Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
2PROTEST NATION
rise to power to put the ANC and its alliance partners back at the centre of
decision making, thereby ensuring levels of democratic accountability that
had been eroded by Mbeki centralising power in the presidency.
However, these promises notwithstanding, more and more people have
taken to the streets to protest because they complain that these very structures
of democratic representation have failed them. In doing so, they challenge
established rules of engagement that often pass for political engagement in
contemporary societies: parliamentary debates, elections, press conferences.
These forms of politics are highly mediated, leading to the formal political
landscape being skewed towards those who already have access to power
and resources. Protests often puncture all the niceties of formal politics, and
make those who have learned how to evade responsibility by ducking and
weaving face the wrath of the public directly. If protests are sustained and
underpinned by mass organisations, they can become insurrectionary: that
is, they can change fundamentally how power is organised in society.To that
extent, protests are one of the most effective forms of political agency, which
is why the powerful fear them so much.
A growing number of protestors have argued that peaceful forms of
protest do not work, as the state simply ignores them. In response, some
protest organisations have become radicalised and engage in increasingly
disruptive and defensive forms of protest, such as erecting barricades and
burning tyres to take control of a particular area and to keep the police
out. They do this knowing that such protests get the media running and
politicians listening. Commentators warn about South Africa facing its own
Tunisia day if it does not deal properly with the many grievances driving
the protests.1 Yet, in spite of their transformative potential, some protests have
taken on a negative character, and these are often what the media focus on
as being the face of South Africas protests. Our television screens are full
of images of marauding protestors burning councillors homes and even
attacking councillors; libraries and schools have been burnt, suggesting that
destructive, anti-social behaviour has also become a feature of the protest
landscape. Some protests have turned xenophobic, with non-South African
nationals being attacked and routed out of their homes and businesses.
Virtually every day the headlines scream about yet another violent service
delivery protest. The political right, and even the centre, fear the protests as
mob rule that threatens chaos and anarchy.
In response to increasingly disruptive and even violent protests, the South
African Police Service (SAPS) argued for its public order policing capacity
INTRODUCTION3
4PROTEST NATION
the policing of protests, with some arguing that increasingly violent policing
is eroding the right, as it deters people from engaging in protests in the first
place. While it does consider the role of the police, this book focuses in
particular on the role of municipalities in exercising their responsibilities to
facilitate protests, and whether they are exercising these in ways that enable
the right. This book also evaluates media performance in reporting on the
right to protest. It considers the extent to which media organisations provide
platforms for grievances to be aired and acted upon, or whether they are
distorting or even silencing protestors voices through mischaracterisation,
as has been alleged of protest reporting in other parts of the world. The
book also considers some related but subsidiary questions, such as whether
the police have a case in arguing for more resources because they are under
siege from violent protestors, and whether it is fair to say that the countrys
protest culture has become overwhelmingly violent, threatening public safety
in the process. Because of its specific focus, this book does not offer a more
general analysis of protests, their causes, repertoires, demands and ideologies,
and effectiveness as modes of communication and action. It also does not
attempt to answer the question of how and why protests turn violent. But it
does make some observations about what the data is telling us about shifts
in the political landscape in South Africa, and their global significance, as
these observations have a direct bearing on the character of state responses,
and whether these exhibit a civil or coercive character.
Assumptions, analytical framework and key arguments
It is important to outline at the outset some of the initial ideas that informed
this book, as they provide an indication of some of its basic assumptions
and hypotheses, and clarify starting points for discussion. One of the main
assumptions is that the right to protest is increasingly under threat, particularly
but not exclusively from the state. This book tests this assumption by
reporting on research conducted into the application of the right in selected
municipalities in order to assess whether the problem is more widespread
than the isolated incidents reported by activist and journalists. Another
assumption is that this question matters; that a society that does not respect
this fundamental right cannot be considered a democracy. Given that South
Africa likes to claim that it has transitioned successfully into a democracy,
this claim must be put to the test. Also, it is assumed that protests are an
important form of democratic expression. That is, they are not activities
INTRODUCTION5
with scant social significance; rather, they serve the important purpose of
communicating grievances to those who are in a position to do something
about them. Potentially, protests are a form of direct democracy in that
unlike representative or even participatory forms of democracythey can
enable public participation in a relatively unmediated fashion. In fact, the
power of protests is derived from the numbers that participate in them,
demonstrating that the ideas put across in these protests have mass support.
