Locations of Violence: Political Rationality and Death Squads in Apartheid South Africa

From the 1970s to the early 1990s members of the anti-apartheid opposition, in South Africa and outside, were subjected to a range of horrifically violent and illegal acts, including assassinations. During the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which started in 1995, it emerged that these acts were the work of various agencies or 'death squads' set up within the state in the late 1960s. South Africans who had sailed oblivious through a civil war were battered by gut-wrenching and graphic accounts of sensational violence. A violence that resists comprehension, because this violence, the grisly gore of it, can by its sheer scale, its sheer brutality, become an object of awe in itself. It is the aim of this paper to locate this individualised violence of state perpetrators within what will be argued were the dominant political rationalities which characterised the defence of the late-apartheid period, which made particular forms of state violence 'thinkable'. Based on a critical reading on state violence in South Africa, the paper seeks to re-situate the fact of this violence in order to suggest a different set of questions that might offer a more illuminating angle on this troubling manifestation of modern state power. © 2005 Journal of Contemporary African Studies.