Cars, compounds and containers: Judicial and extrajudicial infrastructures of punishment in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa
| Author | Gail Super |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221079456 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
Cars, compounds and
containers: Judicial and
extrajudicial infrastructures
of punishment in the ‘old’
and ‘new’South Africa
Gail Super
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto –Mississauga,
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Abstract
This paper examines non-state infrastructures of vigilante violence in marginalized
spaces in South Africa. I argue that car trunks, shacks, containers, and other everyday
receptacles function as the underside of official institutions, such as prisons and police
lock-ups, and bear historical imprints of the extrajudicial punishments inflicted on
black bodies during colonialism and apartheid. I focus on two techniques: forcing some-
one into the trunk of a vehicle and driving them around to locate stolen property, and
confinement in garages, shacks, containers, or local public spaces. Whereas in formerly
‘whites only’areas, residents have access to insurance, guards, gated communities, for-
tified fences, and well-resourced neighbourhood watches, in former black townships and
informal settlements, this is not the case. Here, the boot, the shack, the shed, the car,
and the minibus taxi play multiple roles, including as vectors and spaces of confinement,
torture, and execution. Thus, spatiotemporality affects both how penal forms permeate
space and time, and how space and time constitute penal forms. These vigilante kidnap-
pings and forcible confinements are not mere instances of gratuitous violence. Instead,
they mimic, distort, and amplify the violence that underpins the state’s unrealized mon-
opoly over the violence inherent in its claims to police and punish.
Keywords
Vigilante violence, extrajudicial punishment, forcible confinement, kidnapping, South
Africa, colonialism, penal history, carceral geography, penal infrastructures, inequality,
legal pluralism
Corresponding author:
Gail Super, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto –Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
Email: gail.super@utoronto.ca
Special Issue: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective
Punishment & Society
2022, Vol. 24(5) 824–842
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14624745221079456
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Introduction
This paper examines the role of everyday infrastructures of vigilante violence in former
black townships and informal settlements in South Africa. I argue that car trunks, shacks,
containers, and other commonplace receptacles function as the underside of official insti-
tutions, such as prisons and police lock-ups, and that they bear deep historical imprints
and institutional legacies of the extrajudicial punishments that were inflicted on black
bodies during colonialism and apartheid. They also serve as important reminders of
the uneasy relationship between local meanings (and manifestations) of ‘justice’and
liberal legality.
Drawing on secondary historical literature, police records from two policing clusters in
the Western Cape for the period 2000–2016, and selected court case transcripts, I situate
my case study within the context of the penal violence exercised against racialized sub-
jects during colonial and apartheid rule. I focus on two specific techniques: firstly, when
someone is forced into the trunk of a vehicle and driven around in order to locate stolen
property, and secondly, when a person is temporarily detained, assaulted and/or tortured
in a garage, shack, container, or local public space. Since there is no statutory offence of
vigilantism in South African law, this form of ‘self-help’is framed in the police database
as the common law offence of kidnapping (colloquially referred to as ‘manstealing’), and
is usually combined with alternative charges of murder, attempted murder, and/or assault
with intention to cause grievous bodily harm (GBH). Like police torture, it is more of a
furtive and private ritual than a public act. As such it differs from spectacular incidents of
collective violence, where a suspected offender is publicly burnt, stoned, or beaten to
death by a crowd. While kidnapping as a technology of organized or politically motivated
crime is a much studied phenomenon, it has been relatively neglected and undertheorized
as a form of vigilantism, both in South Africa and beyond. It raises important questions
about the overlaps between organized crime and crime as a ‘moralistic’form of ‘social
control’(Black, 1983:34).
Analytical framework and method
While Punishment and Society scholars tend to study particular institutions and spaces
where punishment is imposed by the state, usually after a conviction in a criminal
court, this paper questions the boundaries of the field. I use the term extrajudicial to
refer to penal violence that is inflicted beyond the courts. From a strictly legalistic per-
spective this is not punishment (Zedner, 2016). However, in practice it is very much
like punishment (Beckett and Herbert, 2010; Super, 2020). Certainly, those on the receiv-
ing end, and sometimes the instigators themselves, regard it as punishment. Like law,
extrajudicial punishment assumes distinct forms and plays out differently, depending
on where in space and time it is inflicted (Merry, 2004; Valverde, 2008). As such, it is
multiscalar and spatiotemporally plural. This multiscalarity is highly visible in historic-
ally marginalized spaces and in contexts of inequality, South Africa being a case in
point. In South Africa the law itself created spatial exclusions and spaces of marginality
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