Even more fundamentally, protests can be used to contest existing
distributions of power in society by bringing the organised power of the
people to bear on questions of pressing importance.While protests may not
automatically disrupt existing social orders, and may even play a systemmaintaining role, they also have the potential to provoke ruptures in these
orders: much depends on the character of the protestors, the capacity of the
protests to be sustained, their links to broader insurrectionary movements and
the extent to which they are generalised across society. Another important
assumption is that protests are often a working-class form of democratic
expression. Those without the means to access more mediated forms of
communication (such as the mass media) may resort to more popular and
less mediated forms of expression, and protests are one such form. Mapping
the right to protest can therefore reveal a great deal about the state of
health of working-class politics, and the democratic spaces such politics
enjoy to grow and exert influence. If this significant form of expression is
being circumscribed, then it is important to understand how widespread
the problem is, and what impact the problem will have on the ability of
the most marginalised sections of society to make their voices heard and
practise popular politics.
Another assumption informing this book is that protests and state
responses cannot be fully understood in surface terms; reference needs
to be made to underlying power structures in society. In other words, the
micromobilisations that protests represent are not isolated phenomena:
they can be related to broader processes of social change. More specifically,
in expansionary periods, when political and economic elites can afford
democracy, they will tolerate higher levels of dissent, including protests. In
such periods, they are likely to promote a negotiated management of protests,
where protesting is recognised as a right within clearly circumscribed legal
and institutional frameworks. Such an approach is consistent with social
contract politics that dominated post-Second World War social democracies
6PROTEST NATION
in the West.While many countries in the global South did not pass through
social democracy and its associated tolerance of protests (within limits), South
Africa adopted the negotiated management of protests after its transition to
democracy in 1994. However, in recessionary periods, when profits decline,
these elites are more likely to resort to coercion than negotiation, and to
circumscribe the right to protest. At the same time, protests are likely to
increase in frequency and intensity, as it is less possible for society to be held
in equilibrium through consensus, and as a result social relations become
more conflictual. South Africa is in just such a recessionary period. However,
if a longer-term, global view is taken, it becomes clear that the neoliberal
phase of capitalism precipitated a wave of protests reacting to the massive
inequalities it produced, either explicitly or implicitly, around the world.
While this wave has ebbed and flowed, it has been sustained for over three
decades. Since the 2008 global recession, it has intensified. Yet, apart from
reducing equality, neoliberalism has exhibited undemocratic and even antidemocratic tendencies.
Therefore the broader assumption made in this book is that, to the
extent that it exists, repression of protests is not an incidental response by
bureaucrats or politicians but an indication of more conflictual social relations
at the macro level. Neoliberalism has not been good for the right to protest:
under its hegemonic grip on elite world politics, the right has suffered very
serious setbacks. Coercive responses to protests have also increased since the
11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, followed by other attacks
elsewhere. Governments have seized on the widespread public panic about
terrorism to introduce mass surveillance and other measures (such as police
militarisation) in the name of protecting national security. However, at times
these measures have been excessive, threatening civil liberties and creating
far more insecurity than they were meant to address. Wily governments, in
collaboration with the private security industry, have redefined more and
more social problems as national security threats requiring the intervention of
the states coercive capacities rather than its civil capacities: a process known as
securitisation. By now, there is more than enough evidence internationally
thatunder the guise of fighting the war against terrormore governments
have used their greatly expanded coercive capacities to clamp down on
legitimate dissent, including the right to protest. It is assumed that this is a
relevant backdrop against which to examine the right to protest in South
Africa, and to explore whether these trends are manifesting themselves here
INTRODUCTION7
8PROTEST NATION
and reshapes how the state is structured and how it operates. Furthermore,
on a day-to-day basis, and by virtue of the logics of its own bureaucratic
functions, the state is capable of exercising some autonomy from the dominant
political class. However, it would be too far-fetched to say that the state
exercises complete autonomy: when the chips are down and the capitalist
class needs the state on side, then the state will likely bring independently
minded bureaucrats to heel. These assumptions embrace the possibility of
totalising views that attempt to understand the various components of a
society in terms of a broader whole, but hopefully not at the expense of
nuance. Being able to grasp the totality of a social structure allows a thinking
person to move beyond the surface manifestations of events, and understand
these events as part of broader social processes that are not preordained and
unalterable; as they are products of human intervention, they can be changed,
and a belief that social structures can be changed is an essential precondition
for system-changing collective action.
