Contested Space and Citizenship in Grahamstown,South Africa

Introduction

During October 2015, Grahamstown, a depressed university town in the mostly rural Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, was the site of two important political mobilisations. Protests by students at South African universities against experiences of racial, class-based, and gender-based oppression that had begun earlier in the year achieved country-wide, partial coordination (with local variation and diverse movements) in October in a mass uprising against tuition fee increases scheduled for 2016. In Grahamstown, the student protests coincided with the (unrelated) mobilisation of xenophobic violence in the city. In the period of some ten days, these two distinct sequences of political events changed, at least for a time, the shape of Grahamstown’s politics while also exhibiting continuity with the long history of politics in Grahamstown. That history is marked by the contestation and control of space, race, and citizenship.

Henri Lefebvre coined the phrase ‘the production of space’ (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991), arguing that ‘(Social) space is a social product’ with ‘a sort of reality of its own’; furthermore, that it ‘serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power’ (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991: 26, emphasis original). While Lefebvre imagined contemporary forms of power to be practised through the homogenisation of space (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991: 23), it was the Martinican psychologist, theorist, and activist, Frantz Fanon, who theorised the differentiation of space through power relationships. Fanon located the racialised production of space – of ‘a world divided into compartments’ (Fanon, [1961] 1963: 37) governed through different modes and logics – at the centre of the system of colonialism.

Lefebvre and Fanon both theorise a fundamental resistance to oppressive space production. The former writes, ‘The violence of power is answered by the violence of subversion…. State-imposed normality makes permanent transgression inevitable’ (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991: 23), echoing Fanon’s more specific formulation of a decade earlier:

The violence which has ruled over the ordering of colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, of the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. (Fanon, [1961] 1963: 40)

Linking the worlds of the colony and post-colony, Fanon writes that ‘this system of compartments’ ‘implies’ and ‘reveals’ certain lines of force; ‘[t]his approach to the colonial world…will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized’ (Fanon, [1961] 1963: 37). Shortly after the end of apartheid, Mahmood Mamdani theorised South Africa as a spatially and politically bifurcated state, ‘deracialized but not democratized’, in which differentiated access to citizenship is mediated by the boundary between urban and rural (Mamdani, 1996: 18). South Africa is a country where space and citizenship have been politicised, racialised, contested, and controlled; where space, race, and citizenship inflect daily on political life in the post-colony in ways similar to and emerging out of colonial spatial organisation and political relationships. South Africans today practise politics that both inscribe and transgress those lines of division.

For 10 years, Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack dwellers’ movement based in Durban, ‘has sought to build a popular counter-power through the construction of self-managed and democratically organized communities engaged in collective struggle’ (Pithouse, 2016). They have faced violent (and illegal) eviction and repression from the state when they assert their right to access urban land for housing and living: actions of lived necessity that are termed ‘land invasions’ by the state. Similar violence has been meted out to shack-dwellers in Cape Town (Knoetze, 2014; Sacks, 2014) and Johannesburg (Keepile, 2010). The repressive narrative imagines the provenance of the repressible poor as elsewhere, often meaning rural, as in Durban, where activists have sometimes been cast as from the Eastern Cape (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2015a).

In 2008 and 2015, major episodes of xenophobic violence occurred which targeted mostly poor Africans from elsewhere on the continent, and, since mid-May of 2015, this violence, it has been argued, has been taken up by the state via Operation Fiela (Nicolson, 2014), which has mobilised South African National Defence Force and police units to harass and coral ‘foreigners’ (although many families suspected of foreignness are South African). Operation Fiela includes ‘land invasions’ by the urban poor among the crimes it will target (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2015b).

The confluence of space, race, and citizenship is of crucial conceptual and practical significance in the contemporary South African political context. Camalita Naicker observes that student political practices of 2015 at times resembled community organising practices, and that repression of students, even at elite institutions, took forms familiar to community struggles in South Africa (Naicker, 2016: 57–59). This paper seeks to historicize contemporary politics in Grahamstown, arguing that spatial exclusion of the past, which entrenched a certain form of citizenship, is among the political precursors of contemporary modes of exclusion that were evident in both the student protests and xenophobic looting in Grahamstown in 2015. By considering together these two events, we can interrogate aspects of colonial political continuities in post-1994 South Africa which variously influence mass protest action for democratic opening, anti-democratic violence, and state responses to both.

