Paul Trewhela’s new book, Inside Quatro, takes readers into the ANC-in-exile’s notorious prison camp, and deals with with Umkontho we Sizwe mutiny in Angola. Here, he writes for Politicsweb on the recent verbal sparring match between ANC bigwigs Kader Asmal and Fikile Mbalula regarding the militarisation of the police:
When the tensions and conflicts within civil society grow too great, and law and parliament and other agencies of civil society are not able to find a resolution for them, then the state grows into a bludgeon, or club, with which to batter down civil society.
It is as if all the energies within the society, which can no longer find a means of co-existence, become concentrated instead into a fist, which tries to force some kind of unity or coherence upon the whole ungovernable mass of warring interests.
This appears to be taking place in South Africa today.
A state of force was the traditional means by which South Africa was governed until the end of the apartheid period. In this sense, it is by far the most deeply grounded, historical and “native” form of government of the society: in a sense, its true face, or most profound reality. Parliament was confined to a small minority of the society, and this determined the nature of the legal system. Over this long and formative period of South Africa's history, the state was quite explicitly the instrument of a minority interest, acting as the controller of the whole. This is what South Africa was used to, irrespective of the manner in which this state power was used, or the resistance which it summoned up, and which eventually overwhelmed it and brought about its end.
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