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Criminological Science and the Criminal Law on the Colonial Periphery: Perception, Fantasy, and Realities in South Africa, 1900-1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Martin Chanock
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Abstract

This article, by framing criminology and criminal law together, suggests that in the early years of the South African state both bodies of discourse served to evade reality and to construct a sense of self and other as a part of the development of the administration of South African criminal law. It considers the derivation of South African criminology from contemporary metropolitan formulations. South African legal doctrine and practice likewise depended on extra-South African sources. These imported discourses provided lenses through which a descriptive confrontation with the realities of the processes of criminalization, and the administration of criminal justice could be avoided precisely by hose “expert” in these fields. Instead, science and law, far from being pragmatic disciplines, provided the means by which to fantasize about the nature of white justice and black criminality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , Fall 1995 , pp. 911 - 939
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1995 

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References

1 Union Government, Department of Justice, Annual Report 112 (Pretoria: U.G. 22–1910).Google Scholar

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6 Foucault's phrase “the great incarceration” strikes a chord. In the early years of the state there was a huge leap in the numbers sentenced and imprisoned. Very nearly all were black men, prosecuted under the taxation, pass, and masters and servants laws. In these years the process was centered on the Transvaal. For an analysis of the figures see A. Sachs, Justice in South Africa 162–70 (London: Chatto, 1973). See too C. van Onselen, “Crime and Total Institutions in the Making of Modem South Africa: The Life of ‘Nongololoza’ Mathebula,” 19 Hist. Workshop 1985 at 68, for his discussion of the “dramatic tightening of the bands of a labour repressive system” and the consequent “explosive increase in the size of the Transvaal prison population.” Between 1912 and 1932 the number of persons of all races prosecuted increased from 46 per thousand to 72.3. The numbers convicted rose from 37.8 per thousand to 63.1. H. J. Simons, “The Criminal Law and Its Administration in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Kenya” 29 (Ph.D. thesis, London University, 1936) (“Simons, ‘Criminal Law’”). Far more acts were criminalized and policing was intensified.Google Scholar

7 In relation to context and meaning a further point must be made. Read now, many of the thoughts discussed here appear both extreme and bizarre. But they were then not an isolated corner of racist thought at odds with liberal and egalitarian principles immanent in Western thought. They were expressed from within the common Sense of the Western scientific and legal worlds, and the words had quite ordinary connotations, different from those which they have today.Google Scholar

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18 Quoted in Simons, “Criminal Law,” at 2.Google Scholar

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26 There was a major rebellion in Zululand in 1906; strikes of white workers involving widespread disorder and the use of troops in 1907, 1911, 1913/14, and 1922; and an Afrikaner armed rebellion in 1915.Google Scholar

27 “The Reef” refers to the geographical (and extended urban) area in the Transvaal (about 60 miles long) where the original goldmines were situated.Google Scholar

28 My emphasis. Commissioner of Police, Annual Rep 45 (Pretoria: U.G. 62-1912).Google Scholar

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59 Some ideas from outside were not developed with such enthusiasm. In 1914 the South African Law Journal published an article entitled “Suspended Sentences and the Probation System” by S. B. Kitchin based on a review of H. Salomon, The Contest against Criminality: Investigation and Probation Work in Sweden (Stockholm, 1913). This canvassed the notion, not normally a part of South African debates, that criminality was dependent not on the failings of the individual but on wider social causes. The author noted that South Africa had enacted versions of the corresponding penal laws taken from England. Section 88 of the Prisons and Reformatories Act (No. 13 of 1911) allowed for probation, and there were similar provisions in the Children's Protection Act (No. 35 of 1913), which were applied only to white children. The provisions, wrote Kitchin, “mark a new epoch of advancement” in the contest against criminality in South Africa (at 18). But probation was not popular in South Africa, came under Parliamentary attack, and was little used. Some new criminological ideas fitted in with the felt imperatives of the local situation less well than others and contributed less to the flavor of local thought and law.Google Scholar

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63 We might note a closely related concern with a huge and undetected mass of criminally disturbed blacks expressed by Laubscher (Sex, Custom and Psychopathology, cited in note 34). Usually, he wrote, “psychotic and defective” blacks were only detected when they committed crimes and became “a nuisance” to white society. But it was easy for them to live in black rural areas, and “we are forced to the conclusion that the numbers of those mentally disordered living in the kraals must be large…. Such a state of affairs has far reaching influences, especially in reference to crimes against property, stock theft and the formation of habitual criminals, but more important still in reference to crimes of violence and homicide, where the only motive before the court is a grudge against the victim” (id. at 226). In this context see also S. Gilman, Differences and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness 137 et seq. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), for discussions in the United States in the 1840s in the context of abolition of slavery which included “scientific” projections of a huge amount of black insanity and feeblemindedness. These concerns persisted into the 1880s and 1890s.Google Scholar

