Post-apartheid South Africa is characterised by frequent public protests. On average, between 2007 and 2013, there were over 11 protests daily. Research shows that protests almost doubled in the 20 years after 1997.
Service delivery protests – over basic services such as housing, electricity, refuse removal, water and sanitation – feature most prominently in these protests.
These protesters employ diverse tactics at different times: marching to government offices, barricading roads, destroying property and attacking unpopular individuals.
Often people ask why protesters resort to destroying public and private property and attacking people.
I have researched poor people’s struggles for housing and basic services in South Africa since 2012.
This article draws from a study involving 20 in-depth interviews and two focus group discussions in Gugulethu and the same number in Khayelitsha. These are low-income black townships in Cape Town.
The study investigated three inter-related questions: the reasons for protests, the tactics used by protesters, and the character and organisation of the protests. This article focuses on when, how and why different tactics are used in these protests.
It may be easy to blame protesters for barricading roads, vandalising property and attacking people. However, as my study shows, protesters often initially engage in peaceful and orderly marches. They resort to more radical tactics only when peaceful tactics fail to yield results.
Rather than placing the blame squarely on protesters, there is a need to consider the seriousness of their grievances (such as lack of water), and the failure by the authorities to respond speedily and adequately. Genuinely acknowledging and addressing the grievances discourages more militant protest tactics.
Findings
There is often a perception that communities have an appetite to engage in violent protests. But my research shows that this is not the case.
Aggrieved communities often engage in protests to push for the delivery of basic services.
Usually, poor communities first engage in rounds of orderly and peaceful means of engagement with government officials to alert them to their grievances.
These means of engagement – which are less reported by the media – include holding meetings with the officials responsible for addressing their challenges, and handing them written demands.
When all these means of engagement fail to yield fruit, communities resort to more dramatic means of engagement. These include barricading roads to pressure the government to meet their demands. Even when they turn to dramatic tactics, they first exhaust less dramatic ones.
As the scholar-activist Trevor Ngwane has rightly remarked,
When people start hitting the streets, they should have a banner saying: ‘All protocols observed’, because they’ve gone through all the channels … People feel that the only way to be heard, to get attention, is to burn tyres and engage in some of protest.
My research in Gugulethu and Khayelitsha found that a lack of response, or a poor or unsatisfactory response, led to more radical tactics.
For example, a pastor I interviewed explained the rationale for more radical protest tactics with a compelling metaphor. He explained that pain was necessary in order for someone to take action. He gave an example of a person with a sore arm, but who did nothing to address the source of the pain. He reasoned that if someone else pinched the sore arm, this would compel the patient to take necessary steps to ensure that the arm was healed.
In the same way, he explained that the government knew about the “sore arms”, or poor conditions that impoverished communities endured, but chose to ignore them.
To pressure the government to address their grievances, communities sometimes employ radical protest tactics (pinching). For communities enduring appalling service delivery, the momentary inconveniences ensuing from the “pinching” pale in comparison to the ignored service delivery challenges (sore arms).
My research, for example, highlights the precariousness of living in shacks, lacking a bathroom, toilet, running water and electricity.
It is these challenges that residents episodically protest against using primarily orderly means of engagement and sometimes more radical protest tactics to pressure (or pinch) the government to address the challenges.
What should be done?
Tactics such as the destruction of property and attacks on people that sometimes accompany protests should be discouraged. At the same time, it is important to condemn the circumstances that necessitate such radical tactics.
A more responsive government would try to make it unnecessary for people to turn to militant protests to air their grievances. The government should proactively address service delivery challenges and swiftly respond to the complaints raised by communities.
Written by Kenny Chiwarawara, Senior Lecturer, University of Johannesburg.