While arguing for the importance of the right to protest, this book does
not adopt a rights-based approach uncritically. Civil and political rightssuch
as the right to protestare understood as defensive rights that democratic
movements must struggle for and win. If they do not do so successfully,
they risk losing the democratic space necessary to mount transformative
struggles proactively. In other words, struggles for rights are a necessary
condition for transformative collective action, but they are by no means a
sufficient condition. Rights-based movements, which frame the struggles for
transformation as struggles for rights, often fail to acknowledge that rights in
a capitalist society will never be extended to the point where they change
social relations fundamentally: that is, this way of conceptualising struggles
fails to take sufficient account of power, how power operates in real-world
situations, and what is needed to change how power is distributed in society.
Analytical framework
The key question explored in this book is as follows: what does the states
approach to the right to protest reveal about the extent of democratic
space and the direction of democratic politics in South Africa? In order to
arrive at an answer to this question, an analytical framework was developed,
incorporating a series of sub-questions pursued according to organising
concepts used to test the main theoretical assumptions. The framework
directed the researchers to collect raw data about the different actors in
INTRODUCTION9
10PROTEST NATION
Interventions or actions
The protestors: Who is protesting and how often? What are the key
issues they are protesting about? Are the organisations that are protesting
changing over time, and if so, why? Where do they stand in relation to
key power holders in the state and society? Are they part of the alliance
or not? Are some organisations more likely than others to be denied the
right to protest, and if so, why?
The municipality: How do municipalities respond to gatherings? Do
they respond differently to gatherings and to protests? Do different
municipalities respond differently, and if so, why?
The police: How do the police respond to protests? Are there shifts
in police responses over time, and if so, why? Are they more likely to
respond violently to particular groups, such as those outside the alliance?
The intelligence services:Are they are involved in decision making about
protests? How and why?
Relationships
INTRODUCTION11
12PROTEST NATION
referred to as the daily humdrum of protests. With the media focus on the
spectacle of violent protests, this larger picture is often missed.
In fact, journalists show very little understanding of the dynamics of
protests, and even less understanding of the RGA and the obligations it
imposes on municipalities and the police. They are more likely to take
seriously the voices of officialdom, relative to the voices of protestors, and
often adopt frames that criminalise protests unfairly: a problem that has
been well recognised internationally in relation to protest reporting, and
which has been theorised into the protest paradigm. Many elements of
the protest paradigm were found in much of the reporting on protests in
the municipalities surveyed, which raises serious questions about the antidemocratic uses to which this journalism can be put, as it could be used
(and has been used) to justify greater state repression. However, there were
significant exceptions to this general rule, especially in relation to reporting
undertaken in the wake of the 2012 Marikana massacre, when scores of
mineworkers, as well as some security guards and police, were killed. This
massacre sensitised more thoughtful journalists to the problem of excessive
and unjustified state violence against protests, suggesting to them that they
needed to consider the dynamics of protest and state responses more deeply.
