A wave of vigilante violence has recently rocked the working class suburb of Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg. It’s the latest instalment of a now all too familiar phenomenon in South Africa.
Images of people being brutally beaten or even killed by a vengeful mob are a regular feature on television, in newspapers and on social media. Private citizens often take the law into their own hands to punish perceived wrongdoers in their communities. Their aim is to improve their collective security and social order where formal law enforcement is absent or ineffective.
The fundamental issues of law, order, justice and power that lie at the heart of vigilante activities have a myriad of significant wider implications. Vigilantism challenges the formal boundary between crime and punishment, between law and justice.
Despite its ubiquity, vigilantism has largely been overlooked as a legal topic worthy of in-depth consideration, or even definition. My recent doctoral study aimed to fill this gap.
The central questions my research sought to answer were how to conceptualise, understand and address vigilantism from a legal perspective.
My study showed that vigilantes resort to violence to “fill the gap” left by unsatisfactory law enforcement. This is because of the state’s failure to command widespread legitimacy.
This loss of legitimacy is due to the state being inefficient, corrupt and out of touch with popular concerns. The situation is exacerbated in marginalised and poverty stricken communities, where violence is commonplace.
Vigilantes as both victims and perpetrators
There are inherent contradictions in how we respond towards vigilantism in South Africa. Vigilantes are viewed as criminals who deserve to be punished. But they are also sometimes portrayed as being proactive citizens fighting crime. As Judge Binns-Ward J in one case stated:
vigilantes are seen by many in the communities … as upstanding and respectable members of the community, and indeed see themselves as serving the interests of their community. On reflection, even if wholly unacceptable, this much is understandable in the context of a perception by a community that the formal and constitutionally established criminal justice system is not functioning.
The courts and the executive seem to share the popular assumption that vigilante violence deserves harsh condemnation. This goes hand-in-hand with an uneasy acknowledgement that vigilantism is essentially an attempt to address a long standing and ongoing problem – namely the state’s woefully inadequate response to societal order and security demands.
The courts and the executive seem to share the popular assumption that vigilante violence deserves harsh condemnation. This goes hand-in-hand with an uneasy acknowledgement that vigilantism is essentially an attempt to address a long standing and ongoing problem – namely the state’s woefully inadequate response to societal order and security demands.
This ambivalence is reflected in the words South Africans use to talk about vigilantism. These include oxymoronic terms such as “popular justice”, “kangaroo court”, “vengeance attacks” and “mob justice”.
And the ambivalence is reinforced by the fact that there are very low levels of trust between citizens of the country and the police. This was borne out again with the release of the country’s latest victims of crime survey by Statistics South Africa. It showed that, on the whole, South Africans are reluctant to report crime because they think the police can’t, or won’t, do anything about it.
