SA has just embarked upon the most extreme experiment in coercion in its history. Even at the summit of the high apartheid period, in the late 1960s, when the police were arresting hundreds of thousands of people a year for pass-law offences, restrictions on movement, access to livelihoods and the capacity to live day by day were not remotely as severe as now. How will it all play out?
The paradoxical thing about coercion is that it only works when people actually consent to it. When they reach breaking point, they simply defy. Once that happens the authorities face a grim choice: either surrender and let people do as they want or go to war with them. How do we avoid that choice?
The answer, frighteningly, hinges on the sophistication of those tasked with policing. On paper, the rules regulating life in the suburbs and in informal settlements are the same: only leave home to get food, urgent medical care and basic goods; when in public, stay a metre or more away from others. In practice, regulations in suburbs and informal settlements cannot possibly be the same. To police an informal settlement as if it were a suburb would simply break it; the degree of confinement would drive even the most stoical soul to madness.
Good policing has always required a tacit understanding that the rules written on paper and the unwritten rules of the street are never quite the same. Police do their work in human ecologies; good police adjust to the ecologies around them, using an intuitive intelligence of which they are often scarcely aware.
Never before have SA soldiers and police had to adjust with more subtlety to the ecologies around them. They need to let enough life go on for things not to grow unbearable, but not so much as to spread the virus wantonly. Getting the balance right calls for daily, indeed hourly, adjustments, for in extreme situations ecologies are evolving before our eyes.
It is hard to say how SA is being policed; it is the violent episodes, rather than the non-events of intelligent policing, that make the news. But from Hillbrow to Alexandra to Mangaung, we are seeing disturbing signs. Men forced to do jumping squats and push-ups before ridiculing audiences; police subjecting alleged violators to public whippings so severe as to leave them bleeding; commuters en route to performing essential services forced to turn around and go home.
It does not augur well. The poor are being asked to shoulder a burden far greater than the well-off. The University of Cape Town’s Murray Leibbrandt and his colleagues have projected a 33% drop in income per person during the three-week lockdown for the bottom six deciles of those SA households that contain an informal worker, and a 45% drop for the bottom decile.
For many, the most sane and rational option will soon be to leave home and risk the virus in the quest for work. Demanding that they stay at home is an awful lot to ask: it is in essence to insist that they forego their and their loved ones’ most vital interests for the greater good. To further subject them to raw displays of punishment in the name of the public interest is a spectacle sufficiently grotesque to live on in collective memory for generations.
Leibbrandt and his colleagues have suggested a temporary R500-a-month top-up in child support grants as the most effective way to make up for lost informal sector income. It is important to flag this here, in a column on policing, lest we forget that what people need most is sustenance.
But in addition to food in their mouths, people need to be policed with intelligence and compassion. The alternative is to inflict wounds so bitter and deep as to leave open to question whether they will ever heal.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.
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