On May 20, 1983, a car packed with explosives was detonated next to the South African Air Force headquarters in Pretoria. The explosion killed the two men who delivered it, and seventeen others, in addition to injuring more than two hundred people, mostly civilians. Though the African National Congress, which eventually claimed responsibility for the bombing, had been training young black South Africans in its military wing since the early sixties, the philosophy of the party had primarily been one of non-violence, with an emphasis on targeting symbols of the regime instead of white civilians. Around the time of the Pretoria bombing, party leaders adopted a more urgent tone, with the A.N.C. president, Oliver Tambo, suggesting to a reporter afterward that the fight for liberation might mean that “more innocent people will be hit.” Two years later, in one of his most famous addresses, Tambo encouraged all South Africans opposed to apartheid to render the country “ungovernable.” The speech was an impassioned departure for Tambo, whose official party addresses were usually more measured and stately. “It is in the attack that victory is to be found,” he said. That call, and the vigilantism that accompanied it, would define South Africa’s most turbulent decade, informing the ways in which protest politics would be understood and practiced long after Tambo’s death, in 1993, and the arrival of democracy, a year later.
Recent attacks in South Africa on immigrants from other African countries and online outrage at the rate of misogynist violence have revealed the complexity of that legacy. The academic Lars Buur wrote that such acts remain “an unpleasant reminder of the violent foundations of the present democratic order.” Today, the perceived effectiveness of vigilante justice endures, despite official remorse. Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, who chaired the government’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, was confronted with detailed and emotional testimonies from victims, survivors, and perpetrators of atrocities committed during the apartheid regime. In response, Tutu condemned the use of any form of violence as a means to achieve liberation. Yet, as South Africa progressed further into its democracy, the ruling party struggled to deliver on Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural promise to “liberate all [its] people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.” Vigilantism allows those who still find themselves on the margins of the Rainbow Nation to voice their needs in a way that society and the government cannot ignore.
Though black South African communities instituted their own forms of self-governance and discipline before the eighties, vigilante justice had come to be viewed, by then, as the natural expression of the marginalized against the state, particularly in the black townships that most acutely felt and resisted the injustice and brutality of the white minority regime. People there experienced shootings, bombings, and, most gruesomely, torture, such as necklacing—a tire filled with oil would be secured around a victim’s neck and then set on fire. The same year that Tambo gave his “ungovernable” speech, state-controlled television broadcast footage of the lynching of a woman named Maki Skosana, who, after attending the funeral of a group of young anti-apartheid activists who had been murdered, was beaten, stoned, and necklaced by fellow-residents who suspected that Skosana had played a role in the activists’ deaths. (The government tried to use video footage of her death as propaganda illustrating the supposed savagery of apartheid resistance fighters.) Though it later emerged that the students had been killed by a former member of a government counterinsurgency unit, Skosana’s death came to represent, to some, the violent side of the liberation movement.
Of late, xenophobic attacks in South Africa killed at least a dozen people in September and left foreign-owned businesses vandalized. They shared some similarities with the methods and rhetoric that were adopted by vigilante groups in the nineteen-eighties. In the most recent attacks, groups of mostly poor black South Africans have claimed that they are taking their country back from foreigners who were supposedly taking away their jobs, offering drugs to youth, illegally occupying housing, and operating human-trafficking syndicates. This isn’t the first wave of such violence—there were similar attacks in 2008 and 2015—but other African nations have still expressed dismay at the violence, which the South African government insists are isolated “acts of criminality.”
Zimbabwe, which provided military bases for many A.N.C. soldiers, announced plans to repatriate citizens shortly after one of its nationals was beaten and burned to death in a township outside Johannesburg. Nigeria, which welcomed anti-apartheid exiles and implemented a so-called Mandela tax to raise money for the liberation movement, announced that it would repatriate six hundred of its citizens over fears of continued xenophobic violence. And Zambia, which served as the A.N.C.’s primary base—Tambo’s “ungovernable” speech was given at its headquarters in Lusaka—called off a September soccer match with South Africa. In a country where the social and economic circumstances of the black majority have only marginally improved since apartheid ended, African immigrants have become a convenient scapegoat for problems that fall squarely on the shoulders of the A.N.C.
