What are some of the ways that Prime Minister Malan justifies apartheid? (worth 5 points; your response should be 2-3 sentence

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Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History Volume 17, Number 3, Winter 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press Article Viewed | Saved to MyMUSE library

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Institutional Violence and the Law in Apartheid South Africa Natacha Filippi

Abstract

In apartheid South Africa, prisons and psychiatric hospitals played a specific role in the imposition of “law and order” on a society which shared many features with other colonial settings. By examining the di�erent dynamics relating to institutional violence, a process in which one must be wary of the ethical problems that may arise for the researcher, a clearer picture of apartheid violence and its relation to the law emerges. Prisons and psychiatric hospitals were permeable institutions which allowed for the transfer of modalities of violence, subjugation, resistance, collaboration and repression. These institutions actually functioned as magnifying glasses revealing the mechanisms of state control through the dissemination of fear in the South African society.

Studying Violence: Ethics and contemporary analyses

Violence, at first sight, seems an unexplainable phenomenon. That may well be what partly defines it, that some of its aspects are ultimately ungraspable, because of its profoundly disruptive character—of the sense of self-being, of narratives, of the boundaries of one’s body, of social structures. But violence is also a productive force, and, to some extent, a reproductive one. Studying violence brings to the fore the ethical problems linked to the positionality of the researcher and, especially in postcolonial contexts, the essential intrusiveness of his/her work. While leading interviews in South Africa with inmates, warders and former political prisoners, one paradox that bothered me hinged on understanding why, if violence could be apprehended as a mere structural and historical construct, the act of inquiring about and listening to testimonies of its occurrence was so profoundly disturbing. One of the reasons is that, when attempting to analyse it, one needs to remember that violence is above all an intimate experience of disruption, partial annihilation and power branded on a person’s body and mind, whether that person was subjected to it or responsible for it. Hence, if violence is a breaking point, and a moment of ambiguous feelings about one’s identity, then the ethical problem encountered by the researcher is linked to the fact that he/she forces the occurrence of violence to re-emerge; that he/she potentially reproduces and mirrors the violence of the past event by his/her identities (as—o�en—a White/Occidental, middle-class individual in an assumed position of knowledge); and involuntarily embodies an exterior and retrospective judgment over the lasting ambiguous feelings produced by the experience of violence.

Bearing in mind these cautions, the study of violence dynamics in closed institutions can still prove extremely relevant. In the case of apartheid South Africa, their analysis from the 1960s to the 1990s informs us on the nature of the state and the modalities of resistance developed against its repression. Prisons and psychiatric hospitals are, indeed, particularly good places to investigate the state in both its regimented and di�use aspects, a state defined as, to take up Patrick Anderson’s definition, “an assemblage of forces and drives, techniques and tactics—o�en organised as violence— performed in discrete sites and scenes.” Through the analysis of Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa, from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article wishes to point out the di�erent logics underlying the historical manifestations of violence inside and around closed institutions in apartheid South Africa. Inherent to prisons and psychiatric hospitals, and especially their maximum security sections, institutional violence constituted a strategy of governance, a way to subjugate and eliminate those deemed as deviant at di�erent points in time. It also materialised a model of fear imposed on the rest of society, showing how patterns of violence crossed the walls of closed institutions.

Investigating the evolution of institutional violence inside two of apartheid’s closed institutions sheds light on the changing dynamics of control, repression, survival and resistance in apartheid South Africa. As such, this study inscribes itself in a corpus of works that have focused on, albeit at di�erent periods of time or at di�erent places, the connections between prisons, psychiatric hospitals and the South African governing body and administration. It also wishes to contribute to the broader literature on the links between colonialism, the political economy of health, psychiatry and punishment. More specifically, this work owes much to the debate on the historical links between violence, gangs, identity formation in closed spaces, sexual abuse and power dynamics. By highlighting the normative aspects of some classic works on gangs and more generally on criminal violence in South Africa, the studies involved in the debate point out the crucial role played by repressive institutions of social control such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals and the system of pass laws in shaping the historical development of patterns of violence that came to permeate many aspects of the apartheid society.

