We Are Not Watchmen

has really “lost it.” In order for guards to maintain prestige, they ought to display resistance of mainly subtle and covert kind.

As mentioned this is the strategy of the great majority of guards. They turn up too late and often drunk, do not drill very well anymore, sleep on duty, claim to have lost their caps and berets, making it impossible for them to salute superiors, refuse to wear their uniforms in public, in effect frustrating commanders, and so forth. Most guards, of course, prefer to perform prestigious politics.

5.6 Alternative Guard Styles Under the given circumstances informed by a certain guard prestige ladder that is in some deeper sense most likely informed by economic circumstances – as well as more acute considerations, for example avoiding to lose one’s job – the above outlined political style might well be the best when working as guard. Yet, it is also clear that its effectiveness might be disputed. As said, it is a problem that when a guard appears too late, drunk, sleeps on duty and so forth, the guard enables the making of “exaggerations [that] reproduces (...) existing barriers (...) which in turn justifies (...) economic and political domination” (Gupta 2001:107).

As mentioned, the barrier of relevance here is the one between “watchmen” and “security officers,” the former signifying a primitive mentality of either localist or cosmopolitanist kind. In either case the guard is incapable of partaking in an advanced security business, hence neither worthy nor needy of civilized work conditions, for example money – to spend on drinking.

In light of the political uneasiness related to this ideological barrier that is all too easily exploited politically by managers – however, is also articulated among the guards themselves – it is worth paying attention to the few guards engaged in cultivating what might in the longer run turn out to be more promising styles of guarding, for example Andrew and Dave.

Dave’s alternative style of guarding is built on blending explicit confrontation with explicit cosmopolitanism, the latter providing a kind of excuse from where to pursue the former. By connecting himself so thoroughly to somewhere out there, somewhere beyond Lusaka and the guard company – even physically by means of wearing ear phones – he resembles very well an outsider. An outsider, it is implied, 62