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68 The strictures on the poor whites were absorbed by the visiting Australian journalist, Pratt, who toured South Africa with the Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher in 1911. A. Pratt, The Real South Africa 57, 70 (London: Holden & Hardingham, 1913). The curse of the country, he wrote, was the large population of unskilled whites. Johannesburg had, and he quoted the words of the Transvaal Indigency Commission, “a large, idle, semi-criminal population” of unemployable whites (at 57, 70). White youth “seem predestined to indigency, indolence and crime” (at 173). “The criminality of South Africa is unparalleled in the civilised world (at 176). The rates of white criminality in the Transvaal were seven times that of England and four times that of the rest of South Africa. As in other accounts, the criminality was seen as an inherent feature of the defective target group.Google Scholar

69 South Africa, House of Assembly Debates cols. 5570 et seq. (6 June 1925). In 1930 it was reported that most European serious crime was “closely connected with Natives,” some 40% involving liquor sales. Union Government, Native Economic Commission#773 (cited in note 31).Google Scholar

70 These are copiously reported in the contemporary press. For an account of a part of the world of black crime from its own perspective see C. van Onselen, Social and Economic History of the Wtiwatersrand 1896-1914, vol. 2: Social Conditions (New York: Longmans, 1982); id., 19 Hist. Workshop 1985 (cited in note 6).Google Scholar

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73 Id. at 712. To be fair to Dr. Sachs, the purpose of his article was to provide refutation of the view that the minds of whites and blacks were essentially different, by showing that they had the same mental illnesses. “There might be a slight difference in the content of the delusions … in the objects of fear” (at 712-13).Google Scholar

74 I do not intend to argue that this was the product of intention. The young state had a small civil and legal service which dealt with situations on an ad hoc basis, searching haphazardly for precedents as new legislation was asked for by politicians. The judges intended to expound the canons of the common law in an orthodox manner. Nor do I entertain arguments based on function or determinism in so complex, disparate, and contingent a world. I refer, rather, to effect, from which one might infer what was acceptable in the way of legal outcomes. The “rule of law,” far from being color blind, was an instrument of legal segregation. Perhaps the best example of this is the way in which the courts applied the full array of obstructive interpretive legalism to the statutes criminalizing the interracial liquor trade, because large numbers of whites were among those accused.Google Scholar

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77 Consider also Moller v. Keimoes School Committee, 1911 A.D. 635, and the discussion of this case by H. Corder, Judges at Work 156–59 (Cape Town: Juta, 1984) (“Corder, Judges at Work”). Immediately after Union, the new Appellate Division gave its seal of approval to the “popular sense,” as they called it, of race divisions and hierarchy, even while noting with regret that popular opinion, as they had defined it, was not unanimous. The Chief Justice noted, in relation to miscegenation: “Unfortunately the practice of many white men has often been inconsistent with that belief” (at 157).Google Scholar

78 There was a continuum of relationships in which revolt was possible. The Magistrate's analysis of the strike and riot in Port Elizabeth in 1920 in which 26 people were shot by the police is suggestive. He wrote not just of economic discontent or only of the problems of controlling a hostile crowd. His account went further. There had been “very considerable unrest and anxiety amongst the European population of the city…. I had received several complaints of open defiance and threats on the part of domestics toward European ladies. Generally the nerves of the Europeans, especially the ladies, were on edge as a result of the truculent attitude generally of the natives.”Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the causes of, and occurrences at, the Native Disturbances at Port Elizabeth on 23/10/10, and the General Economic Conditions as They Affect the Native and Coloured Population 22-23 (Pretoria: U.G. 39-1921) (“Union Government, Commission on Port Elizabeth”). Google Scholar

79 The Star (Johannesburg), 6 Dec. 1921. Magistrates' reports reflect a regular recommendation of the escalation of sanctions for criminal offenses, whipping, longer terms in prison, and harsher prison conditions and diet, in particular those in which Africans were the class of offenders caught. The attitude applied to the most minor areas, as well as major ones, and was accompanied by a repeated diagnosis of the attitude of Africans toward white authority. Without the strictest enforcement of all its laws, the fear was that, to give but one example, Africans would be “under the impression that the Government is afraid of carrying out the laws, and accordingly take up a defiant attitude” (U.G. 36-1919 at 24).Google Scholar

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85 1911 N.A.C.107.Google Scholar

86 Id. at 109.Google Scholar

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