Administrative Death: Bureaucracy, capital punishment and governmentality in South Africa during the 1960s Bianca Paige van Laun Supervisors: Prof. Premesh Lalu and Ms. Nicky Rousseau A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape June 2018 http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ DECLARATION I, Bianca Paige van Laun, declare that “Administrative Death: Bureaucracy, capital punishment and governmentality in South Africa during the 1960s” is my own work, that it has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other university, and that all the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by complete references. Bianca van Laun 27 June 2018 http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to Meg Wilding who instilled in me a deep love of history from an early age. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The dissertation would not have been possible without the support of several people whose various contributions deserve special mention. I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisors, Nicky Rousseau and Premesh Lalu, whose invaluable assistance, knowledge, supervision and guidance from the preliminary to the final phases of this thesis has enabled me to develop it from a mere question to a coherent argument. I am tremendously thankful for their patience, time and diligence in helping me work through several versions of this thesis. Heartfelt thanks must go to my family for their inseparable love, encouragement and prayers. My husband, Daniel Nicholson deserves special mention as this dissertation has spanned the duration of our marriage and he has not given up on me yet! I would like to express my deepest appreciation for his help with archival research but mostly for his love, support and persistent confidence in me. I am indebted to the History Department and Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape which, combined, have become my intellectual home. Special thanks go to my colleagues in the History Department. I am eternally grateful for the years of unfailing support, encouragement and assistance. Riedwaan Moosage deserves special thanks for eleven years of friendship, critical engagement and support. I am especially grateful to him for reading sections of this thesis, for his advice and constructive comments. I would also like to particularly thank my Head of Department, Leslie Witz, who has been incredibly supportive and generous in understanding the pressures of writing and research and allowing me the time to do so. I feel very fortunate to have been a fellow in the Postgraduate Study of Humanities in Africa (PSHA) during the first three years of this project and am very grateful for the important intellectual space, which the CHR provides. I am appreciative of the privilege of being part of this academically engaged and supportive environment. I am heartily thankful to the Mellon Foundation for their generous financial support, which has enabled me to focus on my research. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the NRF Forensic History project and reading group between and 2015 and 2017. The writing retreats were an immense help http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ and the 2018 ‘Missing and Missed: The subject, politics and memorialisation’ Workshop provided me with an opportunity to present one of the chapters of this dissertation. This NRF project also covered the costs of a research trip to Pretoria. Another research trip was funded through the Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons Forum: A Supranational Project in the Department of History, UWC, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I am further grateful to the countless others who have shown their interest and willingness in this project. I am grateful to Barbara Killian at the Department of Correctional Services Archives for her assistance with locating the prisoner files that I consulted. Madeleine Fullard, head of the Missing Persons’ Task Team deserves special thanks for allowing me access to the MPTT files on executions and sharing photographs, for organizing visits to the Gallows Memorial Museum and allowing me to attend and participate in exhumations of the hanged. I am thankful for the opportunity to have spent three months as a visitor to the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where I was afforded the time to work on the writing and research of my dissertation and the opportunity to present one of my chapters. I am grateful to colleagues at the University of Minnesota, including Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Ajay Skaria and, director of the ICGC, Karen Brown, for their encouragement and guidance. I am extremely grateful to have been appointed to the teaching staff of the History Department at the University of the Western Cape in January 2016 as part of the New Generation Academic Programme funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) in partnership with the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). This Programme has allowed me the invaluable opportunity to develop my teaching skills while generously assisting with my resource requirements and providing me with the financial support to undertake research trips to Pretoria and the space to complete my dissertation. Writing this thesis has been a challenging and rewarding experience and I am extremely grateful to each person who has been part of its successful realisation. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ CONTENTS Introduction 1 Considering the hanging machine 3 Capital punishment in South African historiography 5 Capital punishment and South Africa 19 A death sentence for political activities 26 “We are not normal criminals”: Political or criminal? 36 An archive of the hanging machine 39 Chapter Outline 41 Chapter One: Untangling the red tape: Investigating the bureaucratic apparatus of the apartheid state 43 Bureaucracy and Writing 45 The bureaucratic state in South Africa 52 Conclusion 68 Chapter Two: Bureaucratically administered death 70 “A conveyor belt of men preparing for death”: The hanging process 72 “What sort of person is a hangman?” Rationalising state killing 85 Foucault, biopolitics and the justification of judicial executions in South Africa 95 Conclusion 112 Chapter Three: Following the paper 115 “We have to follow the things themselves”: Materiality and written records 117 Turning to the documents 134 Paperwork, History and Archives 169 http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ Conclusion 172 Chapter Four: The afterlives of files: The Gallows Memorialisation Project 176 “South Africa’s gallows now instrument of healing” - launching the Gallows Memorial Museum 178 “Is this the most ghoulish tourist attraction in the world?” - the Gallows Memorialisation Project and memorialisation in post-apartheid South Africa 182 Touring the Gallows Memorial Museum 190 Resurrecting the archives: Documents, photographs and memorialisation 203 Resurrecting “paper cadavers” and “Laying the gallows ghosts to rest”: The Gallows Exhumation Project 215 Conclusion 228 Conclusion 231 Bibliography 243 http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ Introduction On 15 December 2011, the now ousted South African President Jacob Zuma officiated the opening of the Gallows Memorial Museum at the Pretoria Central Correctional Facility, a project undertaken by the Department of Correctional Services. This Project saw the gallows at what was previously Pretoria Central Maximum (C-Max) Prison, which had been dismantled in 1996 following the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, restored and reopened as a museum. At the top of the notorious 52 steps that condemned prisoners climbed to reach the execution room, the then president unveiled a dedicated wall with individualised plaques for each of the political prisoners who had died there between 1960 and 1989. “Today” the president announced, “all 134 names are officially being enshrined for eternity so that future generations will know what this country went through, so that we never go through a similar horror ever again.”1 The Museum is meant to act as an anti-death penalty monument, to honour the anti-apartheid activists who were hanged by the apartheid state and to encourage “healing.” This was to be “a place where the political prisoners who were hanged there can be honoured and the past can be buried.”2 Reflecting the African National Congress (hereafter ANC)- centered dominant narrative of resistance in South Africa, Zuma emphasised the executions of ANC cadres. He failed to note that the Pan Africanist Congress was the organisation that had lost the greatest number of its members to judicial executions. 1 “South Africa’s gallows now instrument of healing,” Associated Press, 1 March 2012. “Inside South Africa’s factory of death” in the Saturday Star (12 December 2011). 2 Keynote Address by President Jacob Zuma on the occasion of the launch of the Gallows Museum at the Pretoria Central Correctional Center, 15 December 2011, accessed at http://www.anc.org.za/content/keynote- address-president-jacob-zuma-occasion-launch-gallows-museum-pretoria-central on 12 March 2014 1 http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ Some 101 political prisoners were hanged between 1960 and 1969. Almost all of these were linked to the Pan Africanist Congress (hereafter PAC) or its armed wing, Poqo.3 Indeed, more people were put to death during the 1960s for politically-motivated crimes than any other decade in South African history. How then do we account for the fact that so many were executed during the 1960s in connection with what were in some cases relatively minor acts of political resistance, as compared to a relatively small number of executions over the following two decades, despite this later period constituting what many claim as the apotheosis of resistance politics in South Africa? The 1960s it would seem is therefore important for any consideration of the history of political executions carried out in South Africa.