Epilogue

Summary

As this work goes to press, a new story of detention headlines international news cycles. This one comes from the US southern border, where images have circulated of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detaining asylum seekers. These are much more visible in press reports than the detention conditions emanating from apartheid South Africa. They include chain link cages filled to the brim, children separated from their parents, lights left on for 24 hours, inadequate food, clothing and nappy supplies. The images are powerful because they hold a mirror to the ways in which the US has regulated access to rights such as due process, social services and even asylum itself. They differ in content and substance from the stories emanating out of southern African police buildings. They resemble each other, though, in showing the inhumanity of detention, and the ways in which the practice can hold up a larger socio-political mirror.

The discussion over these images has been compared to similar phenomena in different temporal and geographic settings. The photos outrage people, but the work of enacting politico-social change through law remains paradoxical and difficult. Project contract attorney and IEC chair Dikgang Moseneke expressed amusement at this:

We truly and fully exploited the prim and proper rule-of-law approach that the Afrikaners have always had. It was always an enigma. They were vicious oppressors and exploiters, but they also believed that they were part of some civilized world where there were civilized norms … so you had a very strange thing—people who were very meticulous about rules, like most Calvinists all over the world. They were positivists; they believed that the law was sacred. What was law was sacred and had to be observed, even if the law was adopted for the wrong reasons. So we consciously exploited what we saw as a weakness, the soft belly of a very tough animal. And we stabbed it in just one place, the soft belly.

But the belly was not always so soft. Moseneke added that “on the other side, it made us addicted to fairness, to just dispensations, to an independent judiciary”. Such things were not always forthcoming. Many Project workers suffered mental and emotional anguish when the beast demonstrated its vitality. Nonetheless, work continued in an often ad hoc and always futile-seeming manner.