about how to present and structure the ideas
contained within this book. My colleagues within the department of polit-
ical science, under the inimitable chairmanship of Bruce Cronin, have been
a particular source of encouragement and tolerance as I took various forms
of teaching leave to finish this book. The students within the department,
many of whom are the first in their families to go to college, have been a
constant reminder of the revolutionary importance of education.
At Oxford University Press, I owe a debt to James Cook, who took an
early interest in the project and took a gamble on a junior scholar. It has been
a dream working with him and his team. Similarly, James Jasper, the series
editor, has been an incredible supporter of this book from its first proposal
until its final appearance. He has read numerous drafts of chapters, often
on short notice, while lending his expert eye on how to reframe arguments
or rearrange content so that it would read more effectively. It has been an
enormous privilege and learning opportunity to work with him. The book
is much better for his guidance.
Finally, although this book benefited from the assistance of many
individuals and institutions, my primary debts are owed to my family. My
 Preface  ( xvii )

parents, Conrad and Patricia Smith, have enabled me, since my childhood,
to pursue my dreams, including, most recently, my dream of pursuing a
PhD. Without their emotional and material support over many, many years,
I have no doubt this book would have never come to pass. Were it not for
my father’s work for the U.S. government abroad and my mother’s joyful-
ness in the face of change, I likely never would have wanted an itinerant life
that takes me across the world. And, yet, I was fortunate to have parents
who fostered this quality, which made pursuing a project far away from
anywhere I had previously known thinkable and possible. I regret that both
my father and my mother passed away before they could see this book in
print as, in many ways, it is a joint production of which I hope they would
be proud.
If my parents provided the worldly imagination that made this book
thinkable, my wife, Meg Alexander, has provided the daily motivation and
love that made this book possible. She has had to abide by more disruption
than most spouses have to endure in a marriage. Not only did she put up
with a partner earning graduate student wages for too long, about a month
after we were married I skipped town for another continent to conduct
fieldwork for a year. She has coped with repeated lengthy absences since.
When I am around, I’m not sure things are necessarily any better, as she has
had to live with a nervy, grumpy academic, who constantly grouses about
not being able to pursue some fun activity because he has a book to finish.
Despite all of this, she has constantly encouraged me to work in order to
make this book the best it could possibly be and repeatedly assented to
my performing additional rounds of research when I had questions I still
needed to answer. Through it all, Meg has been, quite simply, an amazing
partner. For that reason, I dedicate this book to her.
Contradictions of Democracy
 Introduction

A crowd of protestors gathered outside the Vanderbijlpark Magistrate’s

Court on a bright September morning to hear whether the pastor ac-
cused of raping one of his teenage parishioners would again be denied bail.1
Similar protests had been staged at each of the previous bail hearings to en-
sure the pastor would be remanded to custody. Crowds had even burned
impepho (herbs used for traditional medicine) at these earlier gatherings
to sway the judge’s decisions and guarantee the pastor would remain in
jail while awaiting trial.2 So, it hit hard when the news filtered out of the
courtroom that the state would withdraw the charges after concluding the
physical evidence contradicted the accuser’s claims.3 Angered over the de-
cision, the protestors roughly forced their way past the security guards at
the front of the courthouse. As a local newspaper put it, members of the
crowd were “baying for the blood of the suspect” as they stormed into the
building.4
The police were prepared for the attempt at vigilante violence, though.
Indeed, this was not the first time that residents of nearby Sebokeng, where
the alleged victim lived, had attempted to take the law into their own hands

1. Kutlwano Olifant and Thokozile Yokwana, “Pastor Accused of Raping Teenager,” The
Star, September 11, 2012, http://​www.iol.co.za/​the-​star/​pastor-​accused-​of-​raping-​teenager-​
1.1380081#.VbUvEbdC0nU.
2. Lazarus Dithagiso, “Accused Supported by ‘Muthi’ at Court,” Sedibeng Ster, September
12, 2012.
3. Kutlwano Olifant, “Anger as Pastor Is Let Off Rape Charge Withdrawn,” The Star,
September 18, 2012, http://​www.iol.co.za/​the-​star/​anger-​as-​pastor-​is-​let-​off-​rape-​charge-​
withdrawn-​1.1385207#.VbU077dC1sM.
4. Lazarus Dithagiso, “Crowd Runs Amok as Transferred Case Withdrawn,” Sedibeng Ster,
September 19, 2012.

(1)
 ( 2 )   Contradictions of Democracy

when the state’s legal procedures did not accord with the justice residents
demanded. Several months earlier, in neighboring Evaton, protestors had
tried to burn down the church to which the pastor belonged after rumors
circulated that the bishop there used witchcraft and Satanism to perform
the healing “miracles” for which he was nationally famous. Although the
bishop insisted the rumors were motivated by jealousy over his high-​end
cars,5 dark stories spread through the township that, among other misdeeds,
he was snatching children’s souls and turning them into oil.6
Although such occult acts are considered dangerous crimes by many
township residents (Ashforth 2005), the state’s procedure-​based legal
institutions are ill-​equipped to address them. While residents had taken the
allegations to the police, officers had been unable to intervene because of
the lack of physical evidence, leaving aggrieved residents no legal options to
protect themselves from the bishop’s rumored villainy.7 Feeling abandoned
by the legal system and charged by the outrageous accusations following a
mass meeting organized by a local civic association, residents decided to
take the law into their own hands and burn down the bishop’s massive brick
church. Over the ensuing days of unrest, police fought hard to do their duty
and control the crowd.8 Yet the police found themselves on the wrong side
of the community’s sense of justice as, in effect, the officers protected the
“Satanic” church from residents’ attempt to cleanse the community of the
alleged occultism.9 That is, residents saw the police as protecting criminal
acts, rather than protecting the community.
Now, several months later in September, this policing dilemma repeated
itself at the Vanderbijlpark courthouse. Police officers again protected a per-
ceived criminal when they shielded the exonerated pastor from the crowd’s
violence after the modern magic of DNA evidence cleared him of the rape
charges.10 In this case, the pastor was spirited out the backdoor of the court-
house by twelve members of the Amabarette, an elite armed reaction team,
before the crowd could lynch him. For some of the protestors, unsuccessful
in their attempt at vigilante justice, the withdrawn case and subsequent po-
lice rescue became a referendum on their country’s democracy. “We have

5. Mdudzi Mathebula, “False Prophet or False Accusations?” Sedibeng Ster, April 29, 2012.
6. Noni Mokati, “Crowd in March on Church Accused of Satanism,” Saturday Star, March 26,
2012, http://​www.iol.co.za/​saturday-​star/​crowd-​in-​march-​on-​church-​accused-​of-​satanism-​1.
1264102#.VbUujLdC0nU.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Poloko Tau, “Cops Protect ‘Satanic’ Church,” The Star, March 22, 2012, http://​www.
icyte.com/​system/​snapshots/​fs1/​1/​c/​f/​1/​1cf19de8c5818812bb53661a021ca2178bf32577/​
index.html.
10. Olifant, “Anger as Pastor Is Let Off Rape Charge Withdrawn.”
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 3 )

been let down by the justice system of the very government we elected to
power,” one of the crowd members lamented to reporters.11
The would-​be vigilantes were aggrieved by the withdrawn charges. Yet,
the dismissal was arguably the outcome of a technically successful dem-
ocratic legal system governed by clear legal procedures and rules of evi-
dence. After all, with both the occult crimes and rape case, evidence was
either not available to secure a conviction or suggested strong reasons to
dismiss the charges. In both instances, the law’s procedures were followed,
even as residents saw them as perpetuating insecurity. This tension suggests
the problem in the case was not the government’s technical failings but an
underlying tension between citizens’ desire for assured security and inher-
ently fallible legal procedures. It was a tension, the events at the courthouse
and church suggest, from which the seeming certainty of vigilante violence
did not suffer.

