A clear-eyed take on a corrupt and venal institution

Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa
Christopher McMichael
Inkani Books

On April 10 2020, in the early days of the coronavirus lockdown, a South African man named Collins Khosa died after a brutal assault by security services. Khosa was, in effect, murdered by the state. But unlike Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner, African Americans whose names have become synonymous with racist police violence in the US, Khosa has not been immortalised in our national consciousness.

Two years down the line, there are no posters with his name on, no slogans, no marches demanding “never again”. Even the slain miners of Marikana, an event that’s etched in blood in South Africa’s memory, have no names. We encourage ourselves to remember, but in truth we forgot them as individuals almost as soon as they died.

This collective amnesia has many causes, but at least part of what motivates it is fatigue. South Africans are just so tired of stories of violence and death at the hands of the police. We are so tired of hearing who has been brutalised by state forces. Habituated to police violence, we sit with it on a daily basis. Indeed, as Christopher McMichael shows in his excellent if upsetting new book, police violence is as much a normalised part of the South African landscape as braais, code-switching and political puns.

Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa offers a thorough history of policing in this country, debunking some important fictions. While we all, I hope, are now willing to acknowledge the appalling extent of police aggression during apartheid, there is still a strain of thought that insists everything pre-1994 was fine, at least in terms of corruption. McMichael’s thorough and measured history blows that notion out of the water, making it clear the police service in South Africa has always been a corrupt and venal institution. Indeed, as US abolitionists such as the brilliant Mariame Kaba remind us, this type of amoral self-enrichment, this valuing of property over people and of elites over community, has been baked into the idea of policing from the start. Despite the ANC-instituted cosmetic change from South African Police (SAP) to South African Police Service (SAPS), McMichael makes it clear the SA police are not, and have never been, about serving and protecting the public, notwithstanding the carefully constructed mythologies that surround them.

If you’ve been following the news or even just listening to the people around you, none of this will come as a huge shock. What is surprising, however, is the intensity of having all this information collected in one place. McMichael’s academic training serves him well (he has a PhD from Rhodes): the book is rigorously researched and accessibly written, without sensationalism or hysteria. But its clear-eyed discussion of the history and current state of the police in South Africa will nonetheless leave you breathless, anxious and very, very angry.

The state and its institutions have not just failed or abandoned us, they are actively hunting and harming us, most particularly those who are poor and black. As well as a call to arms, this important book offers a memorial to past and future victims of the dangerous excess of unchecked police power