What relationships are present, and possible, in an environment dominated by state sanctioned protocols of control, bureaucracy and violence?
As stated in the Introduction, it is the intention, in this dissertation, to move away from a framing of non-compliance as a problem of simply “the State versus the fisher”, represented in shorthand as x versus y. If fishers are represented by y, then the state is x, and the processes of power and resistance that characterise their interaction are contained in the term “versus”. Chapters Two and Three have complicated the assumed universality of motivation and experience amongst fishers, and has shown that the assumption of universality in law and practice conflicts with the specificity of everyday experiences. In what follows, the discussion attends to how the state is experienced in the everyday, and how these experiences complicate the idea of a centralised, monolithic state (x) that has the power to enact its version of the world on the public (versus). Ethnographic examples from the everyday illustrate how the “state” is not a given, but is constituted through negotiation of space and control between governance institutions, inspectors and coastal publics.
Understanding these everyday interactions reveals that the “state” does not always have the power to control, and how such resistance occurs.
Representing the authority of the state as monolithic illustrates a dynamic of control that does not do full justice to networks of relations on the ground that resist or substitute that authority. The discussion of everyday compliances functions cannot be confined to a discussion in terms of political state power only. It is dangerous to take such a formulation for granted when trying to understand how the state functions. However, reading the South African state’s attempts to regulate the fisheries, it can be argued that the state is trying to establish control as the primary term of engagement between itself and the resource users. The state appears to be taking for granted its own authority, even when resource users question its legitimacy. It is the processes of by which the state is attempting this control that is the focus. In Agrawal’s words, the task is to investigate “how power is generated by and located in different strategies of government” – or not (Agrawal, 2005).
The inspectors play a prominent role in such processes. However, the space in which they operate and the texture of relations within that space, resist these attempts by the
state. Inspectors are the expressions of centralised power, not the power itself. The inspectors do not simply transmit the power of the state onto the resource using public, but negotiate its implementation through interactions with others, in accordance with their positioning in the local and wider web of relations. As “employees at the bottom of the bureaucratic pyramid”, inspectors “pose a challenge to the distinction between state and society” due to their embeddedness in the local and the outside spaces of practice (Gupta, 1995:384).
Inspectors who are considered “powerful” in terms of being well-connected do not necessarily draw their advantage from physical proximity to political leadership, but possibly also from local ties or ‘horizontal’ alliances within their jurisdiction. Furthermore, the authority of an inspector is not necessarily based on their rank or their political affiliations or networks, but can be drawn from their work or life experience. In Gansbaai, two inspectors were pointed out to me who, according to their colleagues, wielded a lot of authority within the unit and the community-at-large, for different reasons. One had been on the job, and specifically in Gansbaai, since the 1980’s and despite never being appointed in the position, was considered unofficially to hold the same rank as the Chief Inspector.
The other inspector in question had previously been in SAPS, and regularly made significant arrests, despite also being prone to getting warnings from Head Office about his lackadaisical attitude to paperwork. This habit, it was hinted by his colleagues, could prevent him from getting promoted despite his proven value as an inspector.
Through the use of “technologies of power” that attempt to regulate the everyday life of citizens, the various processes and institutions that comprise “the state” are geared to articulate a façade of coherence (Das & Poole, 2004:9). “Technologies of power” are akin to what Amita Baviskar refers to as “technologies of rule” (2003:5051; see Chapter Three), and which I will refer to as technologies of control – that is, tactics used by the state to exert, maintain or establish its authority in the everyday, often in the face of resistance. It is the state’s attempts at control that are referred to; the success of these technologies cannot be assumed. In Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India, Akhil Gupta warns that “the real danger lies less in the fact that one’s understanding of the state is located and partial than in the illegitimate claims often made...as to the completeness and holism of the state” (2012:51).