Spatial politics in Grahamstown’s history

The founding of the British settlement of Grahamstown in 1812 on the western frontier of land inhabited by Xhosa people was a significant moment in the development of the politics of space and citizenship in South/ern Africa. The British town, in a hollow in the hills some twenty miles west of the Great Fish River, symbolised what Noël Mostert has called the ‘first great “removal” in South African history’ (Mostert, 1992: 389). The town site was the military headquarters of Colonel John Graham in the war of 1811–1812, during which the British ‘cleared’ the Xhosa from the fertile region between the Sundays and the Fish Rivers, the Zuurveld. It was a campaign and ‘clearance’ which Graham undertook, in the words of Governor of the Cape Colony, John Cradock, with ‘a proper degree of terror’ (Maclennan, 1986: 128). The extent of the violence which drove thousands of people eastward over the Fish River is captured in Cradock’s admiring phrase. As Mostert writes, ‘By finally succeeding in drawing this line between Xhosa and colony, the Cape government’ had ‘created a new reality by emphasizing separation of the races as a divide between natural enemies and irreconcilable cultures, the only solution for which was complete severance’ (Mostert, 1992: 389–390). It was not simply a matter of ‘severance’, but of politics and control, and the logic behind this separation has operated through two centuries.

On 1 December 1818, a commando – an armed column – of British soldiers under Colonel Thomas Brereton, with some Boer and African auxiliaries, departed Grahamstown heading east towards the Great Fish River. They aimed to force Xhosa, already driven so violently across the Fish, further east beyond the Keiskamma River so that the Fish River ‘border’ might be ‘tranquil’ (Mostert, 1992: 469). The pretense for the raid was cattle theft committed by Xhosa against White farmers in the colony, who lived and ran their cattle on land which had been taken from the Xhosa only within the last seven years; land the control of which and access to which was still contested. To achieve tranquility, when Brereton found that the Xhosa had fled the commando and hidden themselves and their cattle in the bush thickets along the Keiskamma, he ‘turned his artillery on the bush and kept firing blindly into it’– as indiscriminate as gunfire can be. Almost 25,000 head of cattle were rounded up and taken to the British colony. Within a few weeks, Xhosa were raiding the colony for cattle in earnest, because they had lost their most important source of food (Mostert, 1992: 470).

In the ‘Brereton Raid’, as the December 1818 commando is known, a rationale can be recognised which has flowed steadily, if adapted, through South/ern African political relationships into the present: the colonised space west of the river was governed by laws, and African incursion into it was perceived to be criminal; it was a ‘civilised’ space where political belonging – citizenship – was determined by race and allegiance to the British Crown. East of the river was a space (in British imperial–colonial eyes) of illegitimate authorities, an African, ‘uncivilised’ space inhabited by African, ‘uncivilised’ people, where both space and people were governable or controllable first with violence rather than with liberal systems of law, and then with laws designed for their exclusion. Domenico Losurdo critiques the core of liberalism as defining precisely these ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ spaces (Losurdo, 2011: 299). On the contrary, of course, east of the river was a space of established and enduring systems and traditions of political legitimacy and belonging, and the invasion of European soldiers and administrators, violence and politics was resisted for over a century before war and starvation ensured hegemony of the colonial system.

Nearly 100 years after the Brereton Raid, in Grahamstown, 23 April 1917, a group of between 500 and 1000 African activists marched from the town’s ‘location’ – designated African spaces in South/ern African parlance since the 1830s, referring both to urban and rural areas – to the doors of the Municipal Hall on High Street. This was a time when a local newspaper moaned that ‘location matters…have been intrusive enough of late as to make them almost offensive’ (Local Opinion, 25 July 1914), invoking classic principles of racialised, spatialised urban politics (Fanon, [1961] 1963; Goldberg, 1993). Decisions taken by the Municipal Council in 1914 that limited legal residence by Africans in Grahamstown to those employed in the ‘White’ city, set unfavourable conditions for leases for Africans, and which limited the number of cattle that could be legally kept by the residents of Grahamstown’s locations had been the subject of protest by petition in the city for three years (Southey, 1990). Furthermore, there had been many evictions from the locations and ‘indiscriminate shooting’ of Africans. All of these exemplify the increasingly micro-managed control of African space that was expressed most fully in apartheid. This state of affairs motivated the march. This protest, during which some of the demonstrators were armed, was a signal not only of frustration with municipal laws but also of a political autonomy extant in the African locations, and therefore, following the logic of the commando, it was crushed.