The book also considers some of the broader political implications of
these shifts by asking, what is the historical significance of the recent protests
in South Africa? To explore this question, some of the major commentators
and theorists of the day are engaged. It could be inferred that if the protests
were significantthat is, if they promised to shift South Africa towards a
more equal societythen those in power would be more likely to stymie
them, as they would feel threatened by their potential. However, if the protests
were not anti-systemic in nature, then the powerful would be more likely to
accommodate and even institutionalise them. It is argued here on the basis
of analyses of the data that there are significant political shifts under way
that bear all the hallmarks of a Gramscian organic crisis. This means that,
in spite of official attempts to close political space from above, this space is
being prised open from below, and that when considered in the context of
the broader waves of resistance to neoliberalism of the past three decades, the
transformative potential of the protests is high. Furthermore, there is evidence
of a shift towards less visible, more pre-emptive forms of repression, which is
actually a sign of the political elites weakness rather than its strength, as the
elite recognises that it cannot use the state to repress dissent in more visible
INTRODUCTION13
ways without risking the loss of legitimacy. In fact, the Marikana massacre has
done a great deal of political damage to the ruling elite in that the event has
hastened the search for political alternatives to the ruling alliance, which has
increased political diversity. In other words, no matter how dark the current
political moment seems, it is also pregnant with great promise.
The research process
14PROTEST NATION
next major UN conference to take place on South African soil, the World
Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).This conference was held in
Johannesburg in 2002.
These conferences took place in a global context that emboldened
radical civil society and anti-systemic social movements. Many of these
movements linked the promotion of fundamental rights and freedoms to
systemic problems in the global capitalist system, and sought fundamental
system change for a more just and equal society rather than mere reforms.
While these movements used a variety of means to pressure for social change,
protests were central in their organisational repertoires. In 1999, what had
become known as the anti-globalisation movement successfully shut down
the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Seattle through direct street
action. Many of these movements coalesced around an alternative global
conference, the World Social Forum, which sought to provide a space for
building ideological alternatives to neoliberalism, a theme that underpinned
its annual global meeting of governments and captains of industry. Challenges
to neoliberalism were becoming more visible at the global meetings of world
leaders, and the intelligence and police agencies were clearly becoming
very worried. No major meeting of world leaders could take place without
protests outside and against them.
In an attempt to prevent a recurrence of what took place at Seattle, the
police and intelligence agencies began to restrict the right to protest, and
South Africa was no exception to this general rule.Terrified of being shamed
in the eyes of the world, the South African government began to overpolice South African-based summits. Evidence of intelligence surveillance
of civil society emerged during the World Conference against Racism, but
the mobilisations around the conference were allowed to proceed with little
official interference. But official paranoia became especially apparent in 2002.
Fearing a WTO-style shutdown of the WSSD conference by protestors,
the police and intelligence agencies swung into action. They placed under
surveillance the LPM and other organisations they considered to be threats,
and clamped down on attempts to protest in the run-up to the summit.The
FXI became heavily involved in contesting these high-handed measures,
bailing arrested protestors out of jail, and challenging violations of the right
to protest legally and through advocacy and publicity. It was an incredibly
demanding period for all of us involved in freedom-of-expression work. It
was also eye-opening, because it suggested that the states security apparatus
INTRODUCTION15
16PROTEST NATION
INTRODUCTION17
are set out in my book The Rise of the Securocrats: The Case of South Africa.10
I decided to extend the project to other municipalities to see whether the
same pattern of prohibition was evident elsewhere. Needless to say, it was
impossible to research all municipalities, so I had to make choices about
which municipalities to select. This book analyses trends in the records of
the following municipalities: Nelson Mandela Bay, Lukhanji, Makana and
Blue Crane Route (all Eastern Cape); Breede Valley,Witzenberg, Langeberg
(all municipalities falling into the Cape Winelands district municipality);
Mbombela (Mpumalanga); eThekwini (KwaZulu-Natal); and the City
of Johannesburg (Gauteng). Records were also obtained from the City of
Cape Town, but they were not in a form that could be analysed sensibly. For
instance, this was the only municipality that did not record the reasons for
gatherings and protests.A visit was also made to the Phumelela municipality
in the Free State, but its records were so poorly kept that they did not yield
any usable data.
