protection and conviviality: community policing in johannesburg

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published online 3 December 2013European Journal of Cultural StudiesDarshan Vigneswaran

Protection and conviviality: Community policing in Johannesburg

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Protection and conviviality: Community policing in Johannesburg

Darshan VigneswaranUniversity of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

AbstractThe study of conviviality explores how everyday interactions and encounters mitigate or ameliorate sociocultural differences. This literature must address the critique that conviviality is a superficial phenomenon, which proves irrelevant in contexts where intergroup differences are deep, complex and punctuated by violent exchanges. This article addresses this criticism by attempting to define the meaning and purpose of convivial exchanges in a context characterized by high levels of violence: policing culture in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using ethnographic methods, the study illustrates how convivial practices often stem from individuals’ sense of insecurity and the search for protection in public settings. The article uses these findings to rethink the extent to which convivial practices might resolve social differences.

KeywordsConviviality, crime, Johannesburg, policing, protection, race, South Africa, violence

Conviviality and violence

Theorists interested in further exploring the heuristic value of ‘conviviality’ must over-come some potentially incisive critiques. Foremost among these is the charge that con-vivial practices are relatively superficial. More specifically, do everyday modes of living together stand up in the face of some well-known and documented symptoms of the poli-tics of difference? Are convivial practices a palliative or corrective to populist xenopho-bia, class warfare, ethnic cleansing and genocide, or are they simply swept away in times of strife? Here, it is worth recalling the testimonies of survivors in Rwanda (Hatzfeld,

Corresponding author:Darshan Vigneswaran, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 237, Amsterdam, 1012DL, The Netherlands.Email: [email protected]

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2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 0(0)

2005) and the former Yugoslavia which illustrate the remarkable variety of interethnic convivial exchange which predated – but in no way prevented – the onset of genocidal violence. Given these considerations, it is worth inquiring more deeply into the relation-ship between conviviality and some of the worst expressions of enmity, or indeed, as this article suggests, whether conviviality can be found in contexts where violence or the threat of violence are prevalent.

In this respect, the city of Johannesburg presents an interesting case for comparative analysis. Johannesburg is one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Crime is not merely prevalent, but the violent and often macabre nature of the regularly and publicly recounted stories of crime in Johannesburg consistently shock and gall residents and visitors alike. These conditions of insecure living are further compounded by deeply embedded forms of social exclusion. Racism, xenophobia and segregation remain pervasive, and over the last few years, Johannesburg has witnessed a series of organized attacks on foreign nationals, particularly in township areas, during which many people have been mur-dered, beaten and evicted from their homes (Landau, 2011).

Violent conditions of everyday life limit the prospects for conventional forms of con-vivial interaction. Previous discussions of convivial behavior have stressed the impor-tance of (1) plentiful and accessible public space (Low et al., 2005), (2) regular and random – even if fleeting – interactions between different groups (Lofland, 1973, 1998) and (3) an openness on the part of residents to chance encounters with strangers (Benjamin and Jennings, 2006; Fisher, 1967). Johannesburg possesses almost none of these. A com-bination of planned decentralization, capital flight and White flight in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (Beavon, 2004) left the few parks and squares in the city, particularly the inner city, largely devoid of causally intermingling social groups. This problem is compounded by the fact that the city’s racially and economically bifurcated transport system tends to provide wealthy and White residents with means of bypassing key nodes of interaction and cohabitation (Vigneswaran, 2010). In the absence of open public spaces, private businesses have built a series of highly controlled and protected communal spaces, which are specifically designed to exclude poor members of society, pedestrian traffic and non-members (Beall et al., 2002: 179–184; Murray, 2011). This problem is compounded by the fact that many residents of the city are so collectively concerned about the threat of violence that they lack a spirit of adventurism that approximates a tradition of the flâneur. Instead, many Jo’burgers structure their daily activities around highly ritualized and restricted commutes between well-known haunts.

This does not mean that conviviality does not exist in Johannesburg. In many public spaces, convivial exchanges occur side by side with relations characterized by violence and intimidation. Indeed, in Johannesburg, one often finds conviviality woven into the very fabric of interactions involving the threat of physical violence and/or criminal vic-timization. This assessment runs against the grain of most of the diversity literature, which has been interested in conviviality partly for its potential to ameliorate or stymie violence, and particularly intercommunal violence. Take for example contact theory, which is interested in the way that meaningful contact paves the way toward more har-monious intergroup coexistence, by changing perceptions of the ‘other’ (Allport, 1954).

Can conviviality and violence, which have more commonly been conceived as oppos-ing forces, be conceptualized as co-constitutive, or at least deeply intertwined? While I




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do not imagine that the attempt to explore this proposition will help advance the pro-grammatic agenda of cosmopolitan theory, perhaps it will help us define what we mean by ‘conviviality’ and better describe the relationship between this phenomenon and expressions of social diversity.