A central feature of these attempts to control the contested spaces of the fisheries is surveillance. The state keeps an eye on both the resource users and the inspectors, while the inspectors and resource users watch each other; unsurprising, given the historical and current presence of violence in relations between the South African state and its citizens (past and present). Compliance inspectors are state-sanctioned peace officers, who are required to enforce certain forms of violence in order to maintain peace. Legal behaviour may not be met with violence, but it is the expected response to illegal behaviour. Violence is not always physical, though in extreme hostile situations such as those that occur in the poaching hotspots, it can be (see Gupta, 2012). Violence responds to and creates a heavily contested physical and social terrain. By equating control with cooperation, the environmental governance prevalent in the fisheries sector has contributed to these contestations.
Violence
The physical dangers of policing marine resources
The non-physical violence that I have witnessed enforced on fishers deemed illegal has largely been in the form of fines or other legal actions, and often such penalties can be shrugged off as just a tap on the wrist. For others, however, the tap on the wrist is felt much more strongly and will have profound effects on their short-term livelihoods – as in the case below.
One day in Stilbaai, February 2012, I went out on river patrol with two of the Cape Nature officials. The first stop was at a middle-aged but weathered coloured man angling from between some reeds, half-hidden amongst them. He was clearly poor, and rather thin.
They checked him for his permit, and he admitted to not having one. The CapeNature official went through his things and found one undersized white steenbras, which is on the no-catch list. It was a tiny fish, and the fish was supposed to be his lunch – he had one or two pieces of bread and some rudimentary braai92 supplies with him. This was subsistence non-compliance, vastly different from the usual profit-based non-compliance I had observed (such as amongst small-scale commercial fishers who exceed catch limits or recreational fishers who sell their catch). He was very submissive, and clearly frightened. The fine that
92 barbecue
was eventually written out and carefully explained to him in Afrikaans amounted to R750.
The look on the fisher’s face when the amount was named was not despair: it was fear.
That amount was more than what he was paid a month as a casual farm labourer in the Riversdale area (as he explained). It was explained to him he had to pay the fine, or present himself on the appointed day at the Stilbaai magistrate’s court to have the fine reduced. If he did neither, an arrest warrant would be issued. Given his circumstances, he was told, the fine would most likely be reduced significantly if he showed up in court to answer the charges, as he would be given a chance to ask for leniency. Though this was good news under the circumstances, it was clear that he was shaken.
We left him, as he left the riverbank to make his way home, hitch-hiking the 40 kilometre road back to Riversdale. When compared to the violence done to and by inspectors in Overberg, then this interaction may seem non-violent in comparison.
However, the possible effect it had on the man in question’s present and future food security meant that he felt it physically.
Metaphors of war are often used to describe the relationship between the state and illegal harvesters. The term war features regularly in Parliament discussions and media articles on poaching.93 Philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres discusses how modernist attempts at control naturalise the paradigm of war (2008). The media-connected denizen of the 21st century cannot help but be aware of the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Obesity, the War on Poaching. Susan Sontag wrote one of her best known works on the narrative of war in the practice of biomedicine, and how this paradigm determines one’s relationship to health and one’s own body (Illness as Metaphor, 1978). This work argues that the war or colonisation metaphor only allows certain kinds of relations between the threat and the enforcer, and between the sufferer and the observer. The same can be said
93 ”Mr Abram said that the war against poaching was far from being won.” Marine fisheries resources & vessel management: Departmental briefing, 11 June 2013. Report available on:
http://www.pmg.org.za/report/20130611-marine-fisheries-resources-vessel-management-departmental- briefing.
“The Committee agreed that DAFF needed to draft a comprehensive “war plan”.
http://www.pmg.org.za/report/agric. Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Portfolio Committee
19 February 2013. Fisheries patrol and research vessels, re-allocation of fishing rights: Department progress reports.
Article by Yolandi Groenewald, “SA ‘losing abalone war’”, 4 February 2009. http://mg.co.za/article/2009-02- 04-sa-losing-abalone-war.
Article by Melanie Gosling and Craig McKune, “Poachers winning war”, 21 May 2009.
http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/poachers-winning-war-1.443988#.UvyrGPna5cY
for other metaphors of war, such as the “abalone wars” (discussed). Maldonado-Torres explains that the paradigm or dominant metaphor of war allows space to be mapped as a battlefield, in which relations with objects take “primacy over the relation between human beings” (2008:237). By being mapped as a battlefield, the relations within that space are predetermined, and will further shape that space according to those assumptions. As Lefebvre states, the processes that produce space and the processes that space produce are part of the same iterative process (1979). It is given shape by what happens within, by what passes through.
