Democratic Death: South Africa’s Killing State

• In Event: New Directions in the Study of Emotions and Violence

Abstract

Why would citizens laugh at a play about a massacre, particularly when the massacre was committed by agents of their own democratic state? What does such laughter tell us about expectations citizens have of democracy and how they experience democratic rule? To answer this question, this paper examines the ways in which citizens experience political time through the lens of one of the most important events since democratization in South Africa: the Marikana Massacre, the largest instance of state violence since the end of apartheid. In doing so, it argues that existing theories about why citizens lose fidelity to democracy are implicitly based on assumptions about political time, variously arguing that democracy can be undone by a country’s cultural past, failures in its present institutions, or the collapse of its economic future. When seen from a South African perspective, though, these understandings of political time appear too linear, while overlooking the experience of political time for citizens themselves. Through the lens of the Marikana Massacre, the paper argues that citizens experience time as uneven, punctuated, multiple, and contradictory. It hypothesizes that this sense of time is emblematic of the uneven, punctuated, multiple, and contradictory ways in which citizens experience democracy generally and, therefore, may shed light on the oft ambivalent fidelity citizens have to democratic rule.

Author

• Nicholas Rush Smith, CUNY-City College