In this respect, the study of Johannesburg provides us with a unique opportunity to test and refine our understanding of conviviality within a broader framework of com-parative study. South Africa is what John Gerring (2005) would call an ‘extreme case’ which may provide us with a unique opportunity to gauge the boundaries and limits of the concept of conviviality and to generate hypotheses regarding a wider variety of its instantiations and forms. It is on this ground that this case study speaks to the broader comparative framework of this collection, which seeks to deploy a comparative method to go beyond microanalyses of the phenomenon in question. If conviviality can thrive in conditions of violence, then perhaps it is a more prevalent phenomenon and robust form of sociality than we have previously thought. If conviviality in Johannesburg looks utterly different to its variants in societies less affected by violence and conflict, then perhaps we need to rethink our definition of the term. By studying the outlier, we can generate a clearer idea of the nature of the norm.

The remainder of this article will develop this case in four steps. In the ‘Violence and social reproduction’ section, I explain why the social reproduction of violence might be compatible with convivial forms of interaction and exchange. I argue that the concept of ‘protection’ might help us identify the types of difference that convivial behavior responds to and enacts in a place like Johannesburg. The article then looks to empirical material from Johannesburg to substantiate this claim and explore its implications. I begin by using the example of ‘car guards’ to reveal that convivial behavior may reflect at least two types of difference-mediating social action: communication across group divides and recognition of social roles. In the ‘“Playing” at policing: becoming “real” police’ and ‘Dancing with the police’ sections, I further explore this latter dimension of conviviality by studying two examples of how civilians reconcile themselves to different roles as providers and receivers of protection. Here, acts of communal ‘dance’ and ‘play’ may be less an expression of how different groups seek to get along and instead reveal how various actors traverse the different orientations they might adopt toward neighbors and strangers as part of a continual search for protection. Finally, in the concluding remarks, I summarize the argument and reflect on its significance, arguing in favor of a more rigorous attempt to tease out the connections between conviviality and violence.

Violence and social reproduction

While violence is often a materially and socially destructive phenomenon, it can also be productive and generative of social order and norms. Indeed, one might say that it is precisely because of the destructive potential of violence that societies have developed such a vast array of social processes and institutions to organize, manage, regulate and temper its use: ranging from international criminal tribunals to armed forces to contact sports. The concepts of ‘security’ and ‘protection’ both help us understand this paradox, albeit in slightly different ways. More specifically, ‘security’ refers us to the manner in which our evaluations and perceptions of the threat of violence encourage us to adopt





measures which reduce our vulnerability (Foucault et al., 2007). From this perspective, the threat or prospect of violence is a powerful social force because of an ongoing uncer-tainty about the level of violent threats to our person or property. There is a circular, but nonetheless deadly, logic to the security dilemma: when we secure ourselves, we encour-age enemies or predators to augment their capacity to attack, necessitating further secu-rity measures on our part and so on. The fact that this dilemma produces an inexorable and incremental growth of social investments in the resources and technologies of vio-lence has been most convincingly demonstrated in the study of interstate arms races (Jervis, 1976). However, the same dynamic can be identified at a more micro-level: in the mini-arms races waged by households seeking to secure their property against crime.

In contrast, the concept of ‘protection’ is less concerned with material defenses and more about defensive relationships. ‘Protection’ refers to the manner in which the capac-ity to wield violence legitimately and effectively is unequally distributed across society. From this perspective, the threat of violence is socially generative because those who are not capable of violent behavior must perpetually establish relationships with actors who have the means to cause them violent harm. Again, the paradox is deadly. The more we place our support behind the providers of protection, the more vulnerable we are to vic-timization, which in turn increases our need for protection and so on. Again, these dynamics work at macro and micro scales. Charles Tilly (1985) has compellingly illus-trated how ‘protection rackets’ characterized both the growth of modern states and the modus operandi of organized crime.

The key issue I am trying to highlight here is that ‘security’ and ‘protection’ – although often treated as synonymous – may refer to different forms of uncertainty. ‘Security’ is an uncertainty about material capabilities and the difficulty involved in preparing ade-quately for a constantly increasing level, and incrementally more effective types, of vio-lence. ‘Protection’ is an uncertainty about human dispositions and the difficulty involved in differentiating between would-be protectors and potential predators. This difference explains why the study of protection, more so than the study of security, constitutes a potential linkage between violence and conviviality. The search for protection refers directly to the constant struggle to establish relationships between the vulnerable and the violent and to establish which social actor adopts what role.

In modern times, we have been accustomed to thinking that these paradoxes of vio-lence have been structured and partially solved by the institution of sovereignty. National armies and constabularies constitute citizens’ ultimate source of protection in times of need, defending borders, evacuating us from zones of conflict abroad and responding to our emergency phone calls. Meanwhile, an anarchy of violence among sovereign states obtains in the international realm, tempered only by temporary alliances and weak inter-national institutions (Waltz, 1979). It is seemingly only in aberrant cases such as the protection rackets run by organized criminals that these clear-cut lines between domestic bliss and international uncertainty begin to blur.

