South Africa’s Criminal Culture

Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and Its Foes
Edited by Jonny Steinberg
202 pages, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001

Few people living in South Africa would be surprised that a police sergeant drives a bright pink Volkswagen with black tinted windows because he believes no one would want to steal it. Or that someone could be robbed of his cash, cellphone, and handheld computer in the main Johannesburg police station. Or that the primary suspect in a pizzeria bomb blast in Cape Town could be arrested at a police roadblock in the company of two cops attached to an anticorruption task force, and that the suspect would be a well-known police informer.

Indeed, every year for the past seven years, South Africa’s police have recorded an increasing number of serious crimes, in excess of 2 million annually. Despite the minister of safety and security’s angry protestations that the crime rate has stabilized, statistics from his own department indicate that recorded crime in South Africa increased by 24 percent between 1994 and 2000. A quick comparison indicates the scale of the problem: Interpol reports that in 1998 in Russia, 110 violent robberies were recorded per 100,000 people; in South Africa the number was 208.

Although not widely documented, there is a popular view of why South Africa’s crime rates are so high. In South Africa, crime is viewed as a legacy of apartheid and therefore a development challenge that can be countered by alleviating poverty and disadvantage. The authors of Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and Its Foes, edited by South African journalist Jonny Steinberg, however, paint a more nuanced picture, bound to stir controversy. For Steinberg and company, South Africa’s crime wave, while originating in the violence of apartheid, is primarily due to the failure of South Africa’s democratic state to impose moral and institutional authority. The politics of exclusion and estrangement that characterized apartheid continue today.

Anthony Altbeker, a policy analyst at the University of the Witwatersrand, captures this idea in an analysis of an "outlaw" lifestyle, characterized by open contempt for the law and its institutions. In this world, a violent gangster shot dead by police during an armed heist of a vehicle transporting cash is given a hero’s funeral, loudly and drunkenly celebrated by gun-toting youths weaving across the road in suspect cars while the police look on. A range of people — many of them middle-class, educated, and employed — choose the outlaw lifestyle. They are people "who are outside of the reach of the law, and whose identities are not shaped by the law," Altbeker says. The real issue for Altbeker is "How do we build a liberal democratic society when even those who stand a good chance of reasonable wealth cannot resist robbery and theft?"

The difficulty of this task is highlighted by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), who profile the nihilistic politics of the amaGents, a township term for young gangsters. These youths — "the brothers, cousins and neighbours of people who worked in [the] research team" — appear drawn to the gang because it offers quick material reward and, perhaps most importantly, "It turns these youngsters into objects of attraction, rather than repulsion, in their own communities." This acceptance of gangster culture is why CSVR Executive Director Graeme Simpson argues that "it is premature to talk of South Africa as a ‘post conflict’ society." Noting the "snail’s pace nature of transformation" and the fine and often-blurred line between the "socially functional" violence of resistance and the "anti-social" violence of criminality, Simpson argues that democratization has so far brought little tangible benefit to the youth. He contends that political analysts and politicians have missed the point: The growth in youth-based criminal activity and organization, not reemerging political resistance, represents "the gravest threat to an embryonic human rights dispensation."

Although perhaps overstating his case, Simpson has a point. For in response to the growing public concern about crime, South African politicians have responded with increasingly tough rhetoric; an unsustainable search, seizure, and arrest law enforcement strategy; and much legislation, some of which may be unenforceable and some of which challenges South Africa’s Bill of Rights.

Last year, the minister for safety and security declared that "criminals must know that the South African state possesses all the authority, moral and political, to ensure that by all means, constitutional or unconstitutional, the people of this country are not deprived of their human rights" [italics added]. While this is clearly soapbox oratory, it smacks of desperation fueled by failure. Some of the reasons for the failure are outlined by Steven Laufer, an editor at the Johannesburg newspaper Business Day, and Wilfried Scharf, professor of criminology at the University of Cape Town. They map the disjointed and until now politically inhibited efforts to transform South Africa’s police.

There are also considerable challenges ahead in renovating South Africa’s prosecution service, as Martin Schönteich, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, and Andre de Vries, a director of public prosecutions, make clear in their respective chapters. While the number of crimes reported to the police has increased over the past seven years, the number prosecuted remains low, as do conviction rates: In 1999, the police recorded 2.4 million crimes, 200,000 of which resulted in convictions. For some of the more serious crimes, conviction rates were even worse: 2 percent for car hijacking, 3 percent for aggravated robbery, and 8 percent for rape.

Mending the gaps in the criminal justice system has become a political and budgetary priority. But even if the remedies work, they will affect only those for whom a social sanction such as imprisonment matters, and this group may not include enough young South Africans to make a real difference. As Altbeker points out, criminologists worldwide have argued that "the real question is not why people commit crimes, but why they do not. In general the answer is not some rational fear of detection and punishment… but that the socializing processes at work in society actively discourage crime as a mode of life.” Crime Wave sharply questions the extent to which this socializing process functions in South Africa.

While Crime Wave offers a challenging analysis of the sociology and politics of crime in South Africa, it does not offer explicit solutions. Implicit in the book, though, are two key interventions: (1) building the capacity of the justice system and (2) fostering a real stake in society by rebuilding the torn social fabric and providing meaningful alternatives to the thrill and reward of deviance. These two goals were identified in the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS), approved by the South African cabinet in 1996. Apart from being slow and patchy, NCPS implementation focused almost wholly on the criminal justice system. But without real attention to the societal aspect of the problem, the authors in Crime Wave indicate these efforts will likely be insufficient.