In colonial contexts like in twentieth-century South Africa, the law adjudicated and punished various forms of violence, albeit with the exception of the violence of the state. This form of violence, instead, was legitimised, performed and carried out by the same law that, turning to the “criminal” realm, sanctioned ordinary citizens through sentences of corporal punishment, imprisonment and diverse forms of social and civil death. The historical relationship between Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital in the Western Cape during the second half of apartheid is shot through with such violence. This article first presents the institutional routinised violence as it prevailed in Pollsmoor and Valkenberg during apartheid before turning to the violence of “inside” survival and resistance in their specific form as mimicry. Although much more needs to be said, I chose these aspects because they bring attention to the specificity and representativeness of the violence inscribed in closed institutions. In doing so, I do not attempt to unveil universal and atemporal logics which supposedly underlie violent phenomena. On the reverse, I wish to remain close to the experience of violence, which subsumes its very nature as an event.

The research I present below is based on internal documents from Pollsmoor Prison and, to a lesser extent because of di�iculties of access, from Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital. It also gathers information from commissions of inquiry, reports from organisations of resistance, as well as personal and public papers on law, justice and psychiatry held in South African national and regional archives. Newspapers have also been consulted in order to appraise the evolution of public opinion and the emergence of voices and events in the public sphere. Finally, in order to compensate for the partiality of archives and to try to apprehend the experiences of di�erent historical actors, I have led a number of interviews with inmates, warders, former political prisoners, psychiatrists, lawyers and psychologists.

“Law and Order” Inside Pollsmoor Prison

Pollsmoor Prison is situated some 40 km south-east of Cape Town, isolated from the city by the Cape Peninsula mountain range. The plethora of laws passed by the apartheid government since its accession to power in 1948 led to such a sharp rise in incarceration rates that existing prisons in the Western Cape could not cope with the daily influx of awaiting-trial and convicted prisoners. Pollsmoor was opened in 1964 and transformed rapidly during apartheid. Indeed, the legal system created an image of a dangerous urban black population that threatened the white minority with degeneration, physical violations and violent uprisings. Pass laws, combined with penal laws on alcoholism and drug dealing, prompted an increase in arrests and prison numbers. The situation worsened in the late 1970s with the township insurrections, prompting the arrest of thousands of young Blacks under the Terrorism Act of 1967.

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As Florence Bernault has shown for other African colonies, the “African [was] largely perceived as essentially criminal, as the descendant of a degenerated race who [could] eventually get out of the vitiated gangue of subaltern society thanks to contact with European law.” In apartheid South Africa, such “contact” could take place at any level of one’s public or private life, as the law strove to regulate a variety of simple social acts relating to, among others, freedom of speech, interracial sex (under the Immorality Act of 1957, itself an extension of the Immorality Act of 1927), freedom of movement, as restricted by the pass laws, or the production of alcohol by “non-Whites.” Any deviance, be it perceived as social, political or mental, could easily lead to extensive periods of awaiting- trial incarceration, detention without trial, prison sentences, psychiatric admissions or, in cases where the perceived violence of the o�enders was deemed beyond any possible rehabilitation and seemed to require an exemplary sentence, the death penalty.

It is in this context that Pollsmoor rapidly expanded from its first prison, Medium A, designed for Black inmates, to four additional prisons: Medium B, reserved for White prisoners only; the Maximum Security section; a female prison, which included a section for juveniles; and Medium C, built at the end of apartheid for minimum security prisoners. This carceral complex was characterised by chronic overcrowding, a labyrinth of corridors, communal cells where more than fi�y inmates could be crammed together and a panoply of heavy gates opened by large iron keys. Pollsmoor administration subjected the large awaiting-trial population to the same treatment that convicted prisoners received, a treatment characterised by violent disciplinary measures, economic exploitation and daily mortifications.

During the day, warders maintained order inside prison through the use of dogs, teargas and tonfas until 1996. They extensively resorted to solitary confinement and reduced diet sentences for infractions to the regulations as small as the illegal possession of a “cup of sugar.” Although throughout apartheid, the di�erent amendments to the Prison Act of 1959 progressively imposed limits to the number of days allowed for solitary confinement, practice inside prisons was hard to change, as few mechanisms of control existed to curtail the warders’ habits. Added to the o�icial censorship surrounding any event or information related to prisons, the arbitrary length of detention in isolation sections reinforced the feeling of a profound vulnerability to the violence of the disciplinary system.

The Prisons Services imposed a stringent military hierarchy articulated along racial lines on the prison personnel. White and “non-White” warders had to parade every morning in two di�erent groups and had to use distinct toilets and lockers. Black personnel got the most degrading jobs, such as night-shi� surveillance of the compound, while Coloured warders worked in the sections and senior White guards ruled over the prison from their o�ices. Each group received di�erent salaries and allowances. Subordination to this hierarchy, which most Black warders heavily resented, greatly emphasised the overall perception by the prison population that humiliation and disciplinary measures constituted normal features of everyday life in this environment. Despite the Prisons Services’ public rhetoric, violence was one of the sole principles underlying the regulations enforced on prisoners. One could either accept to give in, and gradually come to integrate it as a common characteristic of prison life, or confront it, and be submitted to increased violence.

