Penal Violence in Spaces of Rural Precarity (South Africa) | Gail Super

Join us for this seminar in the 2024-2025 Seminar Series presented by the CrimSL Research Cluster for the Study of Racism and Inequality.

This is a free event, however, registration is required.

Prior to the seminar, join us for a light lunch from noon to 12:30 pm in the Centre Lounge. Please indicate your lunch RSVP for catering purposes when you register.

Abstract

This paper examines the role of accusation in producing regimes of 'truth' and 'justice' in a deeply rural area of the former Transkei homeland (bantustan), and in an impoverished urban Black township in Cape Town's southern suburbs. It is based on two case studies. In the latter a crowd of people metes out lethal collective violence onto the bodies of two men suspected of perpetrating the rape and murder of a 13 year old school boy. Various interlocutors refer to the incident as being an instance of 'community' or 'mob' justice. In the former, the khomkulu, a traditional customary law forum consisting of the Nkosi (headwoman) and her councilors, presides over the public hearing of a man accused of stealing a cow. After eight hours he is found guilty and ordered to make amends. This entails an apology (concretized through the payment of 8000 ZAR (600$)), returning the cow, and donating an additional cow to the community. Despite the fact that both case studies play out in ostensibly non-state spaces - in the township's public square, and on a grassy green hilltop, I argue that the forms of justice that emerge are both prefigured by, and prefigurative of, official (State) law and its criminal (in)justice system. In making this argument the paper examines the role of violence (or the threat thereof) in the production of locally situated forms of truth and justice, and the relationship between penal violence and accusation.

About the speaker

Gail Super is Associate Professor, Sociology (Mississauga). Her research interests include legal and criminological theory, the sociology of punishment and its philosophical justifications, vigilantism, legal pluralism, and critical bordering studies, including working with an Indigenous-led policy research program in Northwest Ontario and extensive empirical research in South Africa.

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