Given the legacy of indirect rule, it is unclear who the government can call to reign in the violent leaders who effectively govern some townships. Or, indeed, if it has the desire or popular legitimacy to do so. Impunity for past misdeeds has emboldened these groups, strengthening them so much that police respond to them rather than the other way around.
AuthorLoren Landau
Loren B Landau is Co-Director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab, University of the Witwatersrand.
He is South African Research Chair in Human Mobility and the Politics of Difference at the African Centre for Migration and Society and Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford. Together with Jean Pierre Misago, he co-founded and co-directs the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab. Widely published in the academic and popular press, he is author of The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania (Wits Press), co-editor of Contemporary Migration to South Africa (World Bank), editor of Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (UN University Press/Wits Press) and has published in Millennium, Politics & Society, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and elsewhere.