AMBIGUITIES OF DEMOCRATIZATION

Nearly twenty-​five years after Nelson Mandela triumphantly became South

Africa’s first post-​apartheid president in elections that heralded a democratic
transition hailed by commentators as a “miracle” (e.g., Waldmeir 1997;
Sparks 2003), vigilantism is both a specter haunting South Africa’s legal
system and a grim reality in its streets. In any given year, the South African
Police Service estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of the country’s
murders result from vigilante violence—​four to five times the percentage it
attributes to gang violence (South African Police Service 2009a, 11, 2016,
14). Examinations of mortuary records (Herbst, Tiemensma, and Wadee
2015) and victims surveys (Proctor, Carter, and Barker 2009, 160 fn. 3)
suggest similar percentages, particularly at the lower estimate, noting an
overall increase in deaths from vigilante violence in some neighborhoods
(Herbst, Tiemensma, and Wadee 2015) even as the country’s murder rate
plummeted in the two decades following democratization (Kriegler and
Shaw 2016). Such statistics suggest that over 800 people might die in any
given year as a result of vigilantism. Police estimates may even underesti-
mate the scale of violence in some parts of the country. Researchers from
the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), for in-
stance, estimate that in certain areas the percentage of murders from vig-
ilantism may be closer to 15 percent (CSVR 2008, 73). That vigilantism
is a common and, to a degree, expected response to crime also resonates in

11. Dithagiso, “Crowd Runs Amok as Transferred Case Withdrawn.”

 ( 4 )   Contradictions of Democracy

popular consciousness. A majority of respondents in one opinion poll, for

example, said that if a criminal were caught in their community, it was more
likely he would be beaten than turned over to police.12
Such high rates of vigilantism—​ by which I mean extrajudicial
punishment —​are perplexing given that the struggle against apartheid was
13

also for the administration of justice by a democratic state (Ellmann 1992;

Abel 1995; Meierhenrich 2008). Yet, vigilantism is commonly practiced
in numerous young democracies throughout Latin America (Goldstein
2004; Taussig 2005; Godoy 2006; Arias and Goldstein 2010), Asia
(Hedman 2002; Tajima 2014), and Africa (Baker 2002; Kirsch and Grätz
2010; International Crisis Group 2017). This book explores the relation-
ship between vigilantism and democracy through the South African case.
It asks: Why is vigilantism frequently practiced in post-​apartheid South
Africa despite a celebrated transition to democracy, a lauded constitution,
and massive transformations of the state’s legal apparatus following democ-
ratization? What insights does South Africa provide about the spread of
vigilantism in so many young democracies? What does vigilantism reveal
about how democratic states produce order?
As I detail below, most accounts of vigilantism focus on state failure or
civic failure, arguing that vigilantes step in for states that cannot provide

12. World Justice Project, “South Africa: Nation Lags Behind in Preventing Crime and
Vigilante Justice, New Global Study Finds,” Allafrica.com, October 15, 2010. http://​allafrica.
com/​stories/​201010150916.html.
13. This concept is intentionally capacious and, more or less, compatible with existing
concepts in the literature with two important exceptions (Rosenbaum and Sederberg 1976,
4; Johnston 1996; Abrahams 1998, 6–​10, 2002; Moncada 2017). First, unlike Rosenbaum and
Sederburg’s (1976; see also Johnston 1996, 231) definition of vigilantism as conservatively ori-
ented “establishment violence,” I do not assume that there is a political ideology inherent to
vigilante practices. In South Africa, vigilantism has been practiced by both left-​leaning (e.g.,
Seekings 1990) and right-​leaning (e.g., Haysom 1986) groups. Second, I depart from the ex-
isting literature by emphasizing punitive rather than protective practices because the assump-
tion that vigilantism provides protection is dubious. As I show in Chapter 6, vigilantism may
produce new forms of violence as its targets fight back. By conceptualizing vigilantism broadly,
I hope to consider a variety of practices where citizens violate the law, even as they claim to be
upholding it when punishing others.
It is also important to note that the word vigilantism is politically charged. Even as it can
carry negative connotations of lawbreaking, antisocial violence, the term is analytically useful
because of its historical and linguistic origins. When deployed in ordinary language, the word
“vigilantism” captures the sense that those who engage in the practice are active, critical citizens
because of its linguistic connections to words like “vigilant” and “vigilance” (Abrahams 1998,
4–​6; see also Pitkin 1972). Indeed, the language of vigilance has often been eagerly adopted
by watchful citizens looking to change their societies for the better. For example, during South
Africa’s colonial period, Africans formed “Vigilance Associations” to defend their rights against
the state’s increasingly racist legal apparatus (Dubow 2012, 39). Thus, even though the word
vigilantism carries negative connotations, the language of vigilance captures the uncomfortable
blurring between contemporary vigilantism and other practices of citizenship, a key theme in
this book.
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 5 )

order or emerge from societies where social bonds are fractured. By con-
trast, as I elaborate in greater depth in the next chapter, this book argues
that the eruption of vigilantism in South Africa is a response to pro-
cesses of democratic state formation and is fostered by dense civic networks.
Specifically, vigilante citizens contest the extension of constitutional
rights, the establishment of which are a key aspect of democratic state-​
building (see also Buur and Jensen 2004; Buur 2008). They argue due
process rights produce insecurity because suspects may be released back
into neighborhoods following arrest where they can continue to prey on
residents. This means that in local context residents interpret the technical
success of legal institutions—​for instance, the arrest and subsequent re-
lease of suspects on bail or the withdrawal of charges when there is suf-
ficient evidence—​as failure. In South Africa’s townships, where there are
deep neighborhood ties, these understandings are intensified as the suspect
may be one’s own neighbor (see also Cooper-​Knock 2014) and is therefore
“known” to would-​be crime fighters. Such crime fighters can then rely on
local networks—​networks that were often born during the struggle against
apartheid—​to mobilize a response. In such a setting, the extension of a
strong rights regime may, counterintuitively, make vigilantism more likely,
as vigilant citizens work to correct “failures” in the state’s legal procedures.
In this sense, vigilantism might best be viewed as an uncomfortable form
of citizenship in which citizens critically watch how the law is enacted,
forcefully challenge how the state protects its citizens, and assert an alter-
native moral basis for democratic law to the procedure-​based model that
dominates modern constitutional democracies.
Importantly, though, vigilantism is not only a response to state forma-
tion; vigilantism also provides a new lens through which to understand
state formation. Specifically, when viewed through the eyes of young men
of color, South African lawmaking and state-​making often appear to mimic
vigilantism—​an inversion of Charles Tilly’s (1985) famous argument that
states mirror protection rackets. This mimicry has two forms. First, state
officials critique the country’s rights regime for allegedly perpetuating dis-
order and advocate for violent policing as a response to crime in language
that mirrors the demands of vigilante citizens (see e.g., Hornberger 2013;
Jensen 2014). Second, young men suspect that police officers on the ground
have heeded these calls and “shoot to kill” suspects (Bruce 2012), poten-
tially violating the constitution in the process. When viewed through the
eyes of those being policed, despite a long and violent struggle against the
apartheid state’s capricious legal apparatus, ironically, the democratic state
may be experienced by some of its citizens as increasingly procedure-​less.
In this sense, seeing democratic state-​building through the lens of vigi-
lantism exposes just how contradictory and violent processes of democratic
 ( 6 )   Contradictions of Democracy

state formation can be, while raising key questions about the role that states
should play in regulating social relations. That is, attention to the politics
of vigilantism may upend the very purposes of the state itself. Scholars
and activists alike have argued that a primary purpose of the state is pun-
ishing those who have committed wrongs. Indeed, much of the discus-
sion in young democracies like South Africa is how to ensure that the state
performs this task “efficiently” through its judicial apparatuses to ensure
that the rule of law functions “effectively.” However, such technical language
may hide pernicious effects. While residents of South Africa’s townships
(or comparable places across the globe like Brazil’s favelas or France’s
banlieues) experience too much insecurity, the proposed solution—​more
policing and more prosecution—​implies, intentionally or not, the need
for more state violence to regulate social life in these communities. Even
more, the population that bears the brunt of this state force tends to be very
concentrated: young men of color on society’s margins (Wacquant 2008,
2009; Vitale 2017). It also results in a sense among these young men that
the state is more likely to harm them than protect them, as they worry they
lack the substance of the democratic rights they are due. Attention to the
politics of vigilantism—​a politics that is ultimately connected to a politics
of punishment—​should, therefore, serve as a caution about the unintended
consequences of even well-​meaning demands for more policing and pros-
ecution. This is especially the case in young democracies like South Africa
where demands for policing and punishment are often loud in the face of
rampant citizen insecurity.

