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

“If there are two policemen in a township in South Africa on a Saturday night with 10 or 20 young people present, those 2 cops don't want to be there. They'll make absolutely sure that they're not. They had an equivalent of a CompStat system, which told them where the hotspots were, and they'd make absolutely sure to do the opposite and not be in the hotspots. Because if there were only 2 of them, they were not sure that they could control people.”— Jonny Steinberg

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Police avoid areas where consent is absent

“Nelson's genius was to read the times and to present himself as a character he felt the times needed. In the mid-1950s, he would dress in very expensive tailored suits, drive a fancy car, have a beautiful young wife. He understood that to be a Black man in the height of apartheid, transmitting that image was politically powerful. When his organization was banned, he immediately changed the mask and molded himself on Fidel Castro. He grew his hair, wore trench coats, was a military man.”— Jonny Steinberg

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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Leader presents what moment needs, not what feels authentic

“When there's recruitment into the police, the educational requirements are minimal. You need a driver's license and a secondary school education. In a country with an expanded unemployment rate of 40%, literally tens of thousands of people apply. A tiny minority get the job. They now have a fairly decent salary, a life job, a pension. They've been catapulted unfairly into the middle class. There's an anger around Black police that they've gotten ahead just by chance.”— Jonny Steinberg

Culture & Society · Economics & Markets · Psychology & Behavior

DUR_ENDURING

Random selection undermines authority

“By the late 1960s, something like three-quarters of a million people were being taken off the streets every year for having the wrong stamp in their book or not having their book at all. It was racial minority regimes policing of Black movements. By the late '60s, early '70s, there was a very, very strange sense of unreality in South Africa's ruling elites. The system had a shelf life. It could not last forever. There wasn't really the courage or the imagination to think of something else.”— Jonny Steinberg

History & Geopolitics · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

DUR_CONTEXTUAL

Systems persist when elites can't imagine alternatives

“You start by choosing which crimes are the ones that you want to go after and you target them, usually beginning with good detection. To do good detection, you assemble a carefully handpicked group of people into small, well-resourced, well-motivated groups. You don't try and fix the whole thing at once. You start with priorities and you build good organizations around those priorities and you move from there.”— Jonny Steinberg

Operations & Execution · Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management

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Turnaround via focused small wins

“You could walk into any prison anywhere in South Africa and one of the gangs derived from these stories, they call the 26s, 27s, and 28s, will control the prison and they'll be telling the same story. That story hasn't changed all that much in a century. It's been passed from generation to generation and has not lost its texture, its basic narrative line. Those prison gangs are probably the oldest institutions in South Africa.”— Jonny Steinberg

Culture & Society · History & Geopolitics

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Oral tradition outlasts state institutions

“The gangs speak a language which is purposed to make these organizations functional, including judicial functions. A judge in a gang will essentially retell the story of Nongoloza in order to try the accused. You're literally metaphorically placing yourself in another time, in another place, out in the open in the late 19th century, deciding whether you've lived by Nongoloza's rules. There's a strange combination of fairy tale, procedural process, and violence.”— Jonny Steinberg

Culture & Society · Philosophy & Reasoning · History & Geopolitics

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Law enforcement through narrative ritual

“Policing happens by consent or it doesn't happen. They don't enter crowds because those crowds don't want them and don't consent for them to be there. A relationship between police and a public is driven by whether a public wants them there.”— Jonny Steinberg

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society

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Authority requires consent to function

“Winnie had very weak boundaries. She would need to be very intensely involved with somebody to colonize their heads, to be inside them all the time. That stretched throughout her life. Unfortunately, it meant that she made for a very weak prisoner when she was being tortured because she allowed the man torturing her deep into her head, deep into her psyche.”— Jonny Steinberg

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Weak boundaries make trauma formative

“What happened in 2007, 2008 is that there was something of a revolution inside the ANC and a thwarted, frustrated provincial middle class essentially took over the organization and the state. Their politics was pretty nihilistic. They were very racially brittle people. They didn't believe that they or anybody else was capable of building a future in such a difficult country. And they began fleecing the state through their position in power and in the bureaucracy.”— Jonny Steinberg

History & Geopolitics · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

DUR_CONTEXTUAL

Nihilistic elites loot rather than build

“Winnie understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to exercise power as a woman was through a man. She went after the most powerful rising political activist available. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy and understood herself to be South Africa's leader by virtue of being married to him and understood his and her reputation as her project to endeavor to keep going. She did so brilliantly.”— Jonny Steinberg

Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society

DUR_CONTEXTUAL

Power through proxy when direct access blocked

“What South Africa has which is quite remarkable given what's happened to it over the last 15, 20 years is it has a very solid political center which is very hard to dislodge, a pretty sane liberal-minded political center. It's guaranteed 25 to 30% of the votes every election and is expanding. That gives a fairly solid rational basis to govern the country well into the future. A lot of the stuff that fell apart between 2010 and 2020 can be rebuilt, basic stuff like logistics and electricity.”— Jonny Steinberg

History & Geopolitics · Leadership & Management · Operations & Execution

DUR_CONTEXTUAL

Stable center enables recovery, not flourishing