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South Africa: Tortured by an inheritance it’s trying to bury

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By: JONNY STEINBERG

German anthropologist Thomas Bierschenk has spent the past couple of decades studying African state bureaucracies — education systems, police services and so forth. In a recent essay, he notes that the organisations about which he writes have, for many years now, been undergoing a ceaseless process of reform.

First, Africa’s postcolonial rulers tried to remake the bureaucracies they had inherited. Then the World Bank reformed African state organisations in the 1980s during the years of structural adjustment.

These serial reforms turned into a dizzying cascade in the 1990s, as one international donor after another queued up to do police reform, educational reform, health care reform and so forth.

Each bout of reform, Bierschenk observes, is superimposed on the last.

The result is that African bureaucracies resemble permanent construction sites. It is as if somebody had tried to build a house and abandoned it halfway through. Then somebody else came along and started building a different house on the same spot, but also abandoned it. And so on.

Some strange juxtapositions result. “Public bureaucracies in Africa can unite elements of an ancient colonial state with the very latest trends in administrative reform,” he writes. “Teachers teach in an authoritarian style that goes back to the 1950s but are expected to profess the latest pedagogical fashions….”

A spark of recognition lit up in my head as I read these words. In the mid-2000s, I spent hundreds of hours shadowing police patrols in various parts of SA. I thought the policing I observed to be schizophrenic. Within a single 12-hour shift, the patrol officers I was accompanying might mediate with impressive emotional intelligence in a domestic dispute; give a lecture to schoolchildren about the perils of drugs; lob a teargas canister into a shebeen and beat the fleeing patrons with batons; and spend the early hours of the morning throwing apparently harmless young men into the back of their van.

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The switch from soft-touch policing to warlike aggression seemed quite compatible to them; when I remarked upon it, I was usually told that I simply did not understand their work.

Bierschenk’s essay helped me to comprehend what I had witnessed back then. In essence, I was watching 50 years of policing sandwiched into a 12-hour shift.

Apartheid policing never disappeared; new and gentler forms were simply superimposed upon it.

The various layers now live together, as if nurturing civilians in the mornings and teargassing them in the evenings is the most natural thing in the world.

Why did things turn out this way?

Weak organisations always fall back on what they know. In the late 1990s, South African police leaders found that herding cops into large formations and throwing them at township populations was easy to do, and so they kept doing it.

The new, more sophisticated stuff was adapted to fit as best it could with the old. Police leaders taught themselves to forget that the juxtaposition was jarring.

I have used the example of the police, but one could substitute it for any major sphere of public policy.

Among the most impressive achievements of the ANC government has been to extend welfare grants to nearly 17 million people.

But the instruments the government has used — a means-tested pension, a disability grant and a child support grant — were invented for white beneficiaries in the first half of the 20th century. The ANC has used what it inherited rather than having created something new.

Even land reform, a major initiative of racial redress, is teeming with colonial ghosts. Twisting communal land tenure into forms that increase the power of chiefs over commoners was among the first tricks Africa’s colonial governors learnt in the 19th century. It is being rehearsed all over again now.

This inability to erase the old is, I think, one of the sources of the frustration South Africans currently feel.

For a figure like Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wishes to restore to his country its former imperial might, the presence of old ghosts is a godsend.

But if what lies in your immediate past is apartheid, becoming a prisoner to your inheritance is a nightmare.

Every attempt to discard the old revitalises it; the harder SA tries to bury its inheritance, the more painfully its inheritance tortures it.

-“rdm”


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