ARGUING ABOUT VIGILANTISM

These arguments about the sources of vigilantism stand in contrast to dom-

inant explanations for vigilantism. Such explanations can be separated
into two broad categories: state failure explanations and civic failure
explanations. State failure accounts come in several forms. One group
of scholars working in this tradition explains vigilantism as a response
to the state’s failure to police, prosecute, or imprison (e.g., Baker 2002;
Sekhonyane and Louw 2002; Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry 2014)—​
a problem that is magnified by processes of political transition when in-
stitutional routines are in flux (e.g., Amnesty International 2012). Others
explain vigilantism as a response to the state’s failure to provide mean-
ingful access to social rights (Caldeira and Holston 1999; Goldstein 2004;
Godoy 2006; Arias and Goldstein 2010)—​a problem that is most acute
in states that fail to transform authoritarian institutions (Huggins 1991;
O’Donnell 1993; Cruz 2011). Such arguments have particular resonance
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 7 )

in South Africa where the legacies of apartheid continue to haunt the crim-
inal justice system in numerous ways (Gastrow and Shaw 2001; Shaw 2002;
Schärf 2001; Gordon 2006; Kynoch 2016). Still others see vigilantism as a
response to a different form of state failure—​what might be termed state
withdrawal—​where states, under conditions of neoliberalism, shed respon-
sibility for governing security (Bayley and Shearing 1996; Garland 1996;
Simon 2006; Samara 2011; J. Comaroff and Comaroff 2016) and “out-
source” (Buur 2005; Hansen 2006) the state’s security functions in poor
areas to vigilante groups who provide “a cheap form of law enforcement”
(Sen and Pratten 2008, 3).
These state failure explanations contrast with accounts that see vigilan-
tism as a response to civic failure. Some scholars in this tradition see vig-
ilantism as a response to collapsing civic and communal trust (Potholm
1976; Rosenbaum and Sederburg 1976; Godoy 2006) and the state legit-
imacy often associated with them (Kushner 2015). Other scholars high-
light the challenges of integrating indigenous or rural populations that
have their own justice traditions into modernist legal institutions (Starn
1999; Goldstein 2012; J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff 2008; Hickel 2015),
a challenge that in the African context often has its roots in the colonial
state’s bifurcated legal regime (Mamdani 1996). Still others look to po-
litical competition that frays connections between citizens and states, a
problem made most acute when politicians use security concerns to mobi-
lize voters (Anderson 2002; Kagwanja 2003; Heald 2006; Meagher 2007;
Fourchard 2011, 2012). A final group, often focusing on the American con-
text, connects vigilantism to racial or ethnic violence where extrajudicial
punishment serves as an informal means for ensuring racial dominance in
a divided society (Brundage 1993; Tolnay and Beck 1995; Waldrep 2002;
Evans 2009; Krupa 2009; Smångs 2016).
South Africa is a particularly apt place to study the relationship be-
tween vigilantism and democratic state formation because its prevalence,
relative to existing explanations, is in important respects surprising. The
same is true of the two fieldsites at the heart of this book, KwaMashu and
Sebokeng, respectively an urban township outside of Durban and a peri-​
urban township south of Johannesburg. For someone trying to understand
the underlying logics of vigilante action, the two townships present a useful
set of similarities and contrasts that can be placed in a wider analytic and
historical narrative to understand post-​apartheid vigilantism. Since the end
of apartheid, both KwaMashu and Sebokeng have consistently experienced
vigilantism, despite the very different trajectories that the two townships
have taken since the end of apartheid—​differences that run against many
existing explanations from the literature on vigilantism in democratizing
states.
 ( 8 )   Contradictions of Democracy

To be clear, while I suggest in what follows that existing explanations

have difficulty accounting for vigilantism in both KwaMashu and Sebokeng
and potentially other areas of South Africa, I am not suggesting we should
discount these explanations altogether. On the contrary, much of what
follows in the book tries to explain the complicated ways in which these
various factors impact the practice of vigilantism—​what Erica Simmons
and I call elsewhere “comparison with an ethnographic sensibility”
(Simmons and Smith 2017).14 For instance, if comparative evidence
suggests that crime is unlikely to be a sole explanation for vigilantism but
residents consistently cite it as a major concern, the question becomes how
crime intersects with vigilantism—​a question of process rather than static
variables. While I explain below why high crime is an insufficient explana-
tion for vigilantism in varying parts of South Africa, I detail in the empir-
ical chapters of the book how citizens experience various forms of physical
and moral insecurity, which can feed vigilantism. Similarly, by working in
these two townships, my goal is not to explain vigilantism in every part
of South Africa. The eruption of vigilante violence may have multiple
pathways and dynamics. For instance, there may be differing dynamics in
informal settlements where mobilization against apartheid was not deep
(e.g., Harber 2014) or in rural areas where vigilante violence is led by con-
servative elders (e.g., Oomen 2004; J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff 2008;
Smith 2015). Nonetheless, I would suggest that even if there may be dif-
ferent dynamics at work in other parts of the country, the comparison
of KwaMashu and Sebokeng highlights potential limitations of existing
explanations and exposes contradictions of democratic state formation
that might not be apparent if one looks primarily to state or civic failure to
account for vigilantism.
Take arguments that vigilantism results from the state’s failure to police,
prosecute, and imprison, for instance. (I discuss this explanation at some
length because of its influence and intuitive sense.) In KwaMashu and
Sebokeng there is an empirical mismatch between crime rates, police ef-
fectiveness, and the presence of vigilantism. In 2009, just before I began
the majority of my fieldwork, KwaMashu received the dubious honor of
being named South Africa’s “murder capital” because of its remarkable
rate of violence.15 Predictably, vigilante violence is common there (CSVR

14. This contrasts with traditional applications of Mill’s (2002; see also Przeworski and Teune
1970) methods of similarity and difference, which would fully rule out alternative explanations
(see Simmons and Smith 2017).
15. Caryn Dolley, “Kwamashu Takes over Nyanga’s Title,” IOL News, September 22, 2009,
http://​www.iol.co.za/​news/​south-​africa/​kwamashu-​takes-​over-​nyanga-​s-​title-​1.459380.
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 9 )

2008, 73).16 However, in Sebokeng the story is very different. Crime rates
there have plummeted—​a nearly two-​thirds reduction in the murder rate
between democratization in 1994 and 2009 when I began the bulk of my
fieldwork (South African Police Service 2004a, 2004b, 2009b, 2011).17 The
area’s poverty and history of violence make the reductions all the more re-
markable. Nonetheless, vigilantism regularly featured in local news reports
during this period, suggesting the relationship between crime control and
vigilantism is neither functional nor direct.18
This explanatory challenge is repeated at the national level. Given
South Africa’s notoriously high crime rates, accounts pointing to failing
policing and judicial institutions seem to be a likely explanation. It is un-
doubtedly the case that crime in South Africa is far too common and too
many citizens, particularly in its poorest areas, face insecurity that is far
too great (Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry 2014). Rates of sexual vi-
olence, for instance, are notoriously high and prosecuting such crimes is
notoriously difficult (Lake 2018). Yet, contrary to popular perception
(see, e.g., J. Comaroff and Comaroff 2006a), violent crime has plummeted
since the end of apartheid. The national murder rate (typically taken by
criminologists to be the most reliable crime statistic) has dropped by over
50 percent since the end of apartheid, and now approximates murder rates
from the late 1970s (Kriegler and Shaw 2016, 185). Such dramatic crime
declines have led two of South Africa’s leading criminologists to conclude
that “the past two decades have shown unprecedented improvement in the
physical safety of the vast majority of people in the country.”19 Nonetheless,

16. Subsequent to my beginning fieldwork, the KwaMashu police precinct was split into two
precincts, KwaMashu E Section and Ntuzuma. I continued to conduct work in each station’s
area of patrol, as that is how they were originally established.
17. Due to its size and complicated geography that intersects with its older neighbor, Evaton,
parts of Sebokeng are policed by the Evaton police station. Given that I conducted research
in Sebokeng across the two precincts (and in Evaton proper), I have combined statistics from
the two police stations, although this also captures crime from Evaton. People regularly move
across the borders of Sebokeng and Evaton, however, making it appropriate for me to conduct
research in both precincts. There were 245 murders recorded in the two stations during the
1994–​1995 statistical year, which had dropped to 163 by 2003–​2004 and to 87 by 2008–​2009,
the year prior to conducting the majority of my field research (South African Police Service
2004a, 2004b, 2009b, 2011).
18. One might ask if the decline of Sebokeng’s murder rate is due to particularly virulent vigi-
lantism. However, comparison with KwaMashu suggests reasons to be skeptical of such a claim.
First, KwaMashu has astonishingly frequent vigilante violence (CSVR 2008, 73) but crime has
not declined nearly as dramatically as in Sebokeng. Second, vigilantism may be as much a source
of violence as it is a solution. Indeed, vigilantism may increase crime rates as such murders ap-
pear in police dockets. Thus, the relationship between vigilantism and crime is unclear at best.
19. Anine Kriegler and Mark Shaw, “Facts Show South Africa Has Not Become More
Violent since Democracy,” The Conversation, July 21, 2016, http://​theconversation.com/​
facts-​show-​south-​africa-​has-​not-​become-​more-​violent-​since-​democracy-​62444.
 ( 10 )   Contradictions of Democracy

