White minority rule in South Africa was maintained through different forms of violence. Controlling and exploiting the black population required an extensive and interlinked bureaucratic, judicial and coercive apparatus that directly subjected black South Africans to state violence and marginalisation. Inevitably, this system provoked resistance. At the same time, ...

Despite the potentially catastrophic repercussions of South Africa’s violent crime epidemic, little progress has been made in understanding why violence has persisted and even escalated since the end of apartheid in 1994. Adopting an historical approach that highlights the persistence of urban violence throughout the twentieth century, this article focuses on the c...

Cet article se concentre sur les interprétations et les représentations des actes de violence dans la littérature de fiction et non romanesque et dans les médias, afin d’examiner les discours racialisés autour de la peur et de la vulnérabilité dans l’Afrique du Sud moderne. Il ne se soucie pas tant des statistiques et des « faits » liés au crime que du rôle de la r...

Drawing on interviews with people involved in the communal violence that traumatized Thokoza and Katlehong townships in the early 1990s, this article challenges the received wisdom regarding transition violence in South Africa. Most significantly, it transcends the dominant narrative that African National Congress (ANC) supporters in the townships were under relent...