Of Men, Magic, and the Law: Popular Justice and the Political Imagination in South Africa

The article examines the rise of the anti-stocktheft Makhulu Span movement in rural South Africa during the 1950s. Focussing on the political imagination of the men who took the law into their own hands, the article argues that the movement involved much more than the resolution of disputes and struggles over control of property. Initial attempts to control stock theft became larger struggles against the implementation of apartheid and, ultimately, over the nature of rural civil society. Ideas concerning evil and witchcraft, authority and legitimacy, ethnicity and nation, and the moral order of masculinity, critically shaped the movement's formation and its persecution of suspected thieves and political collaborators. The article points to the complex intersection of violence, masculinity, and subaltern visions of the nation.