vigilantism has persisted and even increased in some areas as national

murder rates fell (see Herbst, Tiemensma, and Wadee 2015).
Even as crime has fallen, one might argue that the police remain inef-
fective or that the legacy of apartheid policing is to blame. To be sure, in
large swaths of the country, the police do not acquit themselves well (see
Chapter 8) and there is mounting evidence that the upper echelons of the
police have become politicized (Steinberg 2014), which has detracted from
the daily work of crime fighting (Newham 2017). Yet, again, differences be-
tween KwaMashu and Sebokeng suggest limits to such arguments. Given
its extraordinary murder rates, rather unsurprisingly, KwaMashu’s police
station was named one of the country’s worst by the biggest opposition
party (Democratic Alliance n.d.). By contrast, because of the area’s rapid
crime reductions, the Sebokeng station was named the best in Gauteng
province in 2006 just prior to when I began my fieldwork and it has been
lauded in the local newspaper.20 Relatedly, KwaMashu and Sebokeng were
policed differently under apartheid. KwaMashu was policed by the home-
land government’s KwaZulu Police while Sebokeng was policed by the
national South African Police. This difference indicates that the historical
legacies of policing and the differing institutional transformations that the
homeland police and national police underwent only indirectly impacted
contemporary patterns of vigilantism.
More generally, though, focusing on policing leaves important questions
unanswered. For example, as in the incident that started this chapter, vigi-
lantism happens with remarkable frequency (both in South Africa and else-
where) after suspects have been arrested, jailed, or acquitted (see Chapter 4).
Such events cannot be easily explained by the failure of the police to make
arrests. Similarly, individuals are subjected to vigilante violence for moral
“crimes” the police are unable to address because they are not found in the
criminal code—​like the bishop accused of turning children’s souls into oil at
the beginning of this chapter or the country’s copious accusations of witch-
craft (Ashforth 2005). When taken together, this suggests that while the
technical capacity of the country’s police could undoubtedly be improved,
poor policing is only a partial explanation for vigilantism.
One might hypothesize that the answer lies in South Africa’s ineffective
court system. But, again, there is room for pause. To be sure, the country’s
conviction rates make the South African prosecutorial system seem feck-
less (Altbeker 2007, 143ff.) and there is evidence of declining performance
by the National Prosecuting Authority (Redpath 2012). However, com-
parative studies suggest that even countries with “strong” prosecutorial

20. “Sebokeng Police Station Does Us Proud,” Vaal Weekly, November 15, 2006.
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 11 )

services like the United States or the United Kingdom struggle to secure
convictions more than 20 percent of the time for most violent crimes
(Van Zyl Smit et al. 2000, 22; Leggett 2003; Altbeker 2007, 81–​82). Yet,
the contemporary United States and the United Kingdom do not experi-
ence high rates of vigilantism, suggesting that the ability to convict is only
a partial explanation for vigilantism. Similarly, despite the unevenness with
which the state secures convictions, South Africa’s prison population has
swelled since democratization as courts have imposed increasingly harsh
sentences (Giffard and Muntingh 2007). Indeed, South Africa prosecutes
and imprisons suspects so “effectively” that it has the twelfth highest prison
population in the world21 and imprisons people at a rate similar to Iran,22
indicating that the relative punitiveness of the court system is unrelated to
outbreaks of vigilantism.
On these points, comparison with America’s lynching history is instruc-
tive. One of the most comprehensive quantitative studies of lynching in the
U.S. South finds little evidence that extralegal punishment was systemati-
cally related to conviction rates (Tolnay and Beck 1995, chap. 4). Indeed,
Southern courts were incredibly “efficient” in convicting (black) suspects
and in handing out capital punishment. Although it is possible that
Southern crowds acted on incomplete information about the “effective-
ness” of the Southern court system in dispensing punishment, as Tolnay
and Beck (1995, 112) argue, “this explanation seems somewhat inadequate
in light of the number of cases in which mobs lynched blacks following a
jury’s failure to convict or the imposition of a sentence it considered too
lenient.” In other words, while the technical effectiveness of South Africa’s
policing and prosecution services could certainly be improved, when con-
sidered comparatively, explaining vigilantism through a technical prism
may obscure the underlying politics of the practice.
Perhaps the issue is not the technical effectiveness but the substance of
the legal system—​specifically, a lack of meaningful access to rights. On this
point, South Africa’s constitution enshrines some of the most expansive
rights guarantees in the world (Klug 2000; Gauri and Brinks 2008) and
its legal institutions underwent massive transformations following apart-
heid to make them more inclusive (Gastrow and Shaw 2001; Hornberger
2011). While the country still has abhorrent levels of inequality (Seekings
and Nattrass 2005), the judiciary has an impressive record of political inde-
pendence (Roux 2009) and of extending social and economic rights (Gauri

21. Institute for Criminal Policy Research, 2017, “Highest to Lowest—​Prison Population
Total” World Prison Brief, http://​www.prisonstudies.org/​highest-​to-​lowest/​prison-​
population-​total?field_​region_​taxonomy_​tid=All.
22. Ibid.
 ( 12 )   Contradictions of Democracy

and Brinks 2008; Dyzenhaus 2011; Brinks and Gauri 2014). Indeed, so-
cial movements seek court intervention so frequently that two of the
country’s most esteemed legal watchers have argued that rather than en-
gaging in class warfare, social movements now engage in class “lawfare”
instead ( J. Comaroff and Comaroff 2006b, 26–​31; see also Robins 2008;
Paremoer and Jung 2011; Cornell 2014; J. Brown 2015). This is not to
suggest that all such appeals have succeeded, nor that the full promises
of South Africa’s constitution have been achieved. While a highly func-
tioning tax apparatus (Lieberman 2003) has enabled the state to fund
a growing welfare system (Seekings 2002) and to slowly and unevenly
expanded public services, anyone who has spent time in one of South
Africa’s informal settlements knows that the achievement of a just dis-
tribution of the country’s wealth is far off (e.g. Chance 2018). However,
the frequent resort to “lawfare” by the poor suggests that while vigilante
spectacles may be bound up in the state’s legal forms, they are not a direct
outgrowth of the state’s legal limitations.
Similar cautions apply to accounts explaining vigilantism as a form of
security “outsourcing.” Although the private security industry is booming
(Goodenough 2007; Diphoorn 2015b), its expansion has not been
occasioned by a reduction in the size of the state’s security apparatus. Quite
the contrary. The overall budget for the criminal justice system increased
five-​fold between 1995 and 2009 (Samara 2011, 36), while the South
African Police Services expanded the size of its personnel by 65 percent
between 2002 and 2012.23 To be sure, even with the increasing size of the
state’s policing apparatus, private security guards well outnumber police
officers (Samara 2011, 37; Diphoorn 2015b). But, to suggest that the South
African state’s policing powers are being replaced by private providers
misses the contradictory dynamic of expanding state security forces and
proliferating vigilantism. In sum, the predominant arguments about state
failure are, at best, partial explanations for South Africa’s high rates of vig-
ilantism and may leave important questions unanswered, even as citizens
still experience unacceptable levels of insecurity.
If state failure explanations only give partial purchase on vigilantism in
South Africa generally and in KwaMashu and Sebokeng specifically, civic
failure explanations also provide pause. Take collapsing communal trust.
Ethnic heterogeneity is often taken as a proxy of communal cohesiveness
(e.g., Alesina and La Ferrara 2002). The more ethnically homogenous a
neighborhood is, it is assumed, the more trusting the relationships should