However, across large parts of the developing world, and particularly on the African continent, multiple overlapping and competing forms of protection are the norm rather than the exception (Bayart et al., 1999; Herbst, 2000; Jackson, 1990). Furthermore, in Africa and elsewhere, as the state’s capacity to provide protection has been whittled away by the forces of neoliberalism, multiple private actors with indistinct spatial and




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functional jurisdictions have emerged to fill the void (Jaffe, 2012). In Johannesburg, we see these two factors working in combination to generate an incredible range of protec-tion services and providers. A wide array of actors, including the South African Police Service, the Metropolitan Police, police reservists, organized criminal networks, private security companies, vigilantes, community policing forums, neighborhood watch groups, street patrols, armed gangs and car guards work in conjunction and competition to provide protective services (Baker, 2008). In this context, it has become increasingly difficult to determine who is a receiver or provider of protection and to differentiate between who is responsible for one’s protection and who may be one’s potential victim-izers. It would be wrong to present everyday life in Johannesburg as a Hobbesian anar-chy in which vulnerable people manically search for protection from an array of equally duplicitous actors. At the same time, it is important that we move beyond the powerful tendency to assume that stable protection relationships and identities allow residents to easily determine who is the protector and the protected and who is friend and foe.

The most obvious fraught actor is the police officer. South Africans necessarily view their police through the lens of history (Brewer, 1994; Steinberg, 2008). The police were the sharp edge of the Apartheid system, consistently and brutally enforcing an explicitly unequal law in often arbitrary ways. In the post-Apartheid period, polic-ing law and policy has changed substantially, but everyday policing practices have not, with repeated examples of deaths in custody and the use of torture, brutality, arbitrary detention and corruption, illustrating the difficulties involved in determining the dis-position of a given police officer (Vigneswaran and Hornberger, 2009). As a result, while South Africans will certainly call on the police when they are victims of serious crimes, they are inherently, and in some respects rightfully, suspicious of police motives, and of the possibility that invoking police protection might expose them to further victimization and trauma (Landau, 2014).

The concept of ‘protection’ would be only marginally relevant to daily life if it only referred to civilians’ efforts to discern the disposition of ‘recognized protectors’ like police officials. In Johannesburg, the search for protection runs much deeper, becoming a constant source of anxiety for both the vulnerable and would-be protectors, in interac-tions with intimates and strangers and in both private and public spaces alike. Some of this represents a paranoid reaction to urban myths, such as the classic fear of vengeful retribution at the hands of one’s recently dismissed domestic worker. Some of this is generated out of an all-too-real history of repeated violence, as in the case of the victim of domestic abuse who necessarily remains uncertain regarding the quality of protection afforded by her family home.

The car guard: protector or victim?

The confusing nature of this protection dilemma is perhaps best illustrated by one of Johannesburg’s most ubiquitous and recognizable figures: the ‘car guard’. Car guards earn a living by assisting drivers to find parking spaces and by remaining in the vicin-ity of the vehicle until the owner returns. While there are many formally employed security guards in private parking lots, most car guards do not operate with a license or at the behest of their nearby businesses, but will claim public parking areas where





there are inadequate spaces and/or organized security forces to protect vehicles or where, for the sake of convenience or cost, drivers choose to park in unauthorized areas.1

The ‘car guarding’ industry provides short-term employment for a large number of the country’s most economically vulnerable urban dwellers. In principle, everyone is quali-fied to be a car guard in South Africa. In practice, access to turf is strictly controlled. Car guards must usually pay some form of rent to a local boss. This rent ostensibly guaran-tees that the boss will protect the car guard’s space against encroachments by competing car guards, violently if necessary. However, individual car guards will regularly fight over territory, claim territory in one another’s absence and thereby jeopardize one anoth-er’s ability to make rent. Car guards are also not protected for loss of income in times of poor health or a downturn in trade. Hence, they regularly incur debts to their bosses, heightening their vulnerability to intimidation and eviction. Of course, this vulnerable economic position means that many car guards are particularly unlikely protectors. Why would a stranger expect an economically and strategically compromised car guard to defend his or her vehicle, especially in a hypothetical instance when the guard is offered payment to look the other way, or ordered by his or her boss to take a couple of hours off work, to allow for the theft of a vehicle?