The very real threat of violence against the inspectors is invoked to justify their access to weapons and restraints, or collaboration with the police or navy. Poaching is a central concern to those inspectors based in the Overberg, the Peninsula and parts of the West Coast (specifically Paternoster).94 In these stations, the job of compliance inspector is one that almost daily brings one face to face with violence. The jurisdictions of the Gansbaai and St Helena Bay units were the two areas in which I worked that were significantly more dangerous than any of the other sites. Gansbaai, Hawston and Betty’s Bay are the three main nodes of the epicentre of abalone poaching in the Western Cape (Hauck, 1997; Steinberg, 2005; Hauck & Gallardo-Fernandez, 2013). I had not been allowed to even consider working in Hawston due to the levels of violence there, and in the end I was only able to complete just over one week in Gansbaai before concerns for my safety over-rode the practicalities of research, as discussed in the Introduction.
Long before working in Gansbaai, I was made aware of how violent the situation can get there. Colleague Sven Ragaller told stories from his own fieldwork about how intense the poaching conflict can get (Ragaller, 2012), and for months I had been hearing stories from inspectors I had been working with about life-threatening situations involving blatant and confident poachers: Gansbaai was represented as the ultimate challenge for DAFF.
While Hawston may be home to some of the most significant abalone cartels, the presence of DAFF and SAPS in Hawston and Hermanus, as well as the by now depleted stocks at that part of the coastline, means that much of the poaching actually occurs in Gansbaai or the
94 Stilbaai is the only site at which I worked where there really is little poaching. The poaching that does occur usually either involves the catching of undersize fish or fishing in the MPA, as well as the poaching of alikreukel for their beautiful shells (the meat is worth less than the shell, so is often left to rot on the beach). The inspectors here do not have the strain of competing with organised poaching syndicates as the units elsewhere on the coast do.
adjacent beaches of Pearly Beach, Franskraal, De Kelders and further into the Strandveld as far as De Damme (en route to Struisbaai).
I arrived in Gansbaai in January 2012 to meet with Chief Mereki at the DAFF offices in the harbour. At that time, 22 inspectors and a permanent anti-poaching squad made up of ex-uMkhonto weSizwe and Azanian People’s Liberation Army veterans95 (who operated more or less independently of the DAFF inspectors) were based at that station. The Marine squad of SAPS was also operational there at the time, and armed naval soldiers who were stationed in Gansbaai over January and February in order to assist the anti-poaching efforts were present. Thanks to the naval presence, poaching was suppressed during these months: the military navy units are more intimidating than the usual forces, as their weaponry and training were far superior to those of either the inspectors or the poachers.
This was temporary, however and the inspectors were all quick to point out to me that the poachers would be back in force within hours of the navy’s scheduled end to this operation (which did indeed happen, according to reports).
At the time of research there were approximately 28 legal abalone licenses in Gansbaai, the only operations allowed to dive in the area. As a preventative to poaching, the area from De Kelders to Franskraal and Ou Kraalsmond had been closed to diving, recreational or otherwise. Besides the legal abalone divers, it was necessary for anyone to apply for a special permit to go diving there. Such permits are usually only given out by the Department of Environmental Affairs for research purposes (such as for those working with Great White Sharks in the Kleinbaai area). Poaching takes up about 90% of the inspectors’
time, with the inspectors outnumbered by around 40 to 60, according to Chief Mereki.
Examples of such outnumbering were related to me by a group of inspectors at the offices in the Gansbaai harbour. Sometimes the cartels from Hawston, in a rare alliance with each other, will come into Gansbaai in convoys of 4x4 vehicles that carry up to 180 poachers. According to the inspectors, they will then, in broad daylight, take over a beach and poach in the open. If a patrol were to find them, there may only be two cars with four inspectors. Even if all 22 inspectors were to be there at the right time and place, the vast numbers of the poachers and the threat of violence means that the inspectors are effectively incapacitated. These are considered by the inspectors to be the most dangerous
95 The armed wings of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, respectively, which were active during the struggle against Apartheid.
poachers, as those who poach at night are risking injury trying to not get caught. Those who poach during the day, however, appear to be confident about not getting caught. The inspectors explain that this attitude is either because of their network of lookouts, contacts in the police or DAFF, or because they are armed heavily enough to be confident about winning any potential battles.