The marchers were met by municipal officials, ‘protected by a posse of foot police armed with rifles and bayonets fixed, drawn up in a cordon across High Street’ and were told that they must present their demands in a reasonable way. They were ordered to return to the location unless they disarmed. The marchers would not disarm as long as the police were armed, but did retreat to the location (Southey, 1990: 7). In traditional commando style, auxiliary paramilitary forces were hastily enlisted and armed and, ‘By nightfall, the outskirts of the city [meaning the White section of the city] and especially those areas contiguous with the locations were ‘“thoroughly picketed”’ (Southey, 1984: 247). The next day almost 1000 police and paramilitaries invaded the locations, armed and mounted or driving cars, where they surrounded the hill called Makana’s Kop and arrested some fifty-five people (Southey, 1990, 9–10). Headlines in the Grahamstown Journal read, ‘Grahamstown Army Marches on the Location’ and ‘Cavalry Charge on Makana’s Kop’ (Grahamstown Journal, 26 April 1917). The spatial–political division demonstrated in the Brereton Raid can be identified in this action as well, and its purpose remained the same: violent control of Africans in specific space, and maintaining a ‘tranquil’ border.

Almost a century later – a century that saw the implementation of the violent ultra-compartmentalisation of apartheid, as well as formal democracy and the election of the African National Congress (ANC) government – in August 2014, members of the local Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) ¹ and other Grahamstown residents were once more protesting outside of the (now Makana) City Hall. Several hundred people mobilised against corruption in the municipality, calling for its dissolution; for transparent management of a corrupt Reconstruction and Development Programme housing programme; and against a poor municipal response to a long-lasting and recurring water shortage problem that affected most of the town but was worst felt in the impoverished Black township (‘location’). Also arrayed once again in front of Makana City Hall was a massive display of militarised police power: several heavily armoured cars as well as smaller South African Police Service (SAPS) vehicles with blinking lights blocked the road and the square on the west side of City Hall, and cordons of police in riot gear stood in front of the building, shields raised. When speakers from the UPM addressed the protesters from a platform immediately in front of City Hall, their backdrop was rendered in SAPS shields and helmets. The meaning was clear: the march and the protest constituted, in the eyes of the municipality, an infringement to be controlled by force.

Space in student protest and community struggle ²

On Monday, 19 October 2015, Rhodes University in Grahamstown was blockaded and shut down by students joining in a countrywide series of protests against the scheduled increase of what are, for some, already unaffordable fees for tertiary education. The students were also motivated by what has been called ‘decolonisation’ of higher education and by the disadvantaged access to universities and the discrimination once in them that are faced by (especially) working-class, Black students. These experiences had been the subject of more localised struggles across South Africa beginning in March and continuing during the year (see Naicker, 2015).

Members of the UPM participated in the student protests that day in October 2015, because the issues of class, race, and access to education were as much theirs as they were the students’. Since Rhodes students began sustained organisation in March 2015, the UPM had been involved and offered support, which usually took the form of the UPM’s participation in marches and of informal discussions with student activists. A few members of the UPM were also members of the most prominent group of political students, the Black Student Movement (BSM), for much of the year. The UPM, and, to a lesser degree, the BSM, viewed collaboration as a necessary part of their programmes, explained through a discourse of uniting student and community struggles. Rhodes University’s site at the extreme western end of Grahamstown emphasises its elite-ness, its inaccessibility, and its distance from the Black and poor township in the east. One UPM member spoke of Rhodes as distant from the community, but she also suggested that a connection between the UPM and the BSM would be an important link to make. The student movement’s links with the UPM differed from other times that people in the western end of town had associated with the UPM: for instance, the August 2014 protest, when some (non-organised) students and suburban Grahamstown residents joined the UPM outside City Hall. Their participation was motivated by a city-wide water shortage, and not by solidarity with the UPM or other township residents. There remained a spatial (and largely racial and class-based) political distinction between participants from the township and the ‘town’. When asked whether this participation should be viewed positively or not, the same UPM member explained that it was not a good thing that ‘they only started getting involved with the community when they were affected. When they are not affected, they do not want to be part of it’ (Author interview, 14 May 2015, Grahamstown).

At times, a different approach than this was apparent in the relationship between the UPM and the BSM. Rather than reinforced, Grahamstown’s spatial divisions were sometimes challenged through this political relationship. For instance, the BSM and the UPM planned a joint march from Fingo Square in the old ‘Fingo Location’ (Grahamstown’s second location, established in 1848) to Rhodes on 28 May 2015 under the banner ‘Decolonise this Institution’ in order to highlight the colonial character of Grahamstown and the university’s position in it. Although miscommunications resulted in only a small number of UPM members participating in this march, the BSM, joined on the way by some members of the community, undertook the march.