Prospective clients are all diffusely aware of the microeconomic dilemmas of the car guard and the uncertain nature of the protection they are being offered each time they park their car. However, car guarding is not really a service that one can refuse. A car guard will usually approach a client by offering unsolicited – but nonetheless often very helpful – directions on how to pilot a vehicle into a suitable bay. He or she may then simply inform the driver that ‘I’m looking’ and possibly offer to wash the vehicle. The two parties will not come to an agreement regarding the amount of payment or the length of parking time, or indeed what sort of protection the car guard will offer. Rather, they must merely develop a way of implicitly communicating offer, acceptance and condi-tions of their ‘contract’. So, car guards will adopt an array of styles of displaying their suitability for the role: demonstrating their professionalism in the way they direct the driver to a spot, demonstrating their concern for the driver’s security by directing his or her attention to open windows or valuable items on display in the interior of his or her vehicles and inculcating feelings of safety by offering a warm. However, the behavior of the drivers is perhaps more interesting than those of the car guard. In this brief negotia-tion over the terms of protection, the driver is placed in an unfamiliar relationship to a radically different social group. The car owner, who is invariably a member of the city’s tiny economic elite, must accept protection from a stranger who comes from the poorest and most marginal sections of society. This is one of the very few, if only, regular interac-tions in Johannesburg where members of these two groups interact on such terms.

Since interactions with car guards are regular and largely unavoidable, drivers tend to develop a personal policy or ethos on the subject of car guards. This is not simply a mat-ter of deciding whether they should pay the guards or how much they should pay. Payment is always negotiated when the driver is preparing to leave the bay and so does not really contribute to influencing the quality of the service rendered. Hence, the driver is faced with the need to establish a relationship of trust through posture and demeanor, signaling acknowledgment of the car guard’s prerogative to offer them protection. Of




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course, many drivers are brusque, avoiding eye contact, ignoring the guard’s efforts to assist with parking and leaving the vehicle without acknowledging the guard’s presence. However, this sort of manner only adds to the driver’s anxiety regarding the security of his or her vehicle. If a driver does not trust car guards, then, somewhat paradoxically, it does not make much sense to be rude. So, drivers may adopt a convivial approach, flag-ging the guard down on arrival, greeting them with deferential and brotherly terms and perhaps even accepting the car wash service in lieu of a relationship of trust. The point here is not that either approach will ultimately determine whether the driver’s vehicle remains safe, it is that in this uniquely uncertain context of vehicular protection, an ave-nue is opened up for convivial exchanges across one of South Africa’s deepest social divides: between the very rich and very poor.

The interaction between driver and car guard serves as a useful illustration of the way everyday encounters and logics of interactions between different social groups are commonly shot through with considerations of violence and predation. Crucially, pro-tection can emerge not only in the context of long-standing or formally acknowledged relationships between a known clientele and registered security providers but also in everyday and informal interactions between relative strangers. Moreover, protection does not necessarily involve a material exchange for a service. In this context, it cre-ates the potential for the development of a bond of trust, however fleeting, across conventional social divides. At the same time, the discussion necessarily forces us to question the normative associations that we often implicitly attach to convivial interac-tions. The interactions between motorists and car guards may indeed constitute one of the very few moments in which rich and poor physically display affection and respect toward one another in Johannesburg, but if these instances of conviviality are under-girded by mutual suspicion and vulnerability, then can we say that conviviality helps cope with difference and/or stymie the potential for intercommunal violence? If not, how do we understand convivial behavior in conditions that are soaked through with the threat of violent victimization?

In order to respond to these questions, we first need to recognize that the convivial encounter between motorist and car guard exhibits at least two types of resolving differ-ence. On the one hand, conviviality constitutes a means of communicating across rela-tively fixed group divides. In this sense, the congenial signaling and gesturing that occurs between privileged motorist and underprivileged car guard provide a medium for the members of two very different groups to come to an implicit agreement about the terms of protection. This is the type of conviviality that the literature has generally discussed (difference-mediating conviviality). However, the example also illustrates how convivi-ality can constitute a means of ‘performing’ and ‘recognizing’ different social roles. In this sense, the body language and symbolic interaction between the two types of actor is not only a way of signaling what type of social role one is performing – that of ‘protector’ or ‘protected’ – but also a way of lending legitimacy to a specific individual’s adoption of an unfamiliar social role. In this case, it is the meek car guard in the position of offer-ing protection and the wealthy driver in a condition of accepting the offer. Here, con-vivial behavior does not necessarily mediate difference, but provides a medium in which actors can – however temporarily – relate to one another from a different position within the social structure.





The remainder of this article will examine how this second type of conviviality – role-recognizing conviviality – emerges in Jo’burgers’ ongoing search for protection. The empirical foundation of this analysis is a comparative ethnographic study of polic-ing. Working in collaboration with a team of researchers, I spent time with police offic-ers, community policing groups and various migrant communities, comparing how relationships of protection developed across a range of urban settings. While the con-cept of ‘conviviality’ was not the primary focus of this research, the idea repeatedly resurfaced in the findings as a feature of the way various actors sought recognition as legitimate providers of protection for all. While the more formulaic interactions between uniformed police officers and civilians without a stake in the security industry helped to contextualize and specify my thinking on this subject, the most intriguing ideas emerged from the study of the many liminal cases in which it was not clear who was a legitimate provider or recipient of protection. More specifically, I paid most attention to several cases where civilians had taken it upon themselves to provide pro-tective services for their own neighborhoods in community policing forums, civilian patrols and other less easily defined and ad hoc vigilante and self-protection groupings and organizations.

