The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Richard Pithouse -
Last week Inigo Gilmore’s documentary, South Africa’s Dirty Cops, was screened on British television. It deals with the torture and murder that have become common at the hands of the South African police and includes an examination of the two most high profile cases of political violence on the part of our police in recent years – the murder of Andries Tatane in Ficksburg in April 2011 and the Marikana Massacre in August last year.
The scale of the Marikana Massacre, in...
![Picture: Lost in Transit [Keep St Joe Weird]/Flickr](/a/image.php?i=2013/04/1627948656c1ce18f3cdb513d9b8648d06da.jpg&min=2&w=150&h=150 "Picture: Lost in Transit [Keep St Joe Weird]/Flickr")
Jane Duncan -
Many people were shocked by the judgement in the Andries Tatane case, who was killed by police rubber bullets in a service delivery protest in Ficksburg, and are even more shocked that the National Prosecuting Authority has decided against appealing the judgement. The fact that his fatal shooting had been caught on camera led many to assume that it would have been an open and shut case, and the responsible police officers would be found guilty of murder, convicted and sentenced.
But this...
Richard Pithouse -
In the colonies ….the agents of government speak the language of pure force. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
All societies are managed with a mixture of force and consent. But in South Africa like, say, India or Mexico, violence, or the threat of violence, is woven so tightly into the banalities and intimacies of day to day life that it is part of the deep structure of things. And it is not simply a matter, as many politicians would like us to believe, of criminality...
Heidi-Jane Esakov -
Mido Macia, a 27-year-old Mozambican immigrant to South Africa was found dead in his police cell in Daveyton, east of Johannesburg, on 26 February 2013. In a brutal scene captured on film by onlookers, Macia, with hands bound and tied to the back of a police van, was dragged 500 metres by police officers. His torture continued in a police cell with allegations of brutal beatings.
His crime: blocking traffic and resisting arrest.
Three days before that, on 23 February, 30-year-old Arafat...
David Bruce -
If one wants to understand the common thread behind police brutality in South Africa, the cruelty that last week killed taxi driver Mido Macia, the massacre of the miners at Marikana or the killing of Andries Tatane, it is helpful to go back to the ANC’s 2009 election manifesto.
The manifesto largely rehashes old ideas. But in describing how the ANC will “intensify the fight against crime and corruption” there is one word in the manifesto that is relevant to understanding...
David Bruce -
During apartheid some of the most notorious instances of police brutality were the killings of demonstrators involved in peaceful protests. It therefore made sense that one of the issues that received concerted attention during the police reform process of the 1990s was public order policing.
An important initial step in this regard was the introduction of new legislation. The Regulation of Gatherings Act, in fact, came into force in January 1994 prior to the formal transition to...
