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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Remembering the Police - On the Consolidation of Transparency and Secrecy
| Panel |
57. Post-apartheid's social imaginaries
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| Paper ID | 755 |
| Author(s) |
Hornberger, Julia Christine
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | In the shadows of the Union Building, forming an explicitly intended line with the Afrikaner monument, stands a memorial honouring the death of police officers. It has been inaugurated in 1985 by the then Prime Minister P.W. Botha and has been in continuous use until today. This memorial makes tangible a self referential narrative of the police which makes claims to historical continuity instead of presenting 1994 as a watershed moment in the history of South Africa's state institutions. Self-referential but nevertheless official, it weaves together claims to a continued adherence to the rule of law, a persistent predominance of civil duties and one of an gradual evolution and ongoing reform process similar to one of technological advancement ( - instead of radical change); even a sense of a sustained racial unanimity is purported.
This however does not mean that the police out-rightly rejects a historical discourse in which human rights and the moment of 1994 have a clear place and in which the 'evils' of the past are used to legitimise the institutional arrangement of the present. Rather, the police has build the narrative of democratisation into its public image, overtly flaunting transparency and submission to change. Also, requests for access to documents from freedom of information lawyers are happily obliged to, co-operative projects with international donors are welcomed and 'serving people' (Batho Pele- the name of the government's public service delivery programme) is high on the agenda, etc. In the light of this simultaneity of contradictive self representations I argue that change in the police has to be understood as a professionalisation of transparency, which in turn however serves to protect the space for the consolidation of secrecy. This secrecy draws from and provides a safe realm for alternative versions of history. |
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