Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era

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• South African policing is characterized by officers avoiding confrontation due to fear, gravitating only toward domestic violence calls where their presence is explicitly requested and grants them authority.  Copied to clipboard!
• South Africa's prison gangs, rooted in century-old oral histories centered on the bandit Nongoloza, represent some of the country's oldest and most enduring institutions, enforcing law through ritualized storytelling.  Copied to clipboard!
• Nelson Mandela wore distinct political masks throughout his life, culminating in projecting an avuncular cheerfulness in the 1990s to prevent civil war, despite personally feeling deep anger and sadness.  Copied to clipboard!

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South African Police Behavior

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(00:00:40)

• Key Takeaway: South African police actively avoid policing hotspots because they fear crowds and only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls where their presence is requested.
• Summary: Police in South Africa often avoid responding to calls in high-risk areas, preferring situations like domestic disputes where their authority is immediately established by consent. This policing by consent means that public willingness to be policed dictates police activity. The legitimacy of the police force has significantly weakened since 2007, making the situation worse.

Fixing Police Effectiveness

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(00:03:16)

• Key Takeaway: Fixing South African policing requires targeting specific crimes by assembling small, well-resourced, hand-picked investigative groups rather than attempting systemic overhaul immediately.
• Summary: The path to fixing policing involves prioritizing specific crimes and building effective organizations around those priorities. The current state of policing is described as a catastrophic failure, evidenced by high-level corruption allegations. Black police officers face unique class resentment from unemployed citizens who feel they unfairly benefited from securing these jobs.

Gender in Domestic Policing

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(00:05:29)

• Key Takeaway: Female and male police officers handle domestic violence scenes very differently, reflecting distinct imaginations of family structure and empathy.
• Summary: The law is often made up by police in the moment, especially at domestic violence scenes, leading to significant variation in outcomes based on the officer’s gender. Police trustworthiness is declining, with endemic bribery becoming common practice where officers are paid by interested parties to investigate crimes. However, police are generally not feared more than criminals, though they are treated with wariness.

Apartheid Policing Mistakes

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(00:07:53)

• Key Takeaway: The ANC government’s decision to use the police force as a political vehicle under Thabo Mbeki rapidly eroded the bureaucratic integrity of the police post-apartheid.
• Summary: A four-to-five-year hiatus after democracy meant the new government couldn’t fire existing police but also didn’t trust them, allowing some good work to occur initially. This changed when President Mbeki began using the police to target political opponents, which damaged the institution’s non-partisan function. Cape Town’s relative safety is attributed to private policing in middle-class areas, contrasting sharply with townships like Khayelitsha.

South African Prison Gangs

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(00:10:25)

• Key Takeaway: South African prison gangs regulate behavior through elaborate, century-old rituals based on the oral history of the bandit Nongoloza, embedding law within narrative.
• Summary: Initiation into these gangs involves learning the story of Nongoloza, whose disputes over gang conduct mirror modern divisions, creating a culturally rich system of law and ritual. The gangs (26s, 27s, 28s) control prisons nationwide, maintaining the same core narrative for a century. Mass incarceration of the early working class, often for minor passbook violations, created the environment for these institutions to form.

Apartheid Prison Structure

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(00:14:51)

• Key Takeaway: Under apartheid, prisons were segregated by race, but by the late 1970s, black warders staffed the majority of positions due to staffing shortages, maintaining a hostile relationship with prisoners.
• Summary: Initially, only white guards supervised black prisoners, but later, black personnel filled most functionary roles under a color bar that limited their advancement. The relationship between guards and gangs was canonically hostile, punctuated by ritualized violence against the entire prison population following attacks on white warders. Prison economies only developed rapidly in the late 1980s when warders became conduits for drug trafficking as apartheid collapsed.

Mandela Marriage Dynamics

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(00:19:36)

• Key Takeaway: Nelson and Winnie Mandela were only living together for two years, and Nelson increasingly loved a fictionalized version of Winnie, whose image he desperately tried to maintain via letters while imprisoned.
• Summary: Winnie Mandela intuitively sought power by marrying the most powerful rising political figure, viewing her role as Mrs. Mandela as a project to maintain their joint reputation. Nelson Mandela, a notorious philanderer, became deeply besotted with Winnie, but his intense love was directed toward a woman increasingly separate from his reality on the outside. Their candid, bugged meetings revealed familiar marital cruelties, bickering, and lying.

Winnie Mandela’s Character

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(00:23:36)

• Key Takeaway: Winnie Mandela’s psyche contained chilling capacity for violence against the defenseless alongside deep sympathy, a duality rooted in her ambitious, high-stakes upbringing.
• Summary: Winnie’s weak personal boundaries led her to allow her torturer deep into her psyche, later fueling her political activism with hatred directed at him. Her early life involved ambitious parents who explicitly favored certain children, teaching her that the stakes were always high. She was capable of terrible violence, yet she also saved both her and Nelson’s reputations at times through brilliant image management.