The decision to select these municipalities was based partly on statistics
obtained from SAPS by the Media24 Investigations unit on the number of
peaceful and unrest-related protests in the country for the period January
2009 to November 2012 (SAPS terminology for protests that remained
peaceful or involved the commission of a crime, and which therefore
triggered the opening of a case docket in terms of the RGA).11 Areas
where the majority of protests were unrest-related were selected in order
to understand why this was so, and whether this problem had anything to
do with the regulation of protests by the municipality. Other municipalities
were selected as a control group, because according to the SAPS statistics,
most of their protests were peaceful; in such instances, it was important
to understand why this was the case. As I was based at Rhodes University
when we were conducting the fieldwork, the researchers prioritised the
Eastern Cape to build up bodies of knowledge about protest cultures in
the province: as a result, four of the ten municipalities covered in this book
are Eastern Cape-based, including the Makana municipality, where Rhodes
University is based. The research team were all Rhodes University-based.
Andrea Royeppen and Lehlohonolo Majoro were undertaking their MA
and honours degrees respectively through the Department of Political and
International Studies. They travelled to the various municipalities to gather
the records, which involved obtaining permission from officials to access
their records, and they recorded all notifications of gatherings and protests
to these municipalities.
18PROTEST NATION
INTRODUCTION19
It is important to realise that the municipal data gives us only part of the
protest picture. It does not provide information about gatherings and protests
that municipalities were not notified about. This means that any analyses
based solely on this data set will be skewed towards more institutionalised
forms of protest, held by protestors who are willing to operate within the
framework of the RGA.As a result, the records will tell us little about protests
that operate beyond the bounds of the RGA, such as spontaneous protests,
protests organised by people who simply do not know about the RGA,
or protests organised by people who are familiar with the Act but refuse
to be confined to protest forms that are bounded by the rule of law. The
records give few clues as to the social base of the protestors, although the
protesting organisations are identified by name, and some protests are held
by a clearly defined constituency (such as a municipal union or a particular
local ward), which means that the social base can be inferred. It is likely that
most protests that are listed in the records took place, as cancelled protests
are recorded: however, no information is available in the records about how
the protests turned out. However, to an extent this information is recorded
in the SAPS IRIS database.
As this manuscript was being finalised, the University of Johannesburgs
South African Research Chair in Social Change received a huge data dump
of information from the IRIS database in response to an information request
sent to SAPS. I have incorporated information from this entirely new data
set in relation to four municipalities (Mbombela, Blue Crane, Lukhanji
and Rustenburg), although for practical reasons I have focused on one
municipality in particular (Mbombela). The IRIS database records several
species of crowd-management incidents, including church- and funeralrelated assemblies, processions, music festivals, meetings, open-air electionrelated activities, sports and political meetings, as well as barricades, boycott
actions, demonstrations, disaster- and catastrophe-related gatherings, hostagerelated gatherings, sit-ins and occupations, acts of intimidation, stay-aways and
strikes.12 It is an extremely difficult data set to work with, as it generally does
not list convening organisations, and entries are not broken down according
to localised areas. Motives for the gatherings are broadly described. These
challenges make it difficult to analyse the thousands of entries for patterns,
and this task remains one that future researchers need to undertake.
In an attempt to probe issues emerging from the municipal records,
Andrea Royeppen conducted an initial round of interviews with 22 activist
20PROTEST NATION
The book is divided into eleven chapters. The general scope of coverage is
as follows: First, in order to understand the most important questions that
need to be posed, the main general theoretical arguments about protests and
repression are identified. Next, the specific context in which the right to
protest is being exercised is sketched, as this context may point to broader
trends towards either a more open or a more closed political context. The
data from each municipality is then considered with this context in mind
to see whether it confirms or refutes the major trends. Each chapter gives
emphasis to particular questions, such as whether the political space for the
right to protest is more open in urban, metropolitan contexts, as opposed
to rural contexts, or whether municipalities appear to be more open to
protests by ANC alliance partners than by those outside the alliance. As
focusing on municipal accounts only would be inherently one-sided, the
experiential knowledge of activists in attempting to exercise the right to
protest is also taken into account. Police and media accounts of how the right
is being exercised complement the overall picture, as all these actors make
INTRODUCTION21
22PROTEST NATION
contexts, and the impact of state responses to protests. In particular, the chapter
considers whether organisations have been subjected to harsher treatment
by the respective municipalities because they lie outside the ANC alliance.
