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Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’S Prison–Township Circuit

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Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’S Prison–Township Circuit Ethnos Journal of Anthropology ISSN: 0014-1844 (Print) 1469-588X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20 Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit Karen Waltorp & Steffen Jensen To cite this article: Karen Waltorp & Steffen Jensen (2019) Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit, Ethnos, 84:1, 41-55, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2017.1321565 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1321565 Published online: 18 Dec 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 156 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=retn20 ETHNOS 2019, VOL. 84, NO. 1, 41–55 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1321565 Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit Karen Waltorpa and Steffen Jensenb,c aAarhus University, Denmark; bDIGNITY Danish Institute Against Torture, Denmark; cAalborg University, Denmark ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore how townships and prison are linked in South Africa among criminalised populations. While the two are often described – also by residents – as belonging to radically different moral worlds, the article shows how they are entangled in often awkward and difficult, yet necessary ways. We show this by paying acute attention to kinship structures and how kin are disavowed, allowed and sometimes denied as residents find their way to prison and out again. The empirical basis of the article is long-term fieldwork in and engagement with Cape Town’s townships and their residents, many of who have experiences with prison as (former) inmates, as family to inmates, or through constant circulation of prison stories. KEYWORDS Cape Town; prison; kinship; morality; township This article takes as its point of departure the large number of people, especially young men of colour, who move and are moved between prison and townships on the Cape Flats.1 As we move closer to the townships and begin talking to people, we realise that prison is an ever-present element in many people’s lives. In fact, it sometimes seems that prison and township cannot so easily be separated and that we may think of the two as linked and entangled in complex ways or in the words of da Cunha (2008: 326), ‘life inside and outside […] become inextricably linked’. Furthermore, it also seems clear that while the walls around the prison are permeable towards the town- ships, for many residents the invisible walls to mainstream Capetonian society outside the townships are far more difficult to scale. This suggests that what we here call the prison–township circuit is actually a world of confinement apart from mainstream society. We shall return to this larger conceptual question below. For now, and in line with the Introduction to this Special Issue, suffice to say that this implies that we need to understand how people navigate the prison–township circuit in everyday life rather than assuming what life can be lived based on the institutional form of prison and ghetto. We need to ask how people survive as they enter the very violent prison CONTACT Steffen Jensen [email protected] © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 42 K. WALTORP AND S. JENSEN and what it entails for their families. Here, respectability – ordentlikheid – is central as an encompassing local understanding of what constitutes morality: religion, education, work, and socially conservative values.2 Yet, the loyalty to one’s local network is a part of this overall moral structure, making it inherently complex and often paradoxical as what this loyalty instils is in opposition to the conservative discourse of a moral, right- eous, middle-class citizen. In this sense, we may reformulate the question as how does one maintain one’s moral standing in a situation where respectability is central at the same time as sizeable sections of residents go to jail, implicating the family and (kin) relations directly or indirectly? To answer these questions, we revisit field material from two coloured townships3 in Cape Town, Manenberg and Heideveld in which we did long-term fieldwork over a span of twenty years, between 1995 and 2002 (Heideveld) and 2005 and 2015 (Manen- berg). Coloureds, and especially those of the townships, have historically had a long and tortuous relationship with the prison system in South Africa. This relationship was fuelled by and in turn reproduced rather hostile stereotypes around inherent coloured criminality. As a consequence, during apartheid, coloureds were four times more likely to go to jail than Africans even if the latter were subject to pass laws and influx control (Jensen 2008). In fact, in those days coloureds were among those most frequently impri- soned globally. While this ratio has gone down to twice their share of the population, especially because the African share has increased, prison is still a pervasive element in township life, not least because criminality is seen as an inherent element of life in Cape Town’s townships.4 In order to grasp the intimate relationship between prison and township, thus echoing the Introduction to the special issue, it is useful not to distinguish too rigidly between the inside and the outside of the prison. Seen from the townships, the prison walls are rather porous and permeable. People, food, clothes, drugs, weapons as well as stories and narratives pass the prison walls in osmotic flows where certain items are allowed through the walls in some instances, while other things and people pass through at other times.5 At the same time moral narratives persist which posit the prison and the township as absolutely separate. We will discuss this seeming paradox of the entanglement between the prison and the township. It is not that the prison resembles the township. Rather, it is that for many people on the Cape Flats the two merge into one social world. In the words of Loïc Wacquant, a ‘deadly symbio- sis’ is created when prison and ghetto (in the U.S.A.) ‘meet and mesh’ (Wacquant 2001). It is this ‘deadly symbiosis’ that we want to explore in this article from the point of view of township residents, especially the families of those that go to prison. What is the moral weight of the symbiosis for those implicated on either side of the prison walls? How does one ensure the respectability and security of those left on the outside and the survival of those on the inside? Our basic argument is that while prison is an ines- capable part of life on the Cape Flats, it does need to be negotiated and it carries a high toll on the respectability of those that remain. We introduce the concept of ‘awkward entanglements’ as a way to explore these complex forms of relations where morality, survival, and everyday life co-exist in necessary, yet near-impossible ways inside the prison–township circuit. ETHNOS 43 We organise our argument in three sections. First, we look at the genealogy of the awkward entanglement between prison and townships, drawing in historical accounts as well more theoretical arguments to develop an understanding of the nature of the social world of prison and township. Secondly, we follow the attempts from the town- ship residents’ side to cope with the sudden arrest of a young man to allow him to survive the violent world of the prison. In the third section, we hone in on the moral deliberations inside an extended family to emerge as respectable people (ordentlike mense) in the face of incarceration of several family members over time. In the final section, we revisit our argument to conclude on how the awkward entanglements are negotiated by people who are touched by it. We argue that an analytical focus on the various trajectories of members of the extended family (or kinship relations) and not only individual trajectories, allows us to discern patterns and dynamics of on-going struggles for morality and survival in the everyday life of the prison–township circuit. The Everyday Life of an Entangled World Pollsmoor Prison, just on the outskirts of the Cape Flats, provides one iconic node of the prison–township circuit. Few families are without stories from Pollsmoor. This is expressed rather succinctly by Moubin, in 1999 a young 19-year-old man with a brief history with one of the many gangs on the Cape Flats. On the interviewer’s assertion that the latter would not survive Pollsmoor, Moubin explains, It is a little easier on us [coloureds in the townships] because, you know, it’s almost part of our life outside. You are told here outside by ex-convicts that ‘you mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that’. It is almost like they prepare you to go and to survive when you come there. Everyone knows what you must do and what you mustn’t do. Together with the statistics provided above Moubin’s explanation reveals the level of entanglement between the township and the prison. While there are clear narratives of ‘going’ and of separation – and how to act in the likely situation that one will go – it is not a strange and unknown world. This is so for the young men, who are preparing to go, and it is so for many families that often with acute sense of sadness see their young boys off. With some drama one interlocutor expressed this when she said, ‘Today people hope to get girls because they will not be so much trouble.’ She made this comment as we were frantically trying to locate her nephew in a police detention facility somewhere on the Cape Flats.
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