(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
When South Africa went to election in 1994, many saw it as a celebration of the four-year democratization process following the collapse of the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela and his party ANC won a convincing victory, and many believed they were heading towards a society of social justice and equality between all citizens, regardless of skin color.
However, this has not happened. According to Shaun Shelly and Simon Howell, who are both researchers at South African universities, the South African community was faced with a number of new challenges and that failed the test. When the struggle for freedom was over, the common cause, which had united the oppressed and marginalized sections of the population, also disappeared. The focus shifted to individual needs and a race to share in the benefits that were redistributed in connection with the new times. There were blacks and colored ones, as it was called in the days of apartheid, who managed to move up and down the middle class. But most were left hanging on the social base, and as a result, the new South Africa turned into a new class society with huge social differences and huge unemployment.
When the struggle for freedom was over, the common cause also disappeared,
which had united the oppressed.
This is the starting point for the two researchers' analysis of the South African state in the global war on drug trafficking and abuse. Their essay is part of a new anthology from the progressive publisher Pluto Press. The overarching theme is how the war on narcotics is racist, or put another way, how to get easier in the drug police's unpleasant spotlight if the skin color is different from white. And as far as that is concerned, South Africa is actually a crude example.
West Indies and Eton
As a result of the South African system change, the boycott fell away and it opened up trade with the rest of the world. This also applied to drugs, and because lots of South Africans felt rootless in the transition, the abuse exploded.
Authorities have responded. But there are no resources for proper police work, so you choose to go for the easy targets. They are found by sending large police forces on nightly raids in the poor neighborhoods where the black or colored population lives. Arrests in large numbers are doing well in the statistics. It gives the impression of a targeted effort against the unruly, and then it means less that almost all the arrestees are retailers or abusers. Drug abuse is also taking place in South Africa's white middle class, but there is little progress, so in many ways the effort has the same nasty bias as the behavior of the authorities in apartheid days.
With this in mind, it is interesting to read another essay in the book that describes the state of England. Here, the text focuses on two music festivals, Notting Hill Carnival and The Secret Garden Party. There are two events with almost diametrically opposite social profile. The NHC actually goes back to the former British colony of Trinidad, and started as a social gathering for the white elite. But after the abolition of slavery, it became a party of freedom for the island's black population, and in the 1970s the West Indies in England picked up the thread with an annual music festival in Notting Hill, a London neighborhood.
SGP is of recent date. It started as a private annual gathering for former pupils from the elite school Eton, and when the event proved popular, it was opened to the public. Today, SPP attracts 30.000 participants annually, but the profile is the same – it is deliberately decadent and hedonistic. For both events the intake of euphoric substances is large. But the position of the authorities goes in two very different directions. They are making arrests in both places, but the West Indian participants are considered common criminals and then punished while the Eton boys from The Secret Garden Party are offered treatment.
It's a whole other story, but just like in South Africa, the skin color and ethnic background are different.
Cleaning
All of this seems, perhaps, to know predictably. The Scandinavian authorities may have the same stereotypical views of the populations in which they work, although one must of course be cautious about accusing them of racism.
However, where the book has its great justification and sets something in motion, the tour is around the world. You see some common features that you may not have been aware of. For what should Notting Hill have to do with the poor neighborhoods of Cape Town, or with Brazil or Indonesia, for that matter? There is a red thread that you spot, and it becomes really thought-provoking by an essay looking more closely at Colombia:
There you live with the concept cleaning. It originates from the indigenous peoples' culture and can best be translated into ritualized violence. The authors, who are both Colombian university people, also talk about the apotheosis of violence, that is, a stage where violence is divinely instigated. They put the Colombian war on drugs in relation to limpieza and describe in captivation how the use of drugs by both the drug cartels and the authorities is ritualized. Respect for individual human life disappears, and the counterpart becomes an anonymous enemy that must be fought by all means, and so Colombia ends up in the same stereotypes that are the hallmarks of racism.
Again, Colombia is a completely different story from the British music festivals and South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime, and yet it is left with a clear sense of a common feature that could be called the ritualization of racism. It is the eerie and thought-provoking story that this book tells.