Immediately upon admission, warders made clear to the inmate that from then onwards, “profanations” of his/her self and violent imposition of a new regulation on his/her most intimate gestures would mark the rhythm of incarcerated life. In Pollsmoor during apartheid, the extremely intrusive violence of the admission procedure reflected the forthcoming daily abuse of the sentenced life. In the female section, complaints against strip searches sometimes occurred, forcing the administration to call a doctor to check if the inmate’s hymen had not been torn during the process. On the male side, warders sometimes had to transfer prisoners to hospitals a�er strip searching them.

Once the inmate was stripped of his/her self, warders strove to assign him/her a new identity through a mechanism of categorisation, and submit him/her to a new social arrangement, based on a system of sanctions and privileges. In Pollsmoor, like in other prisons under apartheid, five apparently strict but actually fluctuating lines of categorisation divided the incarcerated population: race, gender, behaviour, status (political or common-law) and medical state (both physical and mental). In 1979, Pollsmoor administration introduced a disciplinary board—called the “X Court”—that performed a simulacrum of justice in a militarised environment where prisoners were forbidden to talk to the warders, unless spoken to. This innovation merely reinforced the dramaturgy of power prevailing in the institution and prison life remained organised through the bestowal of privileges and the distribution of punishments. The latter included, among others, forms of public flogging, being held naked, in mechanical restraints such as handcu�s, chains and leg-irons or in a straitjacket during solitary confinement, food and medicine deprivation, threats, verbal humiliations and collective beatings.

This disciplinary system, because it mostly hinged on corporal punishments, could appear as an archaic way of governance in an “autonomous microsociety.” However, in South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century, corporal punishments were hardly confined to prisons. Judges, for instance, commonly used whipping as a sentence. The division of the population into di�erent racial categories, from which derived various degrees of privileges and distinct forms of repression, formed the basis of a segregationist system that drew from other colonial patterns. Indeed, as Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao have explained:

Colonial disciplinary correction was understood to be a consequence of native inadequacy, which justified the use of almost any level of force and violence. The visceral, embodied experiences of domination and control—the immediate manifestation of colonial corporeality—were an integral part of governmental practices of codifying, categorizing, and racializing di�erence. Various corporeal technologies, and most specifically bodily violence, have acted to mark and constitute boundaries of alterity.

Pollsmoor, with its characteristic disciplinary system, could therefore be seen, rather than a “microsociety,” as a magnifying glass revealing the dynamics of state control on the outside. Like psychiatric hospitals, prisons were walled-o� margins of society that were sometimes archaic, sometimes ahead of social changes, and whose study provides an acute understanding of the links between the violence prevailing inside closed institutions and the dynamics of state control.

Violence and Subjugation in the Asylum

Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital was built in 1896. It was the first South African hospital designed to cater for mentally-ill patients only, and was exclusively reserved for Whites. In the 1910s, a new section, Uitvlugt, opened for Black and Coloured patients on the other side of one of the two rivers bordering the hospital. Valkenberg architecture reflected the will to reform psychiatric practices in the colony on the model of British asylums and to implement a racial segregation deemed necessary to foster mental healing. In the 1930s and 1940s, despite several threats by the government to close down the hospital’s decaying buildings, Valkenberg continued to be operational. Although gradual changes were implemented from the 1960s onwards, Valkenberg was renowned, up to the end of the democratic transition, for chronic overpopulation, degrading living conditions, the brutality of nurses, and the quasi-absence of therapeutic treatments. The asylum remained the epitome of an archaic colonial psychiatric ward.

In 1976, at a time of increasing state repression, Valkenberg inaugurated its new Maximum Security section, also called Ward 20. Initially designed to be part of Pollsmoor Prison, it was eventually built on the “Black side” of the hospital. Its architecture was therefore identical to that of Pollsmoor, though slightly less safety-oriented. Ward 20 housed, in overpopulated large dormitories, some of them deprived of windows, Black prisoners categorised as “psychopaths” and detainees under psychiatric observation during their trial. It also accommodated o�enders who could not stand trial and that psychiatrists had certified as State President Patients.

