Post-apartheid incarceration The use of incarceration as a state policy continued untrammeled from the colonial to the apartheid periods. Worryingly, the post-apartheid period also shows clear continuities with colonial and apartheid policies. Lukas Muntingh notes that “the rate at which South Africans are currently arrested rivals the situation experienced during apartheid.” In fact, Super concludes that “in South Africa today, imprisonment forms a central plank of the government’s crime policies.” I wish to introduce a further factor into this analysis—while black people as a whole have suffered grievously from a century and a half of mass incarceration in South Africa, the industrial scale of criminalization and confinement takes particular force among a specific group of black people—the descendants of enslaved people, who were known after emancipation as “coloureds.” There are clear continuities between “black” (at first termed “native” in apartheid legislation) and “coloured” identities, though these were created as separate racial identities through apartheid’s Population Registration Act of 1950, and black people were placed at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Despite apartheid’s targeted violence against black people, incarceration figures show that coloured men are imprisoned at twelve times the rate of white men, and twice the rate of black men. This striking phenomenon of disproportionate levels of incarceration has continued from the colonial period to apartheid and even into the post-apartheid period. How does one explain the contradiction between apartheid’s racial theory and its practice of punishment, manifested in the continuing mass imprisonment of formerly enslaved (i.e. coloured) people and their descendants? The answer, I argue, lies in the foundational role of 176 years of slavery in South Africa, which has acted as a hidden force in the country’s political culture since emancipation. These numbers suggest that the slave-based system in the Cape Colony generated a code of disposability that continues to shape how formerly enslaved people were viewed after emancipation, that is, as deviant, criminal and in need of control and repair. This formulation of inherent deviance and infinite reparability is evident in the notion that incarceration is actually a benevolent state policy. Government programs in the 1930s that led to the increasing use of prison labor for road-building and on farms were described as addressing coloured poverty through the “teaching of skills.” These laws therefore acted as a means to produce exploitable labor and embedded apartheid-era capitalism in a longer history of slavery and colonialism. The history of the post-emancipation period in South Africa shows an increasing reliance by both public and private capital on prison labor and discourses of criminality, intoxication, and physical malaise were used to naturalize the resulting epidemic levels of incarceration. Today, this infrastructure of widespread incarceration has attached a discourse of moral failure and physical contamination to black and coloured neighborhoods. The association of such subjects with notions of crime, gangsterism, alcohol and drug abuse, dependency, lassitude and sexual deviancy has created a category of people who appear to deserve and even need punishment.

Intimate and industrial punishment The system of corporal punishment, based on the Masters and Servants Acts, imposed the brutal, degrading and intimate punitive act of whipping on prisoners. James Midgley’s study shows that the widespread use of corporal punishment began immediately after emancipation and continued into the 1970s of corporal punishment, suggesting that the stain of disposability remained attached to emancipated bodies. As the history of punishment in court documents reveal, the severity of such whippings (often more than 100 lashes) has led to severe injury and even death. Despite this brutal history, more than 34,000 young offenders were subjected to whipping as recently as 1970 and its application was explicitly racialized. Originally, in fact, whipping could be enacted solely against black convicts, a policy which only changed in 1880. By 1952-1954, state figures of corporal punishment against juvenile offenders showed “an orgy of whipping.” Reviewing such sentencing in 1970, James Midgley shows that “[t]he great majority of children who were sentenced to corporal punishment were coloured.” Moreover, he finds that “while sixty percent of all coloured offenders were whipped, corporal punishment was imposed on only twelve percent of white offenders.” Midgley observes that about fifty percent of black men who appeared before the Cape Court were subjected to whipping. This revealing figure, as well as the fact that even during apartheid, with its focused violence against black people, coloured men were imprisoned at twice the rate of black men, indicates that the taint of disposability and criminality associated with enslaved bodies has shaped rates of incarceration both before 1994 and into the present. Could the reason for the repeated use of the intimate punishment of whipping during and after slavery be that the enslaved (and, later, coloured) body, in contrast to Khoisan and Nguni bodies, was viewed as both infinitely broken and infinitely repairable? Was the enslaved body nearer to that of the slave-owner and therefore potentially nearer human, if disciplined, compared to indigenous bodies, which were seen as inaccessible and incorrigible? Could the nearness of slave bodies hold both a threat and a promise to repair the flaw of race? The text below allows me to explore further this apparently oscillating view of coloureds as impaired and in need of fixing. In December 2011, a controversial public service advertisement to discourage drunk driving called “Papa Wag Vir Jou” (“Daddy’s Waiting for You” in Afrikaans) appeared on South African television. In the advert, a series of men appear on screen one by one to describe their ideal partner. The lines spoken by successive men were “I’m looking for that special person;” “Someone who can handle heavy situations with a smile;” “These hands will never let you go;” and “I’m quite demanding physically.” Gradually the lines become more sexually overt and are expressed with more loaded meaning. Only at the end of the advertisement does the camera pull back to reveal that the men are in prison uniforms, surrounded by a crowd of other men clad only in their underwear. While the earlier lines are all in English, the final line of the series, “Papa Wag Vir Jou,” is delivered in Afrikaans. In retrospect, the sequence of the lines and the tone of weighted intimacy in later lines, especially “Daddy’s Waiting for You,” makes clear that the basis of advert’s appeal not to drink and drive was the implicit threat of male rape in prison. The advertisement was reported to the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa for racism and homophobia, but the ASA dismissed these objections. The literary scholar Bernard Fortuin has compellingly analyzed the advertisement in his doctoral research on a queered history of homosexuality in South African institutions, but I wish to point to its naturalization of who belongs in prison. Behind its public appeal to reduce drunk driving, the advertisement signaled that some people are at home in prison while others do not belong. The former act as a warning to the public. The bodies who most clearly signal that they belong inside prison are black and coloured men, whose familiarity with the place—their at-homeness there—is signaled by their tattoos, their at-ease bodies and their casual hand gestures. In contrast, a white man at the beginning is stiff and nervous and a second white man laughs self-consciously. The third man in the sequence is African and he looks intently at the camera. In contrast, the loose delivery of the three coloured men who follow him makes the implied threat of rape at the end even more blatant. As Fortuin notes, their treacherously sexual brown bodies suggest their familiarity with prison and its intricate hierarchies, violence and power, which is shockingly clear in the advert. The sexualization and commodification of transgressive coloured bodies can be seen here and also in the songs and music videos of the white South African music group “Die Antwoord.” Fortuin points out how such men’s bodies are simultaneously “threatening and sexually alluring to the South African public,” arguing that part of the advert’s effect comes from the fact that the “prison has been confounded with homosexuality in the South African context.” The “Papa Wag Vir Jou” video relies on the implicit threat of prison rape to deter people from drunk driving. Its larger effect, however, is even more disturbing—which is to entrench the putative link between black and coloured men and criminality. The history of carceral bodies outlined above allows us to revisit this unremarked association of diverse black masculinities with a sense of at-home-ness in prison. In the visual narrative of “Papa Wag Vir Jou,” these bodies do not strike me as repairable, but rather, they are naturalized in the setting of prison. Instead of being redeemable, the coloured bodies arrayed in the prison are portrayed as duplicitous and threatening. In fact, the assumption at first that the men are innocently referring to their ideal partner is revealed as dangerously naïve. Especially the men who appear toward the end of the advert cannot be trusted. The prison could well be the space of abjection for the putative drunk driver who may end up among the men in the advert, facing the threat of rape. But instead of fulfilling the promise to repair the “flaw” of race, the men who are at home there reveal themselves to be irredeemably and inherently “dirty.” And that is why they belong in prison.