Recent efforts to deal with the problem of crime in South Africa have strongly empha-sized the need for civilians to take responsibility for protecting their own communities. Policy makers may have envisaged an orderly process whereby community members would use judicial, democratic and bureaucratic channels to hold their local police and security agencies accountable to service and performance standards. In practice, com-munity members, expressing frustration and distrust in both public and private security organizations, have taken policing responsibilities into their own hands, often working outside of the purview of their local police stations and in only a hazy accommodation with the letter of the law.

When civilians become actively engaged in this sort of operational policing, they face an identity crisis. In its most prosaic form, they must ask themselves ‘why am I doing this’, or more specifically ‘what makes me a protector of others’? Whereas a salaried police officer can resort to the fallback position that policing is ‘just a job’ or ‘a way to pay the bills’, civilian volunteers must justify to themselves why they are taking time away from family and work and risking their lives in the service of others. At the same time, their fel-low community members must evaluate whether these actors deserve the same sort of respect that, according to the written law, they owe to the ‘real’ police. Their answers to these this existential dilemma may be found in the types of convivial behavior they adopt.

The remainder of the narrative will explore this theme by discussing two ways in which convivial exchanges emerged as ways of recognizing social roles. First, I will discuss the way some Jo’burgers collectively assumed the role of protector by ‘playing’ with policing stereotypes. I then discuss the way others seek to win the protection of their fellow civilians in ‘dance’.

‘Playing’ at policing: becoming ‘real’ police

The first example comes from my observations of a group of street patrollers in the sub-urb of Mayfair. Mayfair is a residential neighborhood on the western fringe of the




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Johannesburg central business district (CBD). The neighborhood was a historically demarcated Indian and ‘colored’ area under the Group Areas Act. The street patrollers are a group of 50–60 Muslim local men who trawl through this area at night looking for potential burglars, carjackers and petty thieves. Whereas many other community patrols work unarmed, on foot and in bright reflective vests, the Mayfair group worked in pri-vate vehicles with sirens, flashing lights and radios, and their members carried torches, guns, knives and pepper spray. Their uniform was a carefully constructed pastiche of the South African Police Service colors, logo and style.2

The group’s leadership team, made up of four or five older men, consistently stressed the importance of discipline and procedure, and regularly instructed their newer and younger members in the appropriate protocols. However, both senior and junior patrol-lers alike regarded the rules of policing as less important means of achieving outcomes, than as ways of confirming their collective ability to behave like ‘real’ police. This was particularly evident in their unsuccessful efforts to use their radios one Friday night out on patrol.

The evening began at the mosque where a local politician addressed about 300 con-cerned men about a recent spate of house robberies in their area. Before the meeting finished, the patrollers signaled to one another that it was time to leave, filing out the rear door. On the lawn outside, the patrollers lampooned the politician’s ‘talk-shop’ approach to crime fighting. Soon, Jackie, the patrol leader, called the group to attention, and the members formed up into seven parallel lines behind the driver of each vehicle. Jackie told his members ‘I’ve had enough of these meetings. We need to protect our women and children by taking matters into our own hands’. He emphasized this point by drawing his gun out of his belt.

As the group prepared to ‘mount up’, Jackie asked one of the younger members for the radios. The young man had left the radios in his car. Some absent members had mis-takenly taken their radios home, and so, there were insufficient radios for the number of units. It soon turned out that some vehicles did not have adequate antennae to support the radios and antennae had been fixed to the wrong cars.

The radio problems only worsened after the cars dispersed for the patrol. I travelled with Jackie in the designated ‘control’ vehicle, which was responsible for formally begin-ning the operation by establishing radio contact with all units. However, the control vehi-cle struggled to make contact with the other units, and so, for the next 30 minutes, the cars drove in circles trying to establish communication with one another, barely paying atten-tion to the job of policing. Frustration led to accusations as members blamed one another for inept use of the devices, failure to use the right protocols and other technical issues. Eventually, it became clear that Jackie’s radio was defective. So, by flagging one another down on the side of the road, the group made plans to reconvene at a local strip mall.

At the mall, the senior members bought chicken tikka, chips and soft drink for the group while the technical specialists dealt with the radio problem. Enjoying the feast, the members took the time to joke around, play with their weapons and scope out a bar where several patrons were loudly enjoying a game of table soccer. After another 45 minutes, and having decided to relieve Jackie of control responsibilities, the group headed out again. With radios working, a flurry of activity ensued. Several units detected suspicious persons or vehicles and radioed in for backup. All vehicles





responded hastily, driving at high speeds to the scene. At several points, their overen-thusiasm created multicar logjams in the middle of the road. After attending one inci-dent, several drivers struggled to extricate their vehicles from the jam. Relieved of his ‘control’ responsibilities, Jackie engaged in a more relaxed banter over the radio, fore-going protocol to tease the driver of another car about a sex worker they had interro-gated the previous week.