Many is the story I was told by inspectors about fire fights in Gansbaai involving running on the beach, using the terrain to outsmart the poachers, or to flee from them.
These battles tend to be coordinated, on both sides, with tactics and strategies that are similar to guerrilla warfare. This includes targeting of specific individuals in their homes or cars, from both sides. Willem, with whom I worked in Arniston, told me that he had lost two cars during his time in Gansbaai – one government vehicle had been totally wrecked in a car chase, and his own private car had been torched by poachers in his driveway (prior to his transfer to Arniston some years later).
The ties between poaching and gangsterism (particularly the Numbers gangs) run deep, and organised poaching therefore is directly related to violence and drugs (Hauck, 2001; Steinberg, 2005). This changes the terrain of the job – as law enforcement officials they are often involved in cases or situations in which abalone may not be the primary concern. Often, they know this and team up with the SAPS in the area, such as in the case of the regular roadblocks that look for the drugs (usually the methamphetamine concoction known as tik) that are often transported with abalone or used in payment between the
‘exporters’ and the poachers. Sometimes, they chance upon crimes unrelated to fishing during the course of routine tasks. At such times, the inspectors, as the only authority present to legally deal with violence and crime, are often forced into a confrontation by either circumstance or conscience.
I arrived at the station one morning as one of the most hardened inspectors came off the night shift (after having been on duty for more than 12 hours already), to tell the story of why he was still on shift in the common room. As a show of presence, he and another inspector had been driving through the neighbourhood of Blompark late at night, together with another car of Naval officers. A woman accosted them on the street, hysterical and beaten. She pointed to a house nearby and told them that her drunken husband was in there, raping their young daughters. The inspectors and soldiers had to break down the door. When the man came at them with what the inspector described as a
“huge” knife, he was subdued by a blow to the face with a rifle. The little girls rushed out and, crying, grabbed the inspectors around the legs in hugs of traumatised gratitude. The man was taken to the police cells.
Alongside the everyday aggression encountered in their job, the emotional weight of inspectors’ unofficial responsibilities as peace officers in a space wherein violence is common (as in the case above) must be significant. However, I was only told of one occasion in Gansbaai when counselling was offered and accepted for trauma encountered on the job. Two inspectors on patrol had been out on an isolated beach when they came upon two poachers. Rocks were thrown. One of the inspectors was hit on the head, and in the chase and confusion that followed, one poacher was shot in the leg. The other ran away, and the officers immediately loaded the injured poacher into the vehicle and rushed, as fast as they could on the sand, to the tar road where an ambulance was being sent to meet them. Due to the poacher’s thick wetsuit, they said, the inspectors did not realise how much blood he was losing, but checking on him, the one inspector realised he had died. The inspector who had fired the shot was driving, and his partner had to lie to him about the poacher’s condition in order to keep his focus on the dangerous road.
Paternoster, too, can be violent space. The first time I entered Paternoster with one of the inspectors, we drove along the 15 kilometre dirt road that runs from Britannia Bay to the north, through a nature reserve and private land, to the border of the first holiday homes in Paternoster. We stopped the car and the inspector started pointing out “running routes” to me. These are the paths that the poachers or their runners follow through the nooks and crannies among the houses built in the local vernacular – low walls, curves, gateways and secret inner courtyards. Many of the houses down by the beach seem to have irregular shapes, making for small passages between and sometimes through the properties – escape routes that can only be followed on foot and which require some acrobatic jumping to clear obstacles. We drove further amongst the houses, maintaining a slow speed. As he took the first turn on the road between the beach and first houses, the inspector laughed and told me we had already been seen, and everyone would now know that there is “a new person in the car with him” before we even make it to the beach.
When we did reach the main beach (and parking lot, with basic fish processing facilities), the few local fishers present barely acknowledged our presence, only looking at me when I