When the BSM began protest action in earnest in late August, UPM members continued to be involved. Demanding a long term solution to the university’s short vacation accommodation problem ³ the BSM began an occupation of the university’s Council Chambers in the Main Administration Building on 26 August 2015 which lasted for over a month, and, on many days, a few UPM members participated in the occupation. The occupation was a contestation of space in multiple ways. Students occupied the symbolic decision-making chambers of the university, and they ‘redecorated’ it with black-and-white pictures of important Black and African revolutionaries, thinkers, artists, and militants. The participation of the UPM brought a different dimension to the occupation, in which community members accessed the elite space named after a British imperialist (Cecil Rhodes) whose exploitation of South/ern African people had involved their separation from the land and an important moment in their spatial and political exclusion. ⁴ The student struggle’s objectives of improving the experience and access of working-class, Black students at Rhodes is an important one in Grahamstown, where high school matriculation rates (except at the expensive, elite high schools) are extremely low (Westaway, 2015), and very few local students attend the university which is within walking distance of their homes. The opportunities for solidarity between students and the UPM, and, in the beginning of September, for unity among the student movement, the UPM, and National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union members who work at Rhodes and mostly live in Grahamstown’s township were clear, though such solidarity has not been fully realised; nonetheless, when the countrywide student protests began in October a small number UPM members once again joined the students at Rhodes.

A few hours after the Monday, 19 October 2015, protest at Rhodes began in the early hours of the morning, students from Rhodes marched to nearby Eastcape Midlands College (EMC) to show solidarity with EMC students whose protest beginning on Friday had allegedly been met with police violence. Solidarity was extended because the students at Rhodes, who had burned tires and blocked roads just as the students from the college had done, had not been met with aggression from police. The issues of race and space were certainly at play: Rhodes is an elite and formerly all-White university, with a relatively diverse student body, while EMC’s student body is mostly Black, working-class, and the college is located in a wealthy neighbourhood of Grahamstown. What appeared to be the assumed criminality of Black people in ‘White town’ mimicked the logic whetted during colonialism and systematised under apartheid. Shortly after the Rhodes marchers arrived at EMC, students from both institutions were dispersed with police stun grenades. The protesters returned to Rhodes to regroup, and in the mid-afternoon marched back to EMC. After an hour, SAPS ordered the students to disperse, which they refused to do until five o’clock. SAPS then scattered them by force, deploying more stun grenades and a mobile water cannon. A mass meeting organised at Rhodes in the evening included students from both institutions and several members of the UPM.

Rhodes University remained closed for the week while nationally the scale and scope of both the student protests and their repression intensified. As part of the demonstrations across South Africa on Wednesday, 21 October 2015, Rhodes students and staff marched through town, taking a route that passed EMC. Police had issued a permit for this march, and monitored its progress.

Space and xenophobia in Grahamstown

While the students marched, another protest by the taxi drivers’ associations in Grahamstown had initiated violence. The protesting taxi drivers had delivered a petition bringing attention to the terrible state of Grahamstown’s roads and the rise of violent crime, focusing on rumours of murders committed by foreigners. The Mayor, Nomhle Gaga, did not meet with them, and the taxi drivers turned against ‘foreign’-owned ‘spaza’ shops owned by Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali, and Ethiopian residents of Grahamstown. It was a premeditated move. Some of the taxis taking part in the protest had xenophobic slogans painted on them, and a crowd was mobilised by the taxi drivers to attack and loot the shops, beginning in Bathurst Street not far from the centre of town and then proceeding into the township. The xenophobic violence was legitimated by the looters on the basis of rumours that a ‘foreigner’ – an ‘Arab’, a ‘man with a beard’ – had killed and mutilated several women in recent months; rumours which SAPS had done nothing to dispel in spite of repeated warnings by the UPM members and other Grahamstown residents that they could result in violence (Unemployed People’s Movement, 2015). ⁵ For almost a week, looting, destruction of property, and threats continued against shops and shop owners. Some three hundred shops were looted and several hundred people were displaced.

While Michael Neocosmos’s study of South African xenophobia shows that it has been a problem since the transition to democracy in 1994 (Neocosmos, 2006: 1) xenophobia is not unique to the post-apartheid era. Indeed, the history of Grahamstown’s differentiated spatial politics has threads of xenophobia running through it from the beginning. The voluntary arrival and forced relocation of Africans to the immediate Grahamstown area during the 1830s and 1840s, spurred the colonial government’s decision to set up the first official African ‘locations’ in Grahamstown. These were days when Africans were counted as ‘foreigners’ in the Cape Colony. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, fear and suspicion of Africans arriving in Grahamstown from further east on the advancing colonial frontier inflected the particular racism of the town and region. In this xenophobic view, in which to be African was to live perpetually on the edge of criminality, to be ‘more African’, from the rural frontier, was even worse.

