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Creating People's Justice: Street Committees And People's Courts in a South African City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Sandra Burman  and
Wilfried Schärf
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Abstract

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Ever since coming under colonial rule, Africans in South Africa have operated informal courts which the state courts have not recognized. Using fieldwork data, we contrast two such nonstate judicial structures in Cape Town. We describe the street committees, constituted by the older generation as a subsidiary form of local government coexisting uncomfortably alongside formal apartheid authorities. We then show the explosive consequences of the development from 1985 of youth-run people's courts, which attempted to redefine community values. We conclude with a discussion of our findings in the context of existing theoretical work on informal justice and draw some tentative conclusions on possible developments in a post-apartheid era.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , 1990 , pp. 693 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

We would like to thank the following funders for making the research possible, some as part of a larger project on family breakup: the International Federation of University Women; the British Academy; Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the Nuffield Foundation; the Economic and Social Research Council; the Human Sciences Research Council; the Anglo-American and De Beer's Chairman's Fund; the Ford Foundation Student Trainee Scheme; and the Institute of Criminology, University of Cape Town. Our thanks, too, for their invaluable work, including translations, to our research assistants on this project: Lindiwe Kota, Eunice Mabuya, Malusi Makalima, Nompumelelo Mbebe, the late Ebenezer Nkosi Mehlamakulu, Florence Mphahlele, Chris Ngcokoto, Nini Sipuye, and particularly Debbie Hene and Baba Ngcokoto, who undertook the bulk of the highly sensitive interviews. We are also indebted to Professors R. Abel, H. Corder, C. Saunders, and Dr. K. Hughes for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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