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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Beyond the Instrumentality of Violence: Interpreting Five Homicides in the South African Lowveld
| Panel |
34. Post-apartheid: ethnographies of the South African transition
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| Paper ID | 522 |
| Author(s) |
Niehaus, Isak
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Though the intense political conflict that characterised resistance and repression during the era of Apartheid had long subsided, violence continues to be a very serious problem in contemporary South Africa. In 1999, six years after the country’s peaceful transition to democracy, no fewer than 23,823 people died as a result of homicide. The proposed paper aims to cast some ethnographic light on this disturbing social trend. In it I draw on
different accounts of homicide that I recorded whilst doing fieldwork in the Bushbuckridge area of the South African lowveld. My interpretation of these accounts leads me to question the theory that we can explain violent acts in terms of their utilitarian (coercive or expressive) purposes. Many episodes of homicide that I recorded were an unintended outcome of certain situations such as armed robberies, quarrels between lovers and love rivals, and disputes over scarce material and symbolic resources. In these situations men struck out in moments of rage, without calculating the consequences of their deeds. I argue that it is less fruitful to analyze these acts in terms of their intentions than to examine the conjunction of ideologies of masculine domination, the relative impoverishment of many men, the cultural construction of rage, and the widespread availability of firearms.
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