Brandaan Huigen

Brandaan Huigen (PhD Freie Universität Berlin, 2023) is an affiliated researcher at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His primary ethnographic research focuses on the material/digital culture of violent crime in South Africa, with additional interests in conspicuous consumption, socioeconomic inequality and art, having published multiple articles on these topics. He recently published his first monograph 'Dangerous Technologies: Crime and Digital Divides in (South) Africa' (Routledge). His research has been funded by DAAD and the ERC.

My field setting

My primary field site over the past few years has been in Cape Town, a port city in South Africa where some 5 million people live. While Cape Town is famous for its natural beauty, it is a highly unequal city characterised by shacklands and mountain-side mansions, but also a large (lower-) middle class. I conduct multisited ethnography in these divided spaces and with culturally diverse people. For the Anthropologies of Extortion project I visited restaurants, municipal offices, shopping malls, roadside stalls and construction sites to detect the whispers of extortion.

My key research questions

Considering the growth of extortion in Cape Town, and South Africa more broadly, I have been interested in exploring why it has become a modus operandi for financial extraction at this point in time? Why have protection rackets affected various sectors of social and economic life, in, for instance the construction and small-business sectors? Is this truly something new or an older dynamic? More broadly, does socioeconomic inequality contribute towards the growth of extortion? And how should we frame its impact on social relations? What (material) cultural forms does extortion take in South Africa's diverse urban settings and regions?

My research findings

I focussed on two main research avenues: protection rackets affecting lower-income township businesses and the construction industry. Generally, I found that extortionists wielded tremendous power in their ability to 'lock' their victims, and even large organisations, into an extortive relation. There was hardly a symbiotic relationship that arose that may, in the very least, mutually benefit both parties. Yet, despite the negative impact on people's lives, extortionists often viewed their violence as justified by using sanitising terms (e.g. 'tax', 'empowerment' and 'transformation') and tapping into national grievance discourses. In fact, extortionists often viewed themselves as structurally oppressed people, who were the rightful recipients of (state) monies. This morally legitimated the perpetration of extortion and crimes relating to the initial refusal for co-operation, such as assaults and assassinations. With co-operation established, wealth was amassed and spent on fast cars, mansions and fashionable clothing. Rewards were hardly redistributed to the broader community, but within a closed racket network. In South Africa, we consequently see that extortion is used as a social technique to amass wealth and status, and to conspicuously display this, while the authorities offer little resistance.

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