From the 1860s on, White suspicions of the unemployed and of ‘vagrants’ or ‘illegal inhabitants’, which often referred to African people from rural areas, was prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. In April 1878, with war once more on the frontier, the people following a chief ⁶ named Oba were relocated away from the frontier. Of 500 people relocated to Grahamstown, some 250 remained, about half of them children, apparently because there was concern about Grahamstown’s proximity to the frontier and the danger to the town posed by large numbers of possibly hostile adults (Gibbens, 1982: 273–274); shortly thereafter, White Grahamstown wailed about a ‘great influx’ of ‘utter heathen’ into the city’s locations (Gibbens, 1982: 276).

The distinction between Africans from the town and from the country must be noted. Those arriving from the frontier were considered undesirable fomenters of unrest and disturbances, suggesting at least fear of (and probably existing) political allegiances and activity that was unacceptable to colonial Whites. In another example, from the late nineteenth century through apartheid, the criminalisation of the brewing of sorghum beer was strongly linked to racist and xenophobic perceptions of ‘African-ness’. Citizenship was closely guarded through spatial and racial control and imbued in some cases with perceptions of urban and rural that mirrored the logic of xenophobia. A properly historicised account of xenophobia in South Africa that draws on such local examples would be valuable in analysing the politics of today. However, the purpose here is to demonstrate continuities in the xenophobic event of October 2015 with the spatial politics of colonialism. What is important here is that historical modes and logics of exclusion in Grahamstown are linked to the ways in which race and ‘foreign-ness’ are intertwined today, and the possibility that this discourse, originally levelled against inhabitants of Grahamstown’s ‘locations’, can be mobilised by their descendents. As Mamdani’s study of the Rwandan genocide shows, politics of the colonial state can have both state and popular manifestations in the post-colony (Mamdani, 2001).

In South Africa, xenophobia has retained much of its racialised character. In April 2015, xenophobic attacks in Durban targeted foreign-born Africans, particularly Congolese people, as well as people from the Eastern Cape (imagined as rural) living in informal settlements. To be poor and African – the ‘more African’, the worse – were the criteria for victimisation. When members of Abahlali baseMjondolo organised a (legal) anti-xenophobia march, it was violently prevented by police. Abahlali baseMjondolo identified the police, the ruling party, and local taxi drivers as supporters and instigators of xenophobic violence in Durban (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2015a).

Shortly afterwards, beginning in July 2015, Operation Fiela deployed SAPS and army units to combat crime by rounding up ‘foreigners’ and other ‘illegal inhabitants’, including people participating in land occupations around the country. Poor people, Africans from other countries, and Africans living in informal settlements were targeted. The same understanding that the authorities employed over a century ago in Grahamstown, which views ‘illegal inhabitants’ (foreigners) and ‘unemployed people’ as problems, which led the Grahamstown Journal to observe in 1908 the ‘regular crusade’ against ‘squatters and vagrants’, is at work today (17 October). It legitimates, as it did in colonial Grahamstown, various forms of prejudicial politics and violence. It also emphasises the notion that poverty signals non-belonging, or, alternately, that poverty breeds violence, both of which conceptions involve spatial assumptions, being largely aimed at township residents.

As in Durban, local politicians and businesses were implicated in Grahamstown’s xenophobic politics. Although Makana Municipality convened a meeting at City Hall on Friday, 23 October 2015, asserting there that the municipality and SAPS would handle the situation, these authorities not then proceed in subsequent days to ameliorate either the political situation or the emergency needs of the affected people. No SAPS representative attended the meeting. Democratic Alliance ward councillor, Marcelle Booysen, expressed her belief, highly enabling of xenophobic action, that when the ‘foreigners’ came back, they should have fewer shops. ⁷ Community members allege that, the night before, an ANC councillor, Mthuthuzeli Matyumza, had addressed a crowd, saying the foreigners would go (O’Halloran, 2015a). Grahamstown’s taxi associations actively instigated and supported the looting by bearing xenophobic slogans and transporting looters for free, according to community members.

Police played a central role, as they had in Durban and, indeed, in Grahamstown in the past. Inexplicably, SAPS claimed that their ‘restoration of order’ and ‘support’ of the ‘foreigners’ after the week of looting was a success for Operation Fiela (IOLNews, 2015). Contrary to this narrative, Grahamstown shop owners affected by the looting as well as members of the UPM have recounted police behaviours that ranged from indifference, to laughing at people whose shops were being looted, to facilitation of and participation in the looting. In addition to their failure to respond to the Grahamstown community