Security, Demography and the New and Improved Apartheid: Is South Africa Leading the Way?

 

Pix credit here

Here is an interesting story out of South Africa. There are a number of versions, each infused with the contextual perspective of its publication organ (e.g., here, here, here).  I will use the reporting by ESPN for the context:

David Teeger has been relieved of the South Africa Under-19 captaincy a week before the World Cup over concerns for his safety following his comments in support of Israeli soldiers in the ongoing conflict with Palestine. * * * The decision to remove Teeger as captain, CSA said, was taken "in the best interests of all the players, the SA U-19 team and David himself." He will continue to remain with the squad as a player and a new captain will be named "in due course". * * * There has already been at least one incident in relation to Teeger's appointment as South Africa's U-19 captain at a cricket match in the country. A group of pro-Palestinian supporters picketed outside the main gate at Newlands during the New Year's Test between South Africa and India. They were then escorted by police to a specifically designated spot from where they continued to question Teeger's selection. Another group of fans sat in the North Stand with Palestinian flags during the game. CSA expects the numbers of protestors to escalate in light of Teeger's dedicating an award to the soldiers of Israel last year.* * *

On October 22, 2023, Teeger was named the Rising Star at the ABSA Jewish Achiever Awards ceremony and in his acceptance speech, said the following: "But more importantly, yes, I've been awarded this award, and yes, I am now the rising star, but the true rising stars are the young soldiers in Israel… So I'd like to dedicate this award to the South African family that married off one son whilst the other is still missing. And I'd like to dedicate it to the state of Israel and to every single soldier fighting so that we can live and thrive in the diaspora."

Teeger's comments were reported in the South African Jewish Report on October 26 and have since been widely published across South African media. In response, the Palestinian Solidarity Alliance (PSA) lodged an official complaint with the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee. Subsequently, CSA, Lions (the domestic union where Teeger plays), four Johannesburg-based cricket clubs, one concerned cricket supporter, the Abu Asvat Institute of National Building (a civil society group), and a director of a company that sponsors Lions all issued statements of grievance. CSA referred the complaints to advocate Wim Trengrove, who conducted an independent adjudication. Trengrove found that Teeger had acted in accordance with his constitutional right to freedom of expression and did not engage in any unbecoming or detrimental conduct. CSA has accepted the report.

However, the PSA said Teeger's comments caused a "significant rift within the cricket community," and they continue to question whether he is "fit to represent a diverse South African team and more so, whether he has the necessary capacity to lead any such team." The PSA called for Teeger's suspension from the U-19 World Cup squad and vowed to protest during the tournament. Pro-Palestinian sentiment is surging through South Africa after the country took Israel to the International Court of Justice this week.

And here is the language of the announcement by the South African bureaucrats, delightfully mellifluous and abstract, an aria to contemporary language of rights that can evoke virtually any useful feeling in its hearers.

   It is, indeed, a pity that the statement could not be sung. But the message might sound quite different depending on the ostinato against which this melody is overlain. 

And, indeed, it is that ostinato that merits far more consideration--especially by those least interested in that exercise, the South Africans themselves. What, then, might be the "melodic, rhythmic or chordal phrase, usually short, that’s repeated continuously through" these actions?

1. The weaponization of "security" as a means of effectively managing (and in the extreme curbing) speech, even as the "right" to it is celebrated in the theoretical and performative discursive tropes of a political order (and its private and public institutional organs)  has become a staple of advanced societies and those who seek to mimic their performative tropes for herding their populations. The tactic has been much in use in advanced states (a complaint about it here; for the traditional context e.g., here). One moves here beyond speech that incites--the jurisprudence of which, though difficult at the margins, is well established in advanced liberal democracies, and perhaps other places, even as the borderlands between incitement and opinion differ.

2. But security concerns need context--that is they need a basis for realization. To that end speech/acts might raise passions sufficiently that public order is affected. In that instance the state has two primary choices (beyond suppressing speech objectionable to some); either it suppresses the reaction to levels that accord with social and political norms; or it suppresses speech (or manages it away from the public eye so that passions are not raised). This is all well known.  Traditionally in states that favor broad speech rights, the (weak) presumption is to manage reactive passions.   But that has changed as speech that appears to interfere with the guiding ideologies of institutional actors are valued less than the damage from inflamed passion. That is especially the case, one way or another, official positions tend to favor one side to the other. The scales on which this is balanced is increasingly the ostensibly neutral analytics of security. 