The dynamics guiding people’s transfers between Pollsmoor and Valkenberg were complex and varied over time. Warders rarely took into account the complaints of prisoners who actually su�ered from the brutality of prison conditions or from former experiences and required some psychiatric assistance. O�en, the only attention they received came down to sedatives administered by warders trained as nurses and advised by visiting psychiatrists. While the latter criticised the lack of facilities inside Pollsmoor where they could visit prisoners, they considered many of the prisoners’ complaints as mere malingering. For the prison administration, the ambiguous relation between the two institutions constituted a conscious strategy and was perpetuated as such. Sending the most troublesome inmates to Valkenberg Maximum Security ward helped to maintain order inside Pollsmoor. During periods of tension inside the prison, warders tended to transfer inmates who, once they arrived at the psychiatric hospital, were subjected to tests and diagnoses that did not corroborate, in the medical o�icers’ eyes, the supposed existence of mental illness. Psychiatrists hence periodically sent inmates back to Pollsmoor, participating in a singular trade of misbehaving and insubordinate prisoners. Despite occasional reluctance from forensic psychiatrists, Ward 20 resembled the psychiatric wing of the Attica prison as described by Michel Foucault: it indeed operated as “the machine of the machine, or rather the elimination of elimination, elimination in the second degree” in the “curious mechanism of circular elimination” underlying the prison system.

The gradual changes implemented from the mid-1960s onward did not have an impact on the fact that Valkenberg continued to embody the usual stigma attached to madness, and was, until the 1980s, an institution renowned for the brutality of the treatment received by Black patients. The only “medical care” considered as e�ective consisted in forced electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and neuroleptics. Moreover, according to the medical discourse of the time, Black patients were not supposed to need any anaesthetic before ECT sessions, which took place three times a week. Some psychologists, who had to go through their clinical probation in Valkenberg during the 1970s, heavily criticised the hospital’s archaic structures and methods. Patients’ committals stretched over

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long and indefinite periods of time. On the “Black side” of the asylum, and even more so on Ward 20, White nurses who had not received any psychiatric training brutally forced patients to undergo ECT treatment. In the entire hospital, nurses administered sedative antipsychotics in large doses, sometimes three times over the prescribed amount, and rapidly transformed patients into haggard figures mumbling incoherent words.

By defining and punishing the criminal deviancy of “non-Whites” through a multiplicity of racial laws restricting their movements and actions, penal and psychiatric discourses instituted all Blacks and Coloureds as potential criminals who could only be reformed with the help of the White minority. Although the scope of this article does not allow for a detailed analysis of the incarceration process implemented against White prisoners and patients, the way they were treated inside closed institutions and the adjudication over their deviancy which took place in court also reveal crucial dynamics in the disciplinarisation of White communities.49 For instance, psychiatrists alleged, during apartheid, that Whites were more prone to depression and “complex” mental illnesses than their Black counterparts. According to the same discourse, while Black crime mainly stemmed from “disculturation,” White crime found its roots in exaggerated wealth and the decline of moral values.

Although they shared many aspects, the textures of violence inherent to Pollsmoor Prison and to Valkenberg Hospital di�ered, particularly in the degree of terror and obedience produced by the administration. Even though South Africa, like other British colonies, did not witness a “great confinement” strategy in relation to mental health incarceration, the apartheid asylum still embodied, to take up Foucault’s words, “power in its naked state,” “the medically intensified reality, … the medical power-knowledge that has no other function than to be the agent of reality itself.” In Valkenberg, the medical discourse that attempted to shape every element of the inmate’s identity could destroy his/her sense of autonomous self to an even greater extent that in Pollsmoor. Ward 20 brought this domination to an extreme, as it physically and symbolically subjected the “criminal mentally-ill” to a double violence, the one of the law and of the psychiatric order. For this reason, and because of the nature of the hospital’s archives, the modalities of resistance and survival taking place inside prisons throughout apartheid le� more numerous traces in the records.

Gangs, Resistance and Mimicry: Violence as bounding and “cleansing”

Studies on South African violence have o�en either focused on the brutality of state repression and the retaliation of resistance movements, or analysed crime and gang formations as fascinating or regrettable fratricidal “subcultures.” The links and mutual feeding between these di�erent forms of violence as well as the changing impact of apartheid structural violence on the everyday life of South Africans still need further investigation. Forced removals, police and army repression, economic exploitation di�erentiated on the basis of race, as well as social and civic deprivation constituted some of the main dimensions of this structural violence. As shown by Shula Marks and Neil Andersson, the allocation of health resources, which a�ected mental hospitals, also influenced in a significant way “the totality of social and productive relations” in the apartheid society.