Jarring, too, was the speed with which the language of revolution and liberation was used to support beliefs that undermined the pan-Africanist aspirations of the anti-apartheid struggle. In a 2017 video that recently recirculated online, the former deputy police minister Bongani Mkongi warns of the danger of “surrendering” land to foreign nationals that had been reclaimed from the white minority. Mkongi’s words echoed a 1959 speech by Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the A.N.C.-breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress: “We take our stand on the principle that Africa is one and desires to be one and nobody, I repeat, nobody has the right to balkanize our land.” (The P.A.C. has its own history of vigilantism: an unofficial slogan of its armed wing was “one settler, one bullet.”) Resentment toward foreign African nationals has long been a feature in South Africa, a country that was isolated from its neighbors through decades of white minority rule, but the antagonism toward foreign African nationals stands in stark contrast to the internationalist, anti-imperialist vision Tambo championed. That vision, though, has little relevance in the lives of South Africans whose daily reality is poverty and unemployment, which has been above twenty per cent for more than two decades. It appears easier to attack the immigrant next door than to vote out the political party that hasn’t fixed the nation’s problems after twenty-five years in power.
In hindsight, it was naïve to assume that the toppling of apartheid would eliminate other systems of oppression. After their ascendance, A.N.C. leaders had no difficulty relegating women to second-class citizenship and insuring that they remained an oppressed class, regardless of their political affiliation. When Uyinene Mrwetyana, a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Cape Town, was brutally raped and murdered, earlier this year, South African women on Twitter expressed their anger and fear at what felt like an ongoing war against their lives and their bodies. (The A.N.C. Women’s League has designated South Africa’s femicide crisis a “national crisis,” and President Cyril Ramaphosa has created an “emergency action plan,” but such urgency appears to be a recent development.)
Luyanda Botha, the postal worker charged in Mrwetyana’s death, confessed that he forced himself on her and bludgeoned her to death with a measuring scale. That she was killed in such a mundane circumstance—picking up her mail—prompted the “Am I Next?” movement. South African women publicly grieved and asked themselves when, and not if, they would be subject to such breathtaking violence. Within a day of Botha’s confession, a bloodless sort of vigilantism emerged alongside the protests that took women’s concerns to the streets: Twitter accounts with names like @helpsurvivers, @HSurvivers2, and @AmINext_ZA began posting allegations of rape, sexual assault, and abuse that had been submitted via direct message, in a bid to “out” purported rapists and abusers.
In his 1985 “ungovernable” speech, Tambo emphasized the need for women to be “active participants in the struggle waged by our national liberation movement.” While women had long played a critical role in the anti-apartheid struggle, Tambo’s decision to highlight their increasing role was designed to create a place for them in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet the mistreatment of female fighters happened within the A.N.C.’s own ranks. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, prominent A.N.C. leaders such as Joe Modise, who was then the defense minister, admitted that rape in A.N.C. military camps was a “very serious problem,” but insisted that such incidents were dealt with accordingly. Female freedom fighters who served in the A.N.C.’s military wing told a different story, explaining that reporting allegations of sexual assault and rape was seen as a distraction from the liberation project. Jessie Duarte, the deputy secretary general of the A.N.C., said at the time that “if women said that they were raped, they were regarded as having sold out to the system in one way or another.”
The digital vigilantism of the “Am I Next?” movement seemed to exist in the same tradition as other forms of extralegal attack, but with a softer imperative. Instead of torture and murder, the vigilantes provided a space for survivors to talk and allowed women whose stories had been questioned—or, worse, ignored—to feel vindicated, and to have their experiences treated with importance, sympathy, and understanding.
The moment proved short-lived: after a few days, the Twitter accounts were either suspended or disbanded, as the accused challenged what they saw as an unfair fight. Local police reported that a couple of defamation cases had been opened against the creators of the accounts, which in some cases had amplified false accusations. When an allegation of rape was made against the provincial A.N.C. chair Zamani Saul, for instance, the party dismissed the claims as “faceless people running such malicious campaigns.” Writing for the online political magazine Daily Maverick, the social researcher Khadija Bawa argued that “vigilantism in any form should not be welcomed or applauded because the wellbeing of society is aided by the rule of law.” But she added that that principle is harder to uphold when “systems of justice are neither functioning, effective nor accountable.” When Jacob Zuma was charged with rape in 2005, when he was the A.N.C. deputy president, he received wide support from members of the A.N.C. and even from the party’s Women’s League. After his acquittal, vigilantes burned down his accuser’s house, and she fled to the Netherlands to seek asylum. Zuma went on to become President.
