Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas’ Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era

Writer Jonny Steinberg, author of Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, talks with Tyler Cowen about why South African police avoid the crimes they are meant to fight, prison gangs that govern by retelling a century-old story, a marriage lived almost entirely across a prison wall, the masks Nelson Mandela wore, what went wrong with the ANC, and whether the country’s stuck present is its permanent condition.

Key ideas

1. Policing happens by consent, or not at all. From 350 hours in police vans, Steinberg found officers systematically avoiding the hotspots their own crime-mapping flagged: two police cannot control a crowd that does not want them there, so they gravitate to the one scene where they are invited in — domestic violence — and leave the rest unpoliced.
2. South Africa’s prison gangs are its oldest institutions. The 26s, 27s, and 28s govern every prison in the country by retelling the story of Nongoloza, a turn-of-the-century bandit; law, ritual, and judgment are all embedded in a narrative barely changed in a hundred years — ‘to enforce law is to tell a story.’
3. Mandela fell deeply in love with a fiction. The couple lived under one roof for barely two years before he went underground and then to prison; across 27 years of letters Winnie became the centre of his world precisely as she receded into a woman he never truly knew, living her own life outside.
4. Winnie’s cruelty and compassion were one architecture, not a contradiction. Steinberg refuses the ‘flat-out bad person’ verdict — the same weak boundaries that let a torturer ‘deep into her head’ also made her capable of fierce love and loyalty; his biographer’s task was to hold both in one psyche.
5. The ANC’s decline dates to an internal revolution around 2007–08. After fifteen tolerably-governed years riding a commodity supercycle, a ‘thwarted, frustrated provincial middle-class’ captured the party and state and began fleecing it; the country’s saving grace is a stubborn 25–30% liberal centre that makes a Zimbabwe-style collapse unlikely.

Content

Policing by consent

Steinberg’s fieldwork — some 350 hours riding in police vans across South African townships between 2004 and 2007 — produced a single organising finding: the police try not to police. Facing a Saturday-night crowd of ten or twenty young people, two officers cannot be sure of controlling it, so they stay away; they had the equivalent of a CompStat crime-mapping system and used it to work out exactly where not to go. What draws them in instead is a call, because being summoned confers authority, and the one scene where they are reliably summoned is domestic violence. The lesson Steinberg draws is that policing happens by consent or it does not happen: the relationship between police and public turns on whether the public wants them present. He expects legitimacy has only weakened since — in 2007 the novelty that a Black person could call the police at all still lingered; by the mid-2020s policing sits in open crisis, with a senior commander accusing the responsible cabinet minister of collusion with organised crime. The fix, in his account, is not to reform the whole vast apparatus at once but to pick priority crimes, hand-pick small well-resourced detective units, and build outward from good detection. He notes too that the transition mistake was Thabo Mbeki’s turning the police into a party instrument — once policing serves a politician rather than the state, its bureaucratic integrity collapses.

Crime, class, and the zoning of violence

Cape Town’s relative safety, Steinberg argues, is largely the safety of privately-policed middle-class enclaves; on the far side of the mountain, the township of Khayelitsha carries a murder rate exponentially higher. Answering Cowen’s economist’s puzzle — why criminals do not simply migrate to richer, softer neighbourhoods — he distinguishes sharply between property crime and murder. Property crime and face-to-face armed robbery do spill into the suburbs, and middle-class South Africans suffer far more of both than their peers in the rich world; but the overwhelming majority of murders are between young men who already know one another, so the wealthy are much more victimised by crime yet not by killing. This distinction reappears later as the load-bearing correction to the ‘white genocide’ narrative.

Prisons, gangs, and the Number

In The Number, Steinberg studied the prison gangs — the 26s, 27s, and 28s — that control every prison in the country. They regulate members through a combination of frightening violence and an elaborate ritual built on a rich oral history: to be initiated is to be told the story of Nongoloza, a bandit from the dawn of South African industrialisation whose banditry is narrated as anti-colonial resistance and whose disputes with his colleagues (notably over sex between men) still map the divisions between gangs today. Law, ritual, and narrative are fused — a gang judge tries the accused by retelling Nongoloza’s story, placing everyone metaphorically in the late-nineteenth-century veld to decide whether the accused has lived by his rules. Steinberg has found nothing quite like it elsewhere; the same story, barely altered in a century, is told in every prison in the country, which makes these gangs plausibly the oldest institutions in South Africa. Their origin lies in the mass incarceration of Johannesburg’s early Black working class — at one point 70–80% of working-class Black men entering the city passed through jail — intensified under high apartheid, when by the late 1960s roughly three-quarters of a million people a year were arrested for pass-law offences. The apartheid state, he says, was itself terrified by the sheer coercion it had to deploy and knew the system could not last, yet lacked the imagination to build anything else, so it ‘kept spinning’ long past its natural end.

