Of Police Brutality and Political Theatre
by Sebabatso Manoeli
with Jonny Steinberg
"To be poor and black and a young man in South Africa, and to live in a certain geography, whether it be an informal settlement or a formal township, is to experience a very brutal, very rough form of policing." Jonny Steinberg on Policing in South Africa
In this episode, Yale University professor Jonny Steinberg and I discuss what he calls his “long-standing on-and-off interest in policing, which stems initially from spending many hundreds of hours in patrol cars with police in the early and late 2000s.”
Our conversation explores the similarities and differences between how South Africa and the United States are policed. Reflecting on the renewed global awareness of anti-Black racism in policing – especially in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, we speak about the ironic ways in which the brute force of the police in South Africa belies their vulnerability. He contrasts the impressive legal protections to which South African citizens are entitled with the crass continuities from apartheid that rendered the institution potentially racist.
Geography plays a role in the proliferation of xenophobia in South Africa, which Jonny views as another dimension of policing. He recounts the histories of the police’s performative humiliation of Black and Brown foreigners in South Africa’s urban and peri-urban areas, which he describes as a kind of “theatre.” We discuss how this xenophobic impulse is both institutionally embedded in organs of the state and is, in some ways, socially cathartic in the context of scarcity and severe marginalization.
Steinberg notes how bellicose forms of policing that have emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbate the severity of this form of policing in South Africa, but these actions he believes also open new possibilities for civic action.
For more, listen here.
SUBSCRIBE:
SOUNDCLOUD | SPOTIFY | APPLE PODCASTS | GOOGLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PODCHASER | RADIO PUBLIC | TUNE IN
Award winning writer and scholar Jonny Steinberg is best known for beloved narrative non-fiction books focused on ordinary life in post-apartheid South Africa. His books include: One Day in Bethlehem (2019), for which he won the 2020 Media24 Books Literary Prize: Recht Malan Prize for Nonfiction; A Man of Good Hope (2015); Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York (2011); Three Letter Plague (2008), which was a Washington Post Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize; and Midlands (2002). He is also the recipient of the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award and the Windham Campbell Literature Prize at Yale University. He has explored policing through various lenses, including through his books The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs (2004) and Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa (2008).