23. David Bruce, “Expanding the Police Force Is a Tricky Business,” Mail and Guardian, April 4,
2014, https://​mg.co.za/​article/​2014-​04-​03-​expanding-​the-​police-​force-​is-​a-​tricky-​business/​.
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 13 )

be. KwaMashu is overwhelmingly isiZulu-​speaking,24 while Sebokeng is

ethnically plural,25 so one would expect vigilantism in Sebokeng but not
KwaMashu. Despite different ethnic compositions, however, each town-
ship experiences vigilantism.
More generally, in the country at large, civic and social ties in many town-
ship communities are often thick, if also contradictory (see Chapter 6).
Indeed, South Africa is civically dense with high rates of participation
in classic civic organizations like rotating savings clubs ( James 2015).
Similarly, even as South Africa has high rates of protest (P. Alexander 2010;
J. Brown 2015), protestors often demand greater state provision of social
services, rather than reject the state’s legitimacy outright. Citizens have also
taken these demands to the ballot box and given larger vote shares to op-
position parties with each subsequent election (Paret 2016). Thus, even as
high rates of protest might suggest collapsing civic trust or declining state
legitimacy, such protests may also signal deep political engagement.
Similarly, while South African parties regularly use security to mobi-
lize supporters (Fourchard 2011, 2012), the relationship between polit-
ical party competition and vigilantism is inconsistent. KwaMashu and
Sebokeng, for example, have different patterns of party competition. In
the overwhelmingly isiZulu-​speaking KwaMashu, the African National
Congress (ANC) competes with the Zulu-​nationalist Inkatha Freedom
Party and National Freedom Party for seats on the municipal council. By
contrast, in the ethnically heterogeneous Sebokeng, the African National
Congress has been hegemonic since democratization.26 That the two areas
have different levels of party competition suggests that vigilantism is not
inherently an outgrowth of party competition. As others have shown else-
where (D. M. Anderson 2002; Kagwanja 2003; Heald 2006; Fourchard
2011, 2012), it is undoubtedly true that cooptation by political operatives
has profound impact on the trajectory of crime-​fighting groups over time.
However, it is an incomplete account of why people get into the streets to
engage in vigilantism in the first place or why parties would use security to
mobilize support as opposed to, say, anti-​poverty campaigns.
Suggesting limitations to explanations that focus on incorporating rural
populations into liberal institutions, KwaMashu and Sebokeng have dif-
ferent patterns of urbanization. KwaMashu is only 15 kilometers outside

24. Statistics South Africa, “KwaMashu,” 2011 Census, http://​www.statssa.gov.za/​?page_​

id=4286&id=10351.
25. Statistics South Africa, “Sebokeng,” 2011 Census, http://​www.statssa.gov.za/​?page_​
id=4286&id=11165.
26. For example, during the course of my fieldwork, there were no ward councilors in
Sebokeng that were not from the ANC. See http://​www.emfuleni.gov.za/​index.php/​about-​
emfuleni/​the-​council/​councillors-​77309.html?limitstart=0.
 ( 14 )   Contradictions of Democracy

of Durban and residents regularly go into central Durban to work, shop,

and play. Although a large population of recent arrivals from rural areas live
in a hostel complex or in informal settlements on the edge of the town-
ship (Hickel 2015), the majority of the township’s residents were born in
KwaMashu and are distinctly urban in attitude. Sebokeng, by contrast, is a
peri-​urban area 60 kilometers from Johannesburg. Established by the apart-
heid government to house workers for the Vaal region’s mining industry, it
has long been a site for in-​migration from rural hinterlands (Kynoch 2005b).
The expense of getting to Johannesburg also means that the connections
with urban life are more uneven than in KwaMashu. Nonetheless, the dif-
ferent patterns of urban settlement suggest vigilantism is not just the result
of the state’s inability to incorporate rural populations. KwaMashu suggests
vigilantism is a deeply urban phenomenon too.
Lastly, arguments from the United States that locate vigilantism in the
politics of racial domination would seem to have a clear resonance in South
Africa given its apartheid history. However, South Africa’s history of white
supremacy has important divergences from the American experience.
Specifically, while South Africa’s rural whites used extrajudicial violence to
subordinate African labor as in the United States (Higginson 2015), racial
dominance in urban areas was perpetuated by formal institutions like the
police (Cell 1982), such that vigilantism was a surprisingly rare phenom-
enon in urban areas when compared to the United States (Evans 2009).
While South Africa’s racist history has overdetermined that young, black
men still bear the brunt of the state’s police power (see Chapter 9), there
are important differences from America’s history of racial domination and
its connection to vigilantism, suggesting arguments from American history
may be more limited in South Africa than might initially be assumed given
the history of white supremacy in each country.
Again, to be clear, my claim is not that the above explanations bear no re-
lation to vigilantism. At a national level, major issues persist in South Africa.
Concerns about high crime, poor policing, and the inability to prosecute
criminals are very real. Even as the state’s courts have awarded benefits to cit-
izens, gross racial and economic inequalities (Terreblanche 2002; Seekings
and Nattrass 2005) stemming from the dispossessions of colonialism and
apartheid persist (Reddy 2015). There are concerns about increasingly per-
vasive corruption (Lodge 2014) and, as a consequence, service delivery has
proceeded far too slowly, unevenly, and imperfectly to allow many of the
country’s poorest citizens to live with sufficient dignity. However, when con-
sidering the awkward fit between existing explanations, the two fieldsites at
the heart of this study, and the South African context generally, existing ac-
counts have important explanatory shortcomings. This makes them partial
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 15 )

and potentially misleading explanations for the eruption of vigilantism in

post-​apartheid South Africa and in democratic states generally.
Thus, instead of focusing on state or civic collapse, this book accounts
for vigilantism by understanding processes of democratic state formation
and civic action. To get inside such processes, participant observation, par-
ticularly when combined with a historical sensibility, is an ideal method.
Participant observation is particularly well suited to understanding
practices like vigilantism within the context of large-​scale processes like
state formation because it can reveal how political power operates from
the bottom up (Auyero 2006, 258). In this case, the ethnographic and
archival material that follows in the rest of this book shows the processes
through which law is constructed and contested in practice, while illu-
minating why practices of vigilantism in KwaMashu and Sebokeng often
diverge from our accepted theories. The sum effect is to show how vigi-
lantism is a response to processes of democratic state formation, how it is
embedded within neighborhood civic networks, and how such surprising
patterns expose contradictions of democracy generally.

THE PATH FORWARD

To show how vigilantism could arise in a place like South Africa, which
was at the forefront of the late twentieth century rights revolution, this
book tracks the long history of popular justice and how it has been bound
up with processes of state formation and civic formation at each step.
Chapter 1 develops a theory of vigilantism in democratic states, showing
how vigilantism erupts when citizens perceive that the state’s legal system
makes them more insecure because of procedural rights. It then elaborates
a theory of lawmaking and state-​making as vigilantism, while developing a
critique of the role that punishment plays in modern state-​building. Over
the next several chapters, the book develops these arguments through the
South African case, showing how practices of popular justice emerged
during South Africa’s democratic revolution and found enduring roots in
neighborhood networks. It then shows how the newly democratic state has
failed to discipline such relationships, despite having the modernist, rights-​
based institutions and a vibrant civic sphere that should enable it.
Chapter 2 begins this journey by examining the historical antecedents
of contemporary vigilantism, through the history of one of KwaMashu’s
bloodiest conflicts: the war between the ANC-​affiliated Comrades and the
amaSinyora youth gang. It shows that revolutionary vigilantism was based
on contradictory social ties that broke down amid competition for the
 ( 16 )   Contradictions of Democracy

future of the South African state and how it has had lasting effects on the
networks through which vigilantism is practiced today.
This revolutionary legacy created challenges for post-​apartheid state-​
builders, which Chapter 3 explores by asking why the newly democratic
state was unable to monopolize violence despite massive judicial reforms.
If contradictory social ties were at the center of apartheid-​era vigilantism,
the post-​apartheid state had to insert itself into these relationships so that
people would turn to the state for justice instead of seeking it themselves.
An examination of key Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
hearings in Sebokeng shows how the TRC’s categorization of victims and
perpetrators sometimes reversed local understandings of culpability for
local-​level violence, challenging neighborhood notions of justice in the
process. This problematic performance mirrored the state’s challenges in
getting citizens to turn to the law for justice instead of engaging in vigilante
violence.
If Chapter 3 addresses the failure of the state to monopolize violence,
Chapter 4 explores the dynamics of contemporary vigilantism by exam-
ining a peculiar set of cases: lynchings that occur after the police have
arrested suspects. If much literature argues that vigilantism is a response
to failed policing, these surprising cases suggest that policing failure is, at
best, a partial explanation. Exploring a KwaMashu lynching in which two
suspected rapists were dragged from a police car, the chapter reveals how
residents interpret the state’s legal procedures as potentially perpetuating
insecurity—​a set of meanings that helps explain why citizens would chal-
lenge the state’s legal processes through acts of vigilantism.
How can a state respond to such skepticism? Chapter 5 shows how
the South African state promotes citizen crime-​fighting to combat citi-
zens’ feelings of disempowerment in the face of crime. By examining two
moments in a Sebokeng community policing campaign—​a public spec-
tacle relaunching the program and a weekend of patrolling with a com-
munity policing group—​the chapter examines the contradictory effects
of citizen empowerment on state formation. While active patrolling
allowed residents to feel in control of their neighborhood, patrollers felt
being rough was sometimes necessary to assert agency in the face of fear-​
inducing criminals. Ironically, some patrollers experienced their strongest
feelings of citizenship as they violated the state’s procedural protections
for suspects.
Even as the citizens feel empowered by rough crime-​fighting, though,
crime fighting remains a high-​risk activity. Given its risks, why would an-
yone participate in vigilantism? To answer this question, Chapter 6 looks
at the case of a KwaMashu street committee leader who was shot allegedly
because of his crime fighting work. It shows that forceful crime fighting
 i n t r o d u ct i o n    ( 17 )