In some respects, this incident is a simple techno-comedic farce. The patrollers’ fumbling attempts to use their radios illustrated their amateurism and undermined their capacity to do any real policing. However, the patrollers’ efforts to play with police toys were of a slightly different nature than the conviviality involved in con-suming the chicken tikka at the local strip mall. Their struggle with the radios reflected their efforts to establish their identity as protectors within the rigors and disciplines of their voluntary vocation. The patrollers all possessed working cell phones, an obvious technological workaround for the radio problem. So, why did they allow their boister-ous energy and unity on leaving the mosque to dissipate when their radios did not work?

As Jackie’s joking about the sex worker illustrated, when the ‘boys’ are out and getting ‘action’, they often departed from strict radio protocol in the name of good fun. So the radio problem was not a simple matter of obsession with procedure and tactics. Rather, it had more to do with the fact that the patrollers believed that without radios it was not possible to be ‘real’ police. The radio may be understood as a prop and one that many of the patrollers have undoubtedly learnt about from a long history of watching cop films, dramas and reality shows. In this sense, the patrollers needed the radio to generate feelings of belonging to their policing group: the insider feeling associated with deploying the code words; the professional esprit de corps associated with the use of protocols; the sense of achievement associated with the art of inter-preting the radio’s garbled audio relay; the feeling of being a part of a distant, but connected collectivity that is cultivated when one communicates over an open audio system; and even the feeling of authority associated with holding the radio in one’s hand. In this respect, by using the radio as an object of ‘play’, the group collectively reconciled itself to its role as protectors, even when the need to play properly stopped them from doing much protection ‘work’. It was only once the group was playing properly at policing that they could fully take up and revel in the ‘action’ of protecting their women and children, emboldened and convinced that they were behaving like a ‘real’ police force.

In a context where conventional differentiations between protectors and the vulnera-ble are breaking down, convivial play can structure how would-be victims assume the identity of legitimate protectors. In post-Apartheid South Africa, identifying with the police can be a particularly difficult task, as most civilians are more familiar with an authoritarian and racist image of everyday policing. In this respect, the symbol of the radio, which emerges from a different and more global register of the beat police offic-er’s habits and tools, has particular resonance as a means of relating to policing as mean-ingful work. The radio helps the street patrollers cross over into this less morally ambiguous realm without evoking associations to the more fraught historical images of the South African police.




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Dancing with the police

Of course, regardless of whether would-be protectors are convinced by their own performance, their fellow citizens may not accept their claim to policing prerogatives. Indeed, in Johannesburg, even real police officers are often seen as an instrument of outside forces and categorically opposed to the best interests of ‘the community’ or ‘the people’. While this is in some respects a direct product of Apartheid, more recent tropes of police officers as lazy, corrupt and abusive have made consent an addition-ally elusive ideal. Hence, uniformed officers do not necessarily command immediate respect, and civilians do not necessarily afford them automatic command over a given scene, particularly when the civilians posses a numerical or strategic advantage over the uniformed officials.

It is partly for this reason that civilian policing has become so popular. As members of the communities in which they serve, civilians are often believed to be more inclined to represent local interests. While this is often true, it also creates some dilemmas for civilian police when they are on patrol. As purported community members, it is expected that civilian police will use their powers of discretion in the service of the community, or more specifically, in the service of particularly powerful or influential community mem-bers or groups. Since ordinary civilians know that the civilian police do not have a very wide a range of powers, community members are also often willing to challenge them. Having fought hard to separate themselves and establish an identity that is in some way outside the community, civilian police necessarily face a strong pull to reabsorb them into the fold.

An example of this dynamic may be found in the way the street patrollers of Hillbrow often find themselves diplomatically ‘dancing’ around their neighbors. Hillbrow is a high-rise precinct in the heart of Johannesburg’s inner city. Over the past two decades, the suburb has undergone a dramatic demographic transition. Under Apartheid, it was a middle-class and exclusively White South African neighborhood. Now it is inhabited by a working/lower class, Black African population from all over the continent. The neigh-borhood is particularly crowded on Friday and Saturday nights when people are out partying in its many bars, strip clubs and shebeens.

The Hillbrow street patrollers are a group of 20–40-year-old Black South African men and women who patrol the area on Friday and Saturday nights on foot searching for drugs and weapons. The patrollers’ basic policing strategy involves stopping and searching as many people as they can. This approach consistently places them in direct confrontations with other civilians, wherein the patrollers must decide whether they are in fact providers of protection or agents of the state. This problem becomes particularly acute in cases where their civilian colleagues are patently breaking or flaunting the law. In such contexts, ostensible lawbreakers and law enforcers must find ways of collectively emerging from confrontations with dignity in tact respect, even though their assumed roles suggest the prospect of violence. This dilemma was particularly evident in the following scenario, when the patrollers raided an unli-censed ‘block party’.