This structural violence had an impact on the chronic overcrowding of Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Hospital. Indeed, this overcrowding did not derive only from insu�icient facilities, limited budget and a dehumanising ideology which implied that criminals and mentally-ill patients could be held in warehouse conditions. In South Africa, the rate of crime has, during the twentieth century and up to now, been extremely high. To understand the links between crime and the social conditions created by the apartheid regime, one can view crime as part of a “matrix of cultural violence which is integral to continued social inequality and racial domination.” However, one should be wary of analysing delinquency as resulting from “psycho-social stress and the destruction of the family” or from “criminal deviancy,” for this perspective can only provide an incomplete and o�en normative image of the outlaws. When looking at the structural violence of apartheid and crime, one needs to take into account broader historical dynamics of state control, mine industry, prison-compound complex and oppression characteristic of colonialism, as Charles van Onselen and Gary Kynoch have skilfully done.

Mental deviancy aside, the social and legal appearances of which are far harder to tackle, the law shaped violent social deviancy during apartheid, and increasingly so from the 1970s onwards, into three categories: political, criminal and, in between, the threatening manifestation of the swart gevaar—the “Black peril”—or the fear of the “Black mob.” On the ground, the relationships between the people involved in these categorised events were entangled and blurred, ranging from conflict to collaboration and instrumentalisation of one group by another. Nancy Scheper-Hugues collected testimonies on how young comrades engaged in the struggle against apartheid used and “politicised” skollies (gangsters) in order to, among others, retain the di�erence between “clean” political violence and criminal “brutality.” These kinds of relationships reinforced the connections between the inside and the outside of closed institutions and took a specific pattern within prisons. On the inside, the relationships among “political” and “common-law” prisoners wavered between overt hate and physical confrontation—in the case of gang members being instrumentalised by the prison administration to spy on or even torture political prisoners—and mutual help, when common-law prisoners introduced newspapers and passed messages to the outside and political prisoners shared the benefits of their privileges, particularly food packages. Interestingly, although such exchanges were nevertheless marked by a certain degree of loathing on the part of political prisoners in the male sections, female political prisoners appear to have established relationships of stronger solidarity with their common-law counterparts.

Since its opening in 1964, Pollsmoor had been renowned for the sheer violence it enclosed within its walls. Such a reputation could seem peculiar, when compared to other South African prisons such as Robben Island; Pretoria Central, where prisoners sentenced to death were hanged until 1995; or Zonderwater, also called “psycho city,” which detained “psychopaths” sentenced to life imprisonment. Pollsmoor’s reputation actually lay in the presence of the Number, a structure composed of three brother gangs, at a scale unmatched in any other jail. During apartheid, the prison administration and the leaders of the Number supervised two parallel orders that secured the balance ensuring the perpetuation of prison as a viable institution. A mythology, constructed around the historical figure of Jan Note, served as the basis for the gang’s organisation and doctrine. The three gangs that composed the Number, the 26’s, 27’s and 28’s, attained their full strength during apartheid. Members conceived their own military ranks, which they symbolically represented by tattooing their bodies. In a context where the body has become an object of power, disposable by others than oneself, this practice of tattooing in prison o�en constitutes an ultimate resort of auto-determination. In the case of the Number, tattooing involved even further meaning, as each ink symbol constituted a hint as to the rank and a�iliation of the prisoner.

The intricate rules of the system were based on di�erent—and o�en codified and illegal—systems of communication. Zackie Achmat, incarcerated in 1978 at Pollsmoor, described his entrance in a cell governed by the 28’s in the following terms:

Within minutes all the toilet bowls in the Remand Section were flushed and all the water was removed from the one in our cell. In this way, the sound was carried through the entire sewage system of the block. This system allowed prisoners to communicate with each other illegally, with a diminished threat of punishment and discovery by the warders. When we arrived the 28s had to report to the General—they had to account for the loot gained from the newly arrived prisoners.

Members also invented a parallel system of justice and a new language, called sabela. Willem Schurink, who established a detailed list of the di�erent ranks held in the “private-line” and “blood- line” of the 28’s, pointed out that the Number guaranteed the “fulfilment of physical, psychological and social needs.” In his 1989 study, he commented on the fact that “Number gangs provide camaraderie, status, protection and in the case of the 28 sexual outlets are also provided. ‘Welfare services’ also make provisions for permanent disab

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