Nelson Mandela’s Masks

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(00:26:02)

• Key Takeaway: Nelson Mandela’s political genius involved adopting masks—from tailored lawyer to Castro-esque revolutionary—to match the perceived needs of the moment, most notably projecting joy while feeling deep personal tragedy.
• Summary: Mandela consciously molded his presentation, such as adopting a military look after his organization was banned, or recasting himself as a martyr during his 1964 trial. His final, crucial mask in the 1990s involved projecting unthreatening joy and cheerfulness to guide South Africa peacefully away from civil war, despite his internal sadness over his life’s destruction.

Post-Apartheid ANC Decline

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(00:28:38)

• Key Takeaway: The ANC governed reasonably well for 15 years, benefiting from a commodity super cycle, but a ‘revolution’ within the party around 2007 installed a nihilistic, racially brittle middle class focused on fleecing the state.
• Summary: Younger South Africans are turning away from Nelson Mandela’s legacy due to the ANC’s subsequent 30 years of poor governance. Winnie Mandela remains a lodestar for a vocal, populist constituency advocating for the violent revolution that never occurred. The ANC’s decline began when a frustrated provincial middle class took control, leading to the systematic corruption of state resources.

Judiciary Quality vs. Independence

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(00:31:43)

• Key Takeaway: The South African judiciary has maintained its independence from the executive, but its overall quality has significantly weakened due to the political shifts following the 2007-2008 internal ANC revolution.
• Summary: The judiciary’s long legal culture, established during the apartheid years of resisting the state, has preserved its independence. However, like other public institutions, its quality has deteriorated over the last decade. This decline is linked to the new ruling faction’s destructive ideology and focus on state intervention.

Optimistic Case for South Africa

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(00:32:33)

• Key Takeaway: South Africa’s saving grace is a solid, liberal-minded political center that guarantees 25-30% of the vote, providing a rational basis for modest future improvement.
• Summary: Despite pessimism arising from current failures, the country possesses a stable political center that prevents a Zimbabwe-like collapse. Basic infrastructure like logistics and electricity can be rebuilt, though this rebuilding will be slow. True flourishing requires more ambitious changes, including rebuilding the civil service, which is currently hampered by a destructive ideology.

Durban’s Economic Woes

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(00:34:19)

• Key Takeaway: Durban’s land prices have fallen significantly because of shocking local government mismanagement, which is a symptom of ruling party corruption leading to infrastructure deterioration.
• Summary: Local government management in major cities like Durban and Johannesburg has been ruined by corruption. This mismanagement causes basic infrastructure to deteriorate, escalating the costs of doing business and causing commerce to flee the area. Many of South Africa’s core problems stem from poor governance at the local and regional levels.

COVID Response and Statism

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(00:41:10)

• Key Takeaway: South Africa’s harsh, prolonged COVID lockdown, while initially driven by fear, gave a lease of life to a raw, blunt statist mentality within the cabinet that gratuitously harmed the poor.
• Summary: President Ramaphosa’s eloquent calls for kindness to the military enforcing the lockdown contrasted with the devastating impact of the hard lockdown on poor citizens. The government, once a liberation movement, acted overly paternalistic and statist, controlling the situation anxiously. This crisis provided an opportunity for statist elements in the cabinet to enact serious state intervention they desired.

South African Fiction Vitality

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(00:42:52)

• Key Takeaway: The best South African novels may still be ahead, sustained by a long national tradition where serious writing is intrinsically linked to high-stakes national identity and politics.
• Summary: Marlene Van Niekerk’s novel, which explores a complex relationship between a dying white woman and her coloured carer, exemplifies the depth of post-apartheid fiction. The country’s history of competing nationalisms instilled a DNA where writers are expected to be deeply serious about the world around them. This tradition ensures vitality, as the stakes remain high enough to inspire profound literature.

Cecil Rhodes Biography

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(00:44:26)

• Key Takeaway: Jonny Steinberg’s biography of Cecil Rhodes focuses intimately on his personal life, particularly his complex relationships with young men, while also examining the geopolitics of his era.
• Summary: The biography aims to be more intimate than previous works, initially exploring how a potentially gay man wielded public power, though the author found Rhodes’s self-conception of his private life strange. Steinberg suspects Rhodes never had sex with anyone but was deeply in love with and shaped by certain young men around him. The work also seeks to contextualize Rhodes within the broader geopolitical landscape of the time.

Rhodesia Settlement History

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(00:45:37)

• Key Takeaway: English families moving to Rhodesia in the 1920s were not foolish, as the colony was politically docile and economically successful as a staple exporter by that time.
• Summary: White settlement in South Africa began in the mid-17th century due to favorable climate, while the movement north into Rhodesia was a slower process concluding in the late 19th century. By the 1920s, Rhodesia had established successful institutions and was earning foreign currency, making it a viable place for middle-class white settlement. The initial exclusion of women was temporary, as they were desired once settlement became stable.

Travel Recommendations

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(00:48:10)

• Key Takeaway: An ideal two-week trip should include Cape Town’s beauty, a long, safe coastal drive eastward past the Transkei to witness rural history, and a visit to Johannesburg for its vibrant music scene.
• Summary: Cape Town is recommended as one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and the drive along the coast offers continuous natural beauty and exposure to the densest rural zones of South Africa. Johannesburg is South Africa’s most vibrant city, especially for music, and visitors can safely attend venues by staying in northern or western suburbs and using Uber. Crime is zoned, making it possible to navigate safely by avoiding foolish actions.