Over the course of a 3-hour Saturday night patrol, I had been chatting with two of the patrol leaders. Paul and Andries had described how the local authorities were





gradually curtailing the patrollers’ independence. Officers at the local station had instructed them not to arrest anyone without first involving the police. This new restric-tion became crucial when we encountered a group of their fellow community mem-bers, partying in the street:

The disc jockey (DJ) was set up against the walls of an apartment block facing out onto the adjacent basketball court. Seven or eight men and women were sitting nearby on benches. Four or five young children were playing nearby. Some 8–10 women were enjoying the music from the balconies above, and a group of 15–20 older men were drinking and leaning against parked cars at the opposite end of the court.

Paul walked toward the DJ and told him to turn off the music. Andries approached a smartly dressed man who was sitting on a bench and explained that the party must stop. The rest of the patrollers began to spill out across the court.

As soon as the music stopped, the women on the balcony began singing. One woman yelled out to the patrollers that the party must continue and blew her vuvuzela in their direction and in time with the singing. Soon, the women on the balcony began dancing in unison, directing coordinated arm waves at the patrollers.

A couple of inebriated men stumbled out of the building, swearing at the street patrol-lers. But the smartly dressed man explained to them that ‘[the street patrollers] are just doing their job brothers. You must show them some respect’. The street patrollers’ resolve for a confrontation now began to waver, and they slowly made their way across the court, assembling on the street outside.

The DJ turned the music back on. Several women from the balcony chose this moment to run out onto the court, making an impromptu dance floor with the children. Random pedestrians began to call out in appreciation of the tunes. Paul explained to me, ‘You see these people are not criminals. They are members of the community. But’, he then pointed to several high-rise apartments that looked down on to the court, ‘these people must go to work in the morning’. Despite this admonition, Paul and a couple of other street patrollers briefly danced along to the music.

The patrollers then called Hillbrow police station for ‘back up’. Soon, three police cars arrived from Hillbrow station, and five officers took control of the scene. One officer walked to the DJ and told him to disassemble the system. Another officer aproached the older men and began a heated argument over why the party must stop. A third officer confronted a younger man who was trying to run away. The officer caught up with him and grabbed his face with his left hand and slapped him with his right. He shoved him up against the wall and kneed him in the groin. He slapped him again and kneed him again and took out his pepper spray and sprayed it liberally in his face.

At this, the street patrollers milled out of the area, leaving the officers in heated argu-ments with the revelers about the way the party had been brought to a close.

This incident is in some respects a predictable tale of Saturday night policing. The community members were sufficiently charged up and intent on pushing the envelope. The Hillbrow police always have better things to do than negotiate with revelers and regularly conclude such encounters with unsubtle shows of force. What makes this moment interesting is the presence of the street patrollers and their fraught position between partying and law enforcement. While the partygoers were clearly breaking a number of city bylaws, they were also behaving like the very community that the street




Vigneswaran 13

patrollers’ wanted to create. The street patrollers each knew that many of their fellow residents have been raped or mugged on this same basketball court, which was usually silent, deserted and dark at night. In this respect, while the party, with all its alcohol and lack of organization, was a potential recipe for more violence, it was also a welcome change to the status quo. In this respect, the partygoers were potential guardians in a space of ritual danger, paralleling the service that the street patrollers hoped to provide.

This is what makes the women on the balcony such powerful agents. Simply enjoying the moment, being exuberant if slightly mocking, the women presented to the street patrollers an image of the Hillbrow they were trying to create, where people can enjoy themselves in harmless fun and children can mill about on the streets at night. The fact that they chose to convey their opposition in singing and dance made it all the more powerful. So, while Paul associated himself more closely with the workers in the neigh-boring buildings and their need for a good night’s sleep, he could also be momentarily swept up by the vibe.

The issue here is not that the street patrollers were not capable of delivering the same sort of violence as the police. The patrollers are rarely cowered by opposition. I have seen them chase and catch armed men and deliver terrifying retribution. Their ‘weakness’ is rather their vulnerability to a convivial show of respect. Thus, when the smartly dressed man instructed his fellows to accept the street patrollers’ right to police them, the street patrollers beat a strategic retreat. Paradoxically, by acknowl-edging the authority of the patrollers, he had recognized their right to offer protection, and hence, they could not be the ones to bring this party to a halt. The arrival and tactics of the formal police most compellingly illustrate the limitations of the street patrollers. In contrast to the patrollers, the police never present themselves as protec-tors. Rather, they went straight for, and in some cases initiated, conflicts that would allow them to bring matters decisively to an end. In this respect, the beating of the young man was key. This act closed down any possibility for negotiation and media-tion between the two groups.