3. When combined with the power of a heckler's veto (especially  where the hecklers serve the interests of those concerned with security, the trajectories of management become clearer. Those trajectories, of course, will point in different directions depending on national context and the political objectives of functionaries controlling  relevant institutional organs. Heckler's veto may be annoying to states, but they can be quite effective against speech/acts that the state is otherwise unable to suppress directly. (For a response from an official in an elite US academic institution, see, here). Again the borderlands shift depending on political community. 

4. A heckler's response is a species of mob rule. Mob rule here is not merely a derogatory reference to the canaille. It refers to any mass mobilization that has potential substantial effects not on the specific times, spaces, and places where speech occurs, but on the speaker in other ways.  In some places that potential is measured by the ability of passionate groups to turn their passions into more useful instruments of collective power, for example against political actors (elections, judicial actions,  civil disobedience etc) ) or private actors (boycotts of goods and services). In developed states that impulse has been centered on the effects on social and economic relations of speaker within society. But it can also affect other social relations.  In other states  public bodies may move against the speaker.

5. The combination of weaponization, an increasing reluctance to suppress speech reactive passions, and the political messaging of a heckler's veto by large or important social collectives within a polity (or ones with respect to which there is substantial sympathy by state functionaries and their claques) can effectively be used to punish a speaker for speaking in ways unrelated to the speech/acts that was at the center of the passionate response. The idea is simple: in an effort to avoid the passions of the mob to turn against it, the state to other actor will use the instruments of order against the speaker either per-emptively or after the fact in ways that may be unrelated to the speech act or its content. While this is not understood discursively as punishment (but rather in protecting the reputation of the state or employer, reducing costs and risks of bad thins, etc.,) that is in deployment of the security concern, the effect may feel punitive (and satisfyingly so to the collective that made that possible.  In this sense speech may be protected, but it doesn't necessarily insulate one from reprisal by the actors in the webs of social relations in which the speaker operates.

6. The issue becomes more interesting when the collateral effects produce a ghettoizing effect on a person because of use of weaponization against characteristics and opinions ascribed to a (social, religious, ethnic, racial, religious, gender, etc.) collective. This is most pronounced when speech/acts are conflated with or assumed to be a defining characteristic of a discrete and insular social collective within the larger political collective. In that circumstance, several consequences might follow. The first is that this conflation is made explicit as well as its consequences.  That was the old fashioned approach and far too crude for modern  democratic polities. The second is to reshape the scope of speech rights to ensure that only approved speech is permitted. That, too, is difficult to rationalize much less implement in democratic society.  The third would herd individuals within a normative ghetto by ensuring that space within the wider society would be made available as long as they conformed to, and denied, the opinions or behaviors deemed offensive by the larger community. This works well because one need nly develop unspoken collective presumptions that are then expressed through the mchanisms of neutral legal systems. 

7. But the substantive effect here is apartheid. It is not the crude and old fashioned apartheid that is the animating demon that drives the South African (official, discursive) psyche.  It is actually far more elegant. The object is to manage an effective separation through the abstract use of neutral principles in ways that  make it possible to impose disabilities on members of a collective, by the strict use of rights enhancing mechanisms. 

8. In the case of the Jews of South Africa, the structures of that new apartheid are becoming clear.  First it is grounded in an effective partnership between social sub-collectives with substantial power in a democratic polity and the apparatus of public power. Second, it is grounded on the conflation of essentialist presumptions about a group (that include characteristics repugnant to majority social collectives) with the interpretation of individual speech/acts. Third, it reshapes the scale on which the provocation of opinion is measured to ensure that any expression that exceeds the orthodox view will be (legally) protected but politically costly (civil disturbances, etc.). Fourth, it invokes the benignly necessary principles of social order in favor of suppression--not with respect to the speech/act at the time of its making, but with respect to the speaker whose ability to participate in social organs is now a function of that prior act. Fifth, the consequence is social disability that serves as a form of abstracted social separation.  That is, the separation does not exist formally, but is effective.  Sixth, the larger consequence for the minority social collective--their members will be allowed a space in the broader collective (in the terms of old fashioned apartheid, to serve as the maids, workers, and wealth makers for the ruling collectives) as long as they behave and adhere to the expectations of the majority. 

9. Play on.