The Partisan’s Violence, Law and Apartheid: The Assassination of Matthew Goniwe and the Cradock Four Suren Pillay Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Suren Pillay All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Partisan’s Violence, Law and Apartheid: The Assassination of Matthew Goniwe and the Cradock Four Suren Pillay This dissertation is a study of an instance of political violence that took place during 1985 in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, but which had a wider resonance across the country. It involved the killing of four prominent anti-apartheid activists, known as the Cradock Four, by a state security death squad. It is an instance of political violence that allows us to ask ontological questions about the relationship between law, rights and violence; colonial violence and the Cold War, as well as questions about the epistemologies that surround violence in relation to questions of justice. Revisiting this violence, as mediated through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this study asks: how does this violence relate to the law itself, since apartheid was after all explicit in its claim to being the product of a legal regime? It argues that we need to think about how this violence against the Cradock Four, committed by a ‘death squad’—and therefore orphaned through denial by both law and an official political narrative—related to the constitution of a South African political community, a political community we also have to remind ourselves, which had a colonial genealogy. To answer these questions I have traced the figures of Matthew Goniwe and his political comrades in two ways. The first half of the dissertation is a study of how they are fashioned in legal discourse – over time mainly as victims of human rights abuses through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second half of the dissertation is a study of their constitution in political discourse, where they become transformed from activists to absolute enemies of the state. In my discussion of this latter transformation, I trace and wish to recover what has become a subaltern narrative: thinking about these activists as instantiations of the forms of what I have called ‘the natives revolt’, and therefore apartheid’s concrete enemy: they are reluctant urban native subjects; neither properly rural and neither properly urban. It is this subject which I argue, finally disrupts the colonial ambitions of apartheid. Table of Contents Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………….ii Chapter One Introduction The Cradock Four: Between Memories of Violence on the Right and Wrong Side of History……………………………………………. 1 Chapter Two Mediations of Pain and Suffering and the Production of Apartheids’ Victim………………………………………………. 45 Chapter Three The juridical life after death of the Cradock Four…………………………………….. 108 Chapter Four The Partisan and the Political …………………………………………………………. 153 Chapter Five Apartheid’s Predicament: The Native as Insurgent……………………………………. 221 Chapter Six From Victims to Enemies………………………………………………………………… 262 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………………………. 286 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………… 295 i Acknowledgements I have realized that the good fortune of a protracted period of being a student and of study, first at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and then later at Columbia, has not been that I have found answers to questions that I might have arrived at these institutions with. Rather it has been that I have had the privilege of being able to read and be in the company of a few individuals who have taught me that the question precedes the answer, and that the formulation of a worthy question is a far more challenging proposition than finding the answer to an inconsequential question. I would not be the first to note that in the solitary process of writing we find ourselves conducting internal dialogues with a few people who come to be our primary interlocutors, whose thoughts, and reactions we find ourselves thinking in relation to. Whilst I spent time away from New York City and Columbia University, conducting fieldwork and writing in far away South Africa, the intimate proximity of these interlocutors remained constant. Foremost among them is my dissertation advisor, Mahmood Mamdani. The encounter with Mahmood in Cape Town, and his work, before he took up a Chair at Columbia, fundamentally altered the lenses through which I view South Africa and view the African continent from the vantage point of South Africa. He has altered, by his own example rather than prescription, my notion of what scholarly work might look like. From him I have had the illuminating insight of seeing writing produced that is aware of its location but is not circumscribed by that location. I have also learnt from his ethical disposition the imperative to write about the social worlds we traverse as critical beings, but also as accountable beings. ii This dissertation is largely written in relation to questions that Mahmood laid open and made possible to ask through in his own writing. I am deeply indebted to him for his unconditional and unquestioning support throughout. Two other interlocutors who’s imaginary questions and even raised eye brows often hovered in my mind’s eye when formulating an idea or a sentence, are my dissertation committee members David Scott and Partha Chatterjee. I wish to thank both for their patience and for their generosity of being, and for sharing their thoughts in the seminar room and outside. I have had the good fortune, but I confess, also the quite daunting proposition, of writing with such careful and nuanced readers in mind. It was from David in particular that I learnt to think more about ‘the question’, and to always ask, ‘what might be the upshot?’! At Columbia I was also fortunate enough to have had the quietly unstinting encouragement and support of Nicholas Dirks, and Brinkley Messick, both of whom as Chair’s of the Department, were equally generous with making resources available at crucial moments that enabled the commencement and completion of the dissertation. The external members of my dissertation committee, Peter Vale of the University of Johannesburg, and Sean Jacobs of the New School for Social Research deserve special mention. Both have been invaluable sources of support and critical engagement, and Peter endured with aplomb a dissertation defense conducted over Skype in what were the early hours of the morning for him! iii Much of this dissertation is based on archival research made possible by a generous pre-dissertation fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. My travel to South Africa, to visit research sites, and to be able to ‘go home’ periodically, was also enabled by a Scheldon Scheps Travel Grant from Columbia University. For those who know what archival work entails, it will not be news that an archive is not a straightforward proposition. A novice like myself had to learn this the hard way, and had to learn that without the clarifying presence of a guide, one could easily enter the labyrinth and come out empty handed. I was shown paths I would not otherwise have seen by librarians and archivists whom I hold in high esteem. At the South African History Archive Sam Jacobs was an eager and efficient guide. At Cullen Library at the University of Witwatersand it was Michelle Pickover whom seem to be able to make things appear from nowhere. I am deeply thankful to the archivists of the Documentation Center of the Department of Defence Archives, Pretoria. And at Cory Library and Rhodes University, Victor Gacuna further entrenched my respect and debt to those who manage the records of the Goniwe Trial. I am also thankful to Bavusile Brown Maaba, then with the Disa Project, UKZN, who shared valuable information with me from the archives on covert agencies of the apartheid government. One of the salutary aspects of immersing oneself in a scholarly community is that scholarly relations can often translate into friendships, and that institutions can become places where we not only find an office, a computer, or a library, but that we also find community. I have found community with a number of institutions over the iv course of this project, all of whom have enabled, and shaped the work and left their imprint on me as a person in one way or another. My first forays into the questions that I have written about started at the University of the Western Cape. In the Department of Political Studies at University of the Western I benefited from the guidance and discussions with Willem van Vuuren, the late Sipho Maseko, Thiven Reddy, Chris Tapscott, Cheryl Hendricks, Bettina von Lieres, Mark Hoskins, Keith Gottschalk, and Joelien Pretorius. A special note of thanks must go to the persistence of Pieter Le Roux. At UWC, it was in the seminars of the History Department and Center for Humanities Research that I also benefited both from deep friendships, encouragement, and more critical expectations! The fertile space created by Premesh Lalu has been crucial to sustaining a lively debate on the ‘presents of the past’, and recurrent ‘deaths’. It has been quite formative to me to have as a community Ciraj Rassool, Leslie Witz, Patricia Hayes, Michael Neocosmos, Heidi Grunebaum, Paulo Israel, Annachiara Forte, Jade Gibson, Brian Raftopolous, Riedwaan Moosage and Lameez Lalkhen. When I mentioned in casual conversation that I needed a quiet place to write, it was Harry Garuba, director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, who warmly and instantly offered me a little perch on the hill, as Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre. I was also able to benefit whilst there from discussions with Lungisile Ntsebeza, and I am deeply appreciative of the thoughts and experiences he shared with me about the Eastern Cape, and memories of Mathew Goniwe.