The balcony dwellers’ dance-off strategy replicates and enlarges a convivial encoun-ter over the terms of protection which plays out at a microscale every time the street patrollers attempt to stop and search their fellow civilians on Hillbrow streets. Rather than insisting on their rights or asserting their physical strength, many civilians respond to requests to search them by subtly challenging the patrollers to decide whose side they are on. They may attempt to establish a personal contact with the patrollers, by asking them about their personal lives, or they may preempt the encounter by shaking or clasp-ing hands with the patroller, or they may exaggerate their compliance by animatedly jumping into a prone position. Much like the balcony dancers, these congenial moves make it difficult for the patrollers to conceive of themselves as law enforcers, encourag-ing them instead to see themselves as one with the community. In such scenarios, they will often not search the civilians at all, or simply ‘dance’ around them, ‘going through the motions’ of a search, but not really subjecting the civilians to the physical discomfort and inconvenience or the humiliation of a full-body search. In this way, civilians regu-larly cause their patrollers to question what providing protection means and thereby tame potential predators into genuine protectors.





Concluding remarks

In this article, I have uncovered how conviviality might emerge in an urban context that is replete with violence by exploring the dynamics of protection. One of the great chal-lenges of a city like Johannesburg is the level of uncertainty that its residents experience, due not only to the constant threat of violent victimization by criminals, but to the fact that would-be protectors have proliferated so rapidly in response to this same violence. In this sense, ‘diversity’ in South Africa is not merely reflected in the ethnic, class or racial origins of the population, but in the wide variety of types of actors engaged in providing a service that has traditionally been conceptualized as the privileged domain of a single actor: the sovereign state. As the examples suggest, it often becomes unclear who is playing the role of the protector or what sort of protection they may afford. In this context, convivial behavior may address difference in one of two ways. As the example of the car guard shows, the search for protection might compel actors to establish rela-tionships with members of vastly different social groups. The motorist and car guards use a range of social cues and gestures to establish fleeting relationships of trust in conditions of insecurity. However, conviviality may also constitute a form of performing and recog-nizing roles as various actors seek to define their respective position in the protection market. In the case of the street patrollers in Mayfair, collective ‘play’ became a means by which a grouping with painful memories of Apartheid policing assured itself of its responsibility to protect. In the case of their counterparts in Hillbrow, dance became the means by which community members conveyed their refusal to acknowledge the author-ity of the street patrollers, and somewhat paradoxically, also a means of securing their protection.

These portrayals of convivial behavior contrast markedly with formulations that emphasize that conviviality primarily serves to mitigate or ameliorate the potential for violence and conflict within society. Instead, this approach allows us to see how seem-ingly benign practices like ‘manners’, ‘play’ and ‘dance’ are instead shot through with relations of power and interest, revealing various actors’ conflicted motivations and ambiguous roles in contexts where protection from violence is in such demand.

In one sense, these findings suggest added conceptual scope for the concept of con-viviality. If conviviality can be found in the public spaces of cities like Johannesburg, then perhaps it is a relatively universal cultural phenomenon that we may find in some of the most unexpected places. However, the findings also suggest the need for caution in the way we use the term conviviality in relation to the concept of diversity. From one perspective, this is a matter of the need for greater definition of the analytical concept. Many readers may find my descriptions of social relations characterized by violence as examples of ‘conviviality’ as jarring or contrary to their understanding of the term. If these types of exploration are stretching the concept too thin, then perhaps we need to adopt a usage of the term that excludes these less normatively preferred ways in which different groups in cities tend to ‘live together’.

From another perspective, these findings suggest the need to be more open to the multiple ways in which conviviality relates to diversity. I have suggested that the con-genial, festive and playful behavior which neighbors and strangers deploy to communi-cate and/or relate to one another may also contain attempts to discover, assert and deploy




Vigneswaran 15

social hierarchies. However, if it is true that contemporary urbanism is characterized by the ‘diversification of diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007) where multiple forms of social differ-ence are continually reconstituted in increasingly complex ways, then researchers need to be increasingly attentive to the manner in which convivial behavior that may resolve some differences simultaneously enacts a range of other – potentially more pernicious – forms.

Funding

The author would like to thank the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity for their generous support for this research.

Notes

1. By building great walls around their properties, South Africans have accentuated the dangers associated with parking on the street. By limiting the space available for pedestrian traffic on sidewalks, South Africans have effectively reduced the deterrent effect of random bystanders for vehicular thefts. In this respect, car guards respond to a niche in the protection market.

2. This differed markedly from the community policing initiatives which we had observed in the largely White neighborhood of Melville and the Black inner city areas of Hillbrow and Johannesburg Central which consisted of pedestrian and generally unarmed patrollers who wore reflective jackets that were clearly distinguishable from the police uniform.

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Biographical notes

Darshan Vigneswaran is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, WITS University, South Africa. He has held fellowships at Oxford University, UK and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. He is the author of Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System and currently studies migration control, state development and policing in India and South Africa.


http://www.mmg.mpg.de/publications/working-papers/2010/wp-10-15/

http://www.mmg.mpg.de/publications/working-papers/2010/wp-10-15/



protection and conviviality: community policing in johannesburg

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