Winnie and Nelson: a marriage across a prison wall

Steinberg’s favourite of his own subjects is the marriage at the centre of Winnie and Nelson. The couple met in early 1957, married in 1958, and were living under one roof for barely two years before Mandela went underground in 1960 and to prison in 1962. He was 38 and a notorious philanderer, married with three children; she was 20 and beautiful, and he was besotted. What Steinberg watches unfold in the prison letters is a man making his wife the centre of meaning in his life — his foundation, his sense of self — precisely as everything else falls away, coronating her ever more intensely so she will not forget him. But the woman he loved so fiercely was, increasingly, a fiction: she was living her own life outside, and the letters trace a troubling line between fantasy and reality. Asked what he learned about marriage in general, Steinberg points to the bugged transcripts of their prison visits in the last decade of his sentence — both knew they were overheard yet were startlingly candid — in which he recognised ten marriages he knew: the bickering, the lying, the small cruelties, all familiar.

Winnie’s antinomies

Pressed by Cowen — is Winnie simply ‘flat out a bad person’, given the kidnappings, the endorsement of necklacing, the affairs? — Steinberg answers first as a craftsman: a biographer who begins by deciding his subject is evil will not write a good book. He does not soften what she did; the bitter irony, he says, is that the supposed champion of the oppressed hurt people who were poor, young, Black, and defenceless, and she was capable of terrible violence. But she was also capable of deep sympathy, love, and commitment, and his task was to assemble the whole into one psyche — antinomies held not as contradictions but as parts of a single psychic architecture. He traces the continuities to her childhood: one of eleven children of fiercely ambitious parents who openly picked winners and discarded losers, she learned early that the stakes were high and made herself the favourite. Her lifelong pattern was weak boundaries — a need to ‘colonise’ the heads of those close to her — which made her a poor prisoner under torture, because she let her torturer deep inside her psyche; years later she described that hatred, absorbed at close quarters, as the fuel of her activism.

Nelson’s masks

If Winnie was an architecture of antinomies, Nelson was a sequence of masks, and his genius was to read the times and present himself as the character the moment required. As a Black lawyer in the 1950s he wore expensive tailored suits and drove a fine car, understanding the political charge of a Black man projecting that image at the height of apartheid; when his organisation was banned he remade himself on Fidel Castro, grew his hair and wore trench coats as a military man; at the 1964 trial he became a martyr. The greatest mask came in the 1990s. Personally he felt a deep, raging grief — that his life had been destroyed, a tragedy — but he judged that to bring that anger into politics as the leader of Black South Africa would lead his people to war, so he presented himself as an avuncular old man radiating joy and cheerfulness, the opposite of what he felt, to carry the country from the brink of civil war. Writing the book, Steinberg rediscovered that South Africa never truly healed from the civil war it fought in the 1980s: some societies recover quickly from extreme moments and others do not, and the violence around Winnie in the late 1980s left wounds that never closed, partly because of what did not happen next.

The ANC, the Afrikaner-farmer myth, and the balance sheet

On the wider polity, Steinberg reads the ANC’s arc as a sharp break rather than a slow slide. For its first fifteen years it governed reasonably well, helped by luck — it caught a commodity supercycle and China’s rise, and the bottom two deciles roughly doubled their incomes. Then, around 2007–08, a ‘revolution’ inside the party brought a thwarted, frustrated provincial middle-class to power: racially brittle, politically nihilistic, disbelieving that anyone else could build the country, and set on fleecing the state through their positions. That same rupture explains the decline of institutions across the board — even the judiciary, whose independence has held (rooted in a genuinely old adversarial legal culture) but whose quality has not. On the American discourse about murdered Afrikaner farmers, Steinberg is categorical: white farmers are not being killed in large numbers, the overwhelming majority of murder victims are young, Black, and unemployed, and though real violence does spill into the suburbs, the idea of a genocide is ‘absolutely insane’. His own verdict on the country is guardedly steady rather than despairing: a solid, sane liberal political centre, guaranteed 25–30% of the vote and expanding, makes a Zimbabwe-style collapse very hard and gives a rational basis to govern; the broken plumbing of logistics and electricity can be rebuilt, slowly, but genuine flourishing needs a rebuilt civil service and a fixed education system — the country’s deepest problem is human capital — and that more fundamental change is not yet in sight. Modest improvement is probable; more than modest is not.

What comes next

Cowen closes on lighter and forward-looking ground. Steinberg counts South Africa’s HIV/AIDS response a real success — several million put on antiretrovirals despite an AIDS-denialist president, a genuine demonstration of state capacity — and the COVID lockdown a self-inflicted wound: begun in fear, then prolonged by a cabinet faction long itching for blunt statist intervention, working fine for the middle class while gratuitously hurting the poor. He judges Johannesburg’s cultural scene more robust than ever (music, theatre, fine art), reachable safely by anyone who does not ‘do anything stupid’, since crime is zoned and ghettoed. On the South African diaspora question, he is sceptical of neat theories about Elon Musk — though he grew up the same age and about fifty kilometres away, in a 1980 South Africa where everyone knew the old order was ending, a milieu that prized first-principles thinking and imagining the unimaginable. His next book is an intimate biography of Cecil Rhodes, begun from the question of how a man who was probably in love with the young men around him (though Steinberg doubts he understood himself as gay, or ever had sex with anyone) came to wield the power he did; after that, more Southern Africa, probably historical, from the archives of the mid-apartheid period.

See also

• Jonny Steinberg — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Nelson Mandela — the masks he wore across four decades
• Winnie Madikizela-Mandela — her antinomies as one psychic architecture
• Winnie and Nelson — Steinberg’s dual biography of the marriage