offered emotional rewards connected to ideals of being a good citizen and

community member. However, the street committee leader’s communal
commitments made him comfortable with forceful policing for those
who violated the neighborhood’s moral tenets, suggesting informal crime-​
fighting is premised on a contradictory form of social capital.
While the book is rooted in South Africa’s townships, Chapter 7 asks
how the politics of crime and vigilantism in South Africa’s predominantly
white suburbs differ. An analysis of what organizers billed as the largest
anti-​crime protest in South Africa’s history—​a virtually all-​white affair at
a Pretoria rugby club—​shows surprising similarities in claims made about
crime between the suburbs and townships about how rights enable crim-
inality. However, fear of crime in the suburbs is expressed through more
directly racialized language than in the townships and suburban vigilantism
is aimed primarily at “outsiders” rather than “insiders.”
While vigilantism is widespread, of course, it is not universally
supported. How do opponents of vigilantism challenge it, though? Relying
on a discourse analysis of a commission of inquiry’s final report emerging
out of anti-​vigilantism mobilization in Cape Town, Chapter 8 shows that
the commission’s focus on police efficiency expresses faith in a proce-
dural model of justice to reduce vigilantism. This faith, however, overlooks
contradictions, first highlighted by Walter Benjamin (1978), between the
justice legal procedures seek and the irregular violence police deploy to
achieve it. Put differently, opponents of vigilantism put faith in state vio-
lence as the solution to citizen violence—​an irony in a place familiar with
the horrible unpredictability of violent policing.
Chapter 9 builds on this analysis by examining fears of extrajudicial po-
lice violence among young men in KwaMashu. It argues that, when viewed
through their eyes, South African lawmaking and state-​making emulates
vigilantism. This is surprising because in South Africa’s early democratic
years officials positioned the state as bound by human rights and the rule
of law. Yet, as the state failed to achieve the Weberian fantasy of monop-
olizing violence, its own rates of police violence increased. This has cre-
ated a contradictory state form, where state institutions are charged with
protecting citizens’ rights and upholding legal procedures, even as its agents
are rumored to violate both.
The Epilogue places these themes in a broader pattern of state vigilan-
tism across the globe, where from the Philippines to the United States
empowered police are engaging in violence against young men in the name
of security for the people. After all, South Africa is a useful case to think
through because of the contradictions that it highlights inherent to dem-
ocratic governance—​contradictions explored in more depth in the next
chapter.
 CHAPTER 1
w
Vigilantism and the Contradictions
of Democratic State Formation

O scar Pistorius, South Africa’s internationally renowned Paralympian,

sat head hung low in the dock, waiting to hear how long he would
be imprisoned for shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, four times
through a locked bathroom door. The sentencing hearing, like the rest of
the trial, was being broadcast on national television—​the first time cameras
had ever been allowed into a South African courtroom. Building on a long
history stretching back to the colonial era of trials being used to communi-
cate political messages, it was a decision likely intended to dramatize how
the state’s legal system worked to a citizenry often skeptical of it.1 However,
where trials from previous eras dramatized the state’s domination of restive
political movements challenging official state racism ( J. L. Comaroff 2001,
306–​307), now they dramatized the state’s command over rightful justice.
And, in many ways, the trial did show a remarkable transition in how justice
was administered from the South African state’s apartheid past. Most ob-
viously, the state’s leading prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, an Afrikaner man, made
his arguments for a lengthy incarceration to judge Thokozile Masipa, an
African woman. It was a performance that would have been unthinkable
just over twenty years ago and visually displayed for a nation how radically
the state’s legal system had been transformed.
Nel, seemingly conscious of the stakes of the drama, pitched his argu-
ment for a lengthy sentence in terms of the recently democratized state’s
capacity to regulate justice by invoking one of the biggest threats to state

1. On the politics of drama at court proceedings, see Hay (1975).

( 18 )
 v i g i l a n t i s m a n d d e m o c r at i c s tat e f o r m at i o n    ( 19 )

justice: popular justice. “If the court sentence is too light and society
loses trust in the court,” he intoned, “they will take the law into their own
hands.”2 If the state does not punish harshly, he was suggesting, the people
will instead. The claim had recent precedent. The last South African celeb-
rity murder trial—​the trial of Molemo “Jub Jub” Maarohanye, a popular
singer who had killed four Soweto schoolchildren while drag racing—​saw
bail hearings turned into battlefields when police fired rubber bullets at
protesting pupils who threatened to kill Jub Jub and sack the court were he
to be released while awaiting trial.3
Yet even as Nel argued that harsh punishment for Pistorius was neces-
sary because an absence of punitive state violence would inevitably result
in its substitution by punitive citizen violence, there was an irony to his
argument: vigilantism was central to the case immediately following the
Pistorius hearing on the court’s docket. Ntokozo Hadebe, the defendant
replacing Pistorius in the dock, had nearly not made it to trial because he
had almost been lynched. A year prior, when Hadebe was first arrested on
charges of raping and murdering several young girls in the informal settle-
ment of Diepsloot, outside of Johannesburg, residents protesting at the po-
lice station demanded that police release him from custody and hand him
over to the crowd so he could be guaranteed punishment by the people.4
Vigilantism, thus, hung like a specter over the South African justice
system and impacted how state agents played their roles in its judicial
dramas. In citing vigilantism in his demand for harsh punishment for
Pistorius, in effect, Nel was making a claim about the relationship between
vigilantism and state formation: state punishment was a necessary and
vital replacement for citizen punishment. It is an argument that carries res-
onance far beyond the shores of South Africa in both scholarly and legal
thought. Most notably, in Gregg v. Georgia, the 1976 Supreme Court case
that reinstated the death penalty in the United States, the majority opinion
argued that “When people begin to believe that organized society is un-
willing or unable to impose upon criminal offenders the punishment they

2. Alan Cowell, “Awaiting Oscar Pistorius Sentencing, South Africa Wrangles Over Complex
Issues,” October 20, 2014, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2014/​10/​21/​world/​africa/​oscar-​
pistorius-​sentencing-​south-​africa.html.
3. Jub Jub was released on bail but immediately went into hiding while awaiting trial. Miranda
Andrew and Theo Nkonki, “Rubber Bullets for Jub Jub Protesters” IOL News, March 17, 2010,
http://​w ww.iol.co.za/​news/​south-​africa/​r ubber-​bullets-​for-​jub-​jub-​protesters-​476673;
Candice Bailey, “Jub Jub Goes into Hiding,” IOL News, March 20, 2010, http://​www.iol.co.za/​
news/​south-​africa/​jub-​jub-​goes-​into-​hiding-​476963.
4. Ed Cropley, “Pistorius Shoves Race, Crime and Punishment in South Africa’s
Face,” Reuters, October 23, 2014, http://​www.reuters.com/​article/​2014/​10/​23/​
us-​safrica-​justice-​idUSKCN0IC26920141023.
 ( 20 )   Contradictions of Democracy

‘deserve’ then there are sown the seeds of anarchy, of self-​help vigilante jus-
tice, and lynch law” (Quoted in Pfeifer 2006, 151).
Yet, even as scholars of vigilantism in the United States have long known
the importance of vigilante violence for understanding American state for-
mation (R. M. Brown 1975; Brundage 1993; Waldrep 2002; Pfeifer 2006;
Kirkpatrick 2008), the relationship between vigilantism, lawmaking, and
state-​making elsewhere has only received attention relatively recently.5
Nonetheless, since the democratization wave of the 1980s and 1990s, vig-
ilante violence in young democracies across the globe has been rampant
(e.g., Pratten and Sen 2008), as has extralegal punishment by state agents
(Barker 1998; D. M. Anderson 2002; Hedman 2002; Mazzei 2009; Tankebe
2011; Jauregui 2015).6 The question is why.7