Chapter 7 examines the regulation of gatherings and protests in
municipalities incorporating large rural areas in the Eastern and Western Cape.
It considers the political shifts taking place in these localities, and tests the
assumption that the authorities are more likely to respond with hostility to
political shifts away from the ruling alliance, as most gatherings and protests
in these areas take place away from the media spotlight and, as a result, the
costs of repression are lower.
Chapter 8 summarises the main findings of the activist interviews, which
probe the experiential knowledge of users of the RGA, and examines whether
these interviews point to official facilitation or frustration of the right to
protest. It incorporates preliminary interviews with 22 activist organisations
and their legal representatives, as well as findings from four protest sites.
Chapter 9 evaluates police responses to the right to protest, with emphasis
on recent controversies around public order policing of protests. It examines
the efficacy of recent police arguments for more resources on the basis that
they are under siege by examining trends in the number of peaceful versus
unrest-related crowd incidents and the number of cases of police violence.The
chapter also considers the extent of police commitment to demilitarisation.
Chapter 10 discusses the media coverage of collective action in four
protest sites, evaluating the extent to which the coverage manifested elements
of the protest paradigm. It does so through a source analysis and a thematic
content analysis, and compares and contrasts media reports with the municipal,
police and activist accounts in those areas. The emphasis is on evaluating
whether the media coverage has contributed to an understanding of protests
and their underlying drivers, or whether distortion of these issues is apparent
in media reporting.
Chapter 11 brings together arguments from all the preceding chapters
and examines the overall trends emerging from the protest data. It looks at
whether the worrying findings that came out of the Rustenburg research
were evident in other municipalities, and at what can be concluded on a
more general level about the conduct of municipalities in facilitating the right
to protest. It also considers the broader political significance of protests, and
whether repression is a likely political trajectory for South Africas current
political administration.
INTRODUCTION23
Notes on terminology
Some points about terminology used in the book need to be made. The
RGA requires those wishing to engage in a gathering, including a protest,
to notify the municipality of their intention to do so. Once they have done
so, the notification process is complete. They do not need to wait for the
municipality to provide permission to proceed; however, many municipalities
are under that impression. As a result, when reference is made in the book
to the number of gatherings that have been approved by a particular
municipality, the word approved is put in scare quotes. This makes it clear
that the notification process is not a permission-seeking process, which is
what the word approved implies.
A distinction also needs to be drawn at the outset between peaceful
protests, disruptive protests and violent protests. In an attempt to encourage
a measure of reflection on the appropriate use of the word violent to
characterise protests, the South African Research Chair in Social Change
has distinguished between peaceful, disruptive and violent protests; this was
done to make the point that while some protests may involve property
destruction, they do not necessary involve violence.13 While peaceful protests
would take place without any public disturbance or injury to participants or
bystanders, disruptive protests would involve methods that disrupt the normal
functioning of social institutions but are nonetheless peaceful in that they
do not involve injury to persons; examples include occupations and sit-ins,
burning tyres and blockading roads.This form of protest is often undertaken
when peaceful means do not work and protestors need to escalate their
actions into disruption to draw attention to the fact that these institutions
may have normalised fundamentally unjust social arrangements. Violent
protests, in contrast, involve the destruction of property and/or injuring or
killing people. Even more confusingly, in cataloguing gatherings and protests,
SAPS draws a distinction between peaceful and unrest-related gatherings.
According to SAPS, an incident becomes unrest-related when it triggers
the opening of a crime docket in terms of section 12 the RGA, which sets
out offences and penalties for contravening the Act.14 It is likely that SAPS
would categorise disruptive and violent protests as unrest-related, but much
depends on whether or not a docket was opened. These terms will take on
these meanings in the book.