CONTRADICTIONS OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP

We saw in the introductory chapter that most of the literature on vigilan-

tism in emerging democracies argues that vigilantism is the result of either
state failure or civic failure. Where most of the literature argues that vigi-
lantism is a response to failing state or civic institutions, I argue the oppo-
site: vigilantism is a response to processes of democratic state formation and
is fostered by dense civic networks. Specifically, vigilantes contest the exten-
sion of constitutional rights (see also Buur and Jensen 2004; Buur 2008).
Sympathizers of vigilantism argue that because suspects may be released

5. Abrahams’ (1987, 1998) work is an important exception here.

6. To be sure, vigilantism occurs in nondemocratic settings, including under apartheid in
South Africa (see esp. Chapter 2). However, the function, incentives, and meaning of author-
itarian state institutions are very different from democratic ones. So, too, are the conditions of
possibility that lead to the emergence of vigilantism because the relationship between citizens
and their states change dramatically with democratization. This is not to say that South Africa
had a complete break between apartheid and democracy or between vigilantism then and now.
On the contrary, one of this book’s explanatory challenges is to grapple with remarkable conti-
nuities in the practice of vigilantism even after an incredible political change. Its focus, however,
is on explaining the emergence and persistence of vigilantism post-​apartheid and amid demo-
cratic change.
7. In asking why vigilantism has flourished in post-​apartheid South Africa and in transi-
tional democracies generally, my goal is to understand what pushes people into the street in
the first place to engage in extralegal punishment and what the consequences of such large-​
scale movements into the street are for state formation generally. There is important work
either on vigilantism in South Africa or elsewhere that asks related questions: Why do some
crowds kill while others do not (R. Wilson 2001; Cooper-​Knock 2014; Gross 2016)? Why do
some forms of vigilantism occur through formal organizations while others are ephemeral acts
(Bateson 2013)? How are targets of vigilante violence chosen (Bailey et al. 2011)? Why do
some attempts at lynching fail (Beck, Tolnay, and Bailey 2016)? These are important questions.
However, they are separate from the questions I address in this book, which examine the factors
that push people to circumvent the state’s legal apparatus in the first place.
 v i g i l a n t i s m a n d d e m o c r at i c s tat e f o r m at i o n    ( 21 )

back into neighborhoods following bail or the withdrawal of charges in

the face of insufficient evidence, procedural rights produce insecurity be-
cause suspects can continue to prey on residents. In other circumstances,
they argue such rights may enable moral insecurity—​for instance, through
the inability to prosecute witches (Ashforth 2005). When viewed through
this lens, citizens interpret the technical success of legal institutions as pro-
found state failure. In places where there are deep neighborhood ties, like
South Africa’s townships, these understandings are intensified if the sus-
pect is one’s neighbor and is familiar to would-​be crime fighters (see also
Cooper-​Knock 2014; Weeks 2017). In this context, vigilant citizens may
contest the extension of a strong rights regime through vigilantism to cor-
rect “failures” in the state’s legal procedures.
Discontent with the state’s legal systems is not sufficient to explain on-
going vigilantism, though. A social basis is needed to mount such efforts.
Understanding local networks is key to understanding this mobilization
because without social networks to draw on, vigilantism might occur but is
likely to be limited in scope as repeated vigilantism necessitates a social basis
for support. Such networks are most likely in areas with a history of mobi-
lization against the state because residents of such areas have demonstrated
the willingness to take risks in the service of actively watching the state and
resisting against it—​two hallmarks of vigilantism (Abrahams 1998; Pfeifer
2006). Legacies of contention may enable contemporary vigilantism, as
participation in other forms of social mobilization gives community leaders
organizational and repertory capabilities that they can redeploy to mobilize
responses to crime through dense associational networks (see McAdam,
McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Tilly, McAdam, and Tarrow 2004). For instance,
long-​active groups like Cape Town’s People Against Gangsterism and
Drugs (PAGAD) or Limpopo’s Mapogo a Mathamaga were built through
networks first formed through either revolutionary (PAGAD) (Desai 2006;
Bangstad 2005) or counterrevolutionary mobilization (Mapogo) (Oomen
2004; J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff 2007) during the struggle against apart-
heid. However, even episodic acts of vigilantism rely on local networks to
mobilize participants (Chapter 4) because such mobilization is personally
risky (Chapter 6). Not only do participants risk arrest, they face poten-
tial reprisals by criminals. If an individual does not know her neighbors,
she is unlikely to take risky action in a neighbor’s defense. In this sense,
the networks that enable vigilantism need not necessarily be connected to
formal organizations but can include diffuse forms of social capital and net-
work ties. When neighbors perceive their neighborhood to be under attack,
informal ties can be powerful for mobilizing a response.
However, while citizen crime fighters rely on associational ties to mobilize
support, these bonds are neither neutral nor natural (Chapter 2). Particularly
 ( 22 )   Contradictions of Democracy

amid situations of violence or insecurity, the kinds of intimate social ties

that pervade many South African townships (Ashforth 2005; Cooper-​
Knock 2014; Weeks 2017)—​like intimate social ties generally (Kalyvas
2006; Theidon 2012)—​often have a double-​edged quality to them. They
can foster communal closeness and enable collective responses to threats.
Or, these intimate ties can be used to target enemies and attack undesirable
neighbors. This is an unexpected side of the social capital formed through
social mobilization. While theorists often argue that social capital can im-
prove democracy (e.g., Putnam 1993) and reduce violence (e.g., Varshney
2002), attention to the relationship between social capital and vigilantism
suggests a more ambiguous picture. Indeed, vigilante citizens often police
the boundaries of communal and political belonging by actively contesting
who is a member of the community (e.g., Super 2016b, 463–​466), who is a
rightful citizen (Oomen 2004), and what the terms of membership are.
Why are these networks being used for the specific end of collective
extrajudicial punishment? Understanding citizens’ concerns over the
effects of procedural rights is the key to answering this question. Vigilante
sympathizers argue that rights allow criminality and immorality to prolif-
erate as the activities of suspected criminals and other “wrongdoers” are
enabled by the protections afforded by a liberal democratic regime (see also
Posel 2004; Buur 2008). Moreover, because liberal legal institutions are
designed to be fallible and, in fact, depend on this fallibility to produce the
nonarbitrary procedural justice valued by liberal jurisprudence, criminals
(or other moral outcasts like alleged witches) are granted legal safeguards
in ways that, at times, run contrary to citizens’ felt needs for security. Worse,
from the perspective of vigilante citizens, the state may actually protect im-
moral agents, either when police intervene to rescue victims of vigilante
violence or when courts provide procedural protections to individuals on
trial. In the context of such a felt contradiction, citizens see it as necessary
to combat the performance, procedures, and protections of the law—​what
Michael Pfeifer (2006, 9) has called in writing of vigilantism in the United
States “a revolt against due process.” In this sense, citizens may be as con-
cerned about the style in which the law is administered, as its substance.
The specific aspects of due process that citizens contest shifts, often
within the span of a single conversation. The concern could be about a
suspect being released on bail, to the police not making arrests speedily
enough while an investigation proceeds, to the high evidentiary bar needed
for a prosecution to move forward, to the possibility that even if a suspect
is convicted he won’t be punished severely enough, to the limitations of
the state’s ability to prosecute individuals like witches whose “crimes” are
not found in the criminal codes. Suggesting the depths of these concerns,
the alleged criminal need not necessarily be particularly violent for such
 v i g i l a n t i s m a n d d e m o c r at i c s tat e f o r m at i o n    ( 23 )

concerns to erupt into vigilante violence. In fact, petty thieves and drug
users are some of the most frequent targets of vigilante violence (see e.g.,
Cooper-​Knock 2014; Super 2016b), rather than the most serious criminals
like rapists or murderers (although they certainly may be targeted too). The
criminals may be small-​time, but their release, possible non-​conviction, or
potentially short sentencing is experienced as a failure of the state judicial
apparatus, even if that apparatus is working in a technically correct manner.
Such concerns point to an underlying concern about the nature of rights
not often recognized by scholars but deeply felt by many citizens. That is,
rights have contradictory meanings attached to them, particularly when
they operate at different scales. Scholars often point to the aggregate so-
cial gains that come with strong rights protections (esp. Marshall 1964 and
followers). At an individual level, though, citizens may apprehend rights
differently. While gains for one’s individual rights might be viewed favor-
ably (gains that citizens will recognize often come from aggregate advances
like democratization), advances in the rights of others may be viewed skep-
tically. This is particularly the case if there are security concerns attached
to the rights of others. Put starkly, while rights gains might be celebrated in
the abstract, in practice the rights of others can be perceived as threatening
to one’s self. The sum effect of these concerns is that counterintuitively and
contrary to scholarly expectations (Tankebe 2009b; Pinker 2011, chap. 7;
Tyler 2012), the introduction of a strong procedural rights regime may en-
able vigilantism rather than militate against it (see also Smith 2015).
In South Africa, such skepticism has two primary variants: a rural, con-
servative version (e.g., Haysom 1986) and an urban, radical (e.g., Bozzoli
2004) version. Among rural populations, the skepticism is often due to
concerns that liberal rights may subvert “traditional” notions of communal
order by overturning existing familial, sexual, generational, and gender
hierarchies (Oomen 2004; J. L. Comaroff and Comaroff 2007; Hickel
2015; Smith 2015; Weeks 2017). In urban and peri-​urban areas, though,
the genealogy of rights skepticism is quite different. While some town-
ship residents do share concerns of their rural counterparts that rights un-
dermine traditional sources of moral and political authority (esp. Hickel
2015), the skepticism about the effects of the rights regime also ties back
to the revolution against apartheid (Chapter 2). By now, much scholarship
has shown how South Africa’s revolutionary foment, particularly during the
late-​apartheid years, saw the creation of a new moral imagination of what
the law should be (Burman and Schärf 1990; Seekings 1990; Nina 2000;
Schärf and Nina 2001). If rebellious action across the world tends to ex-
press a subaltern moral economy (e.g., Thompson 1971; Scott 1976), in
apartheid South Africa, popular justice could be said to have propagated a
subaltern moral legality.
 ( 24 )   Contradictions of Democracy

This moral legality was built on an imagination of law as an expression

of popular sovereignty and directed at the creation of communally ori-
ented justice. This vision of law was rooted in an antagonism toward lib-
eral law where township revolutionaries viewed a future liberal order as not
going far enough to achieve the purified moral communities that young
rebels tried to create during the latter years of the struggle against apart-
heid. As Bozzoli (2004, 2) writes of this period, this moral rethinking in-
creasingly “concerned itself with the daily lives of township dwellers, rather
than simply opposition with the state.” This focus on regulating the lives
of township dwellers, young militants held, would create a post-​apartheid
order “in which society would be purified. There would, at least some of the
youth believed, be no crime, decay or alcohol, no oppression, no suffering”
(Bozzoli 2004, 2). That is, practices like crime or witchcraft would upend
the communal purity they fought to create. At a more abstract level, this
privileging of communal needs over individual demands was mirrored in
the proclamations of the anti-​apartheid movement as a whole. This antago-
nism is apparent in the earliest human rights statements, like the Freedom
Charter, which emphasized the primacy of collectivities like “the people” or
“the masses” above rights-​bearing individuals who would have those rights
secured through a procedure-​based constitution (Dubow 2012, 67–​73).
One implication of this insistence that law is founded in the people is an
ability, if not a duty, to correct the law if it goes against the popular will—​
a vision of law that continues to live in practices of popular justice today
when vigilantes “correct” the law by punishing moral outcasts the state is
unwilling or unable to punish itself (Buur 2008).
Nonetheless, by the time South Africa transitioned to democracy, elite
members of the liberation movements held to a faith in law as a rational
legal apparatus to neutrally adjudicate conflicts that could be held in check
by individual rights. Despite the challenges put forth to formal law in many
communities, liberal elites asserted the basic, universal goodness of the rule
of law and argued that the apartheid state was engaged in rule by law in-
stead. That is, they claimed the law had been perverted in such a way that
it was used to violate individual rights and that the post-​apartheid future
needed more robust protections of those rights in order to bring the neutral
substance of modern law together with its rationalized modern form (see
Dugard 1992; Ellmann 1992; Abel 1995; Meierhenrich 2008).
By contrast, as democracy was dawning, vigilant citizens whose view
of law was fashioned through the crucible of local-​level popular justice
viewed the rights-​based procedures advocated by national reformers with
some skepticism because such procedures embodied a vision of law that
prioritizes fallibility in order to protect individual liberties. In advocating
for an anti-​procedural law, these emerging vigilante citizens put forward a
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Next morning we were aroused early and ordered to get breakfast.
Company B being informed that to it had been awarded the post of
honor of leading the forlorn hope up the Summertown road, a narrow
road cut through the rock leading to the top of the mountain, which
would admit about four men abreast, and we figured that as we
marched up, in the face of a desperate enemy, it would probably use
up the last man of our company before a landing could be effected.
Under the protecting wing of a friendly cloud we built fires and made
coffee, of which we stood in sore need, for, sore from yesterday’s
exertions, shivering in our breezy breakfast hall, as the chill gray
dawn crept over us, and in the absence of the enthusiasm of the
active assault, the prospect before us was anything but encouraging.
Just as we finished breakfast the cloud rolled away, and the sun
peering over the smoky mountains of North Carolina, gilded our
mountain top.
My first thought was “sharp-shooters,” and glancing up at the top
from whence the shots might be expected, I saw a little squad at the
extreme point, unfurling a flag. With breathless interest I watched the
opening folds of that flag, when out upon the wind floated the
grandest national standard that ever flapped in any breeze under the
shining sun. That emblem dearest to every loyal American heart: the
glorious Star Spangled Banner!
I lifted up my voice and yelled. At the same time the whole mountain
side resounded with huzzahs of joy and triumph. The one hundred
thousand veterans in the Chattanooga Valley sent back the answer
like a mighty echo, and there went up, tossed from crest to crest,
and mountain top to mountain top, a tremendous Yankee shout of
victory, proclaiming in thunder tones the triumph of “the battle above
the clouds!”
The whole situation had experienced a change. The sharp-shooters
were gone. We were relieved from that Summertown road business,
and we held the key to the rebel position in front of Chattanooga.
It is no derogation to the manhood of soldiers whose valor had been
fully proved, to say, that the tears of joy coursed down over many a
war-worn face. With surprising alacrity we were in line of march,
moving around and down the eastern slope, our minds attuned to the
enjoyment of the most picturesque view I ever beheld.
Before us lay the vast amphitheatre of the Chattanooga Valley. The
broad shining river curving around the north of the town, flashing the
sunlight from its bosom as it came, swept down until it struck the bed
rock beneath our feet, where turning sharply to the right it swept
between the cliff and the great toe of Moccasin Point, then turning
abruptly to the north, bathing the bottom of the gigantic foot as it
went, turned the mighty heel at Waldron Ridge.
The east and south bounded by the majestic crescent of Missionary
Ridge, buttressed upon the west by the cloud-hung battlements of
Lookout Mountain, clad in the variegated paraphernalia of autumn
foliage; the whole softly illuminated by the mellow radiance of an
Indian summer day, presented a picture that may be treasured in the
memory as one of nature’s masterpieces.
As we crossed the valley we had the pleasure of witnessing the
magnificent charge of the center as it moved out from the line of
Orchard Knob, crossed the intervening plain, flowed with a resistless
tide over the rifle pits at the foot of the ridge, and then, without
orders, every man his own commander, surged like a huge swarm of
blue flies up the rugged side of Missionary Ridge, while the half a
hundred rebel cannon bellowed overhead, frescoing the air with the
smoke of bursting shells. But up they went hurling the rebels from
their vantage ground upon the crest, and turning his own cannon
upon him “sped the parting guest,” stamping out the last vestige of
rebel claim to the Chattanooga Valley, and securing to the Union
army permanent possession of this great “gateway to Georgia.”
 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
standardized.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
REMINISCENCES OF THE CHATTANOOGA CAMPAIGN ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in
these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it
in the United States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of
this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept
and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and
may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the
terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of
the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given
away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with
eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject
to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
 PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from
the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do
not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing,
performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the
work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™
mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely
sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of
this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its
attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without
charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the
United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms
of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying,
performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this
work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes
no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in
any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™
work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or
with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is
accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the
United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must
comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a
part of this work or any other work associated with Project
Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you
provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work
in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in
the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
 copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe
and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating
the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may
be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a
copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or
damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph
1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner
of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must
return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity
that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may
demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the
problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur:
(a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b)
alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project
Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.
It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and
donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a
secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help,
see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can
be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the
widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and
keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in
locations where we have not received written confirmation of
compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of
compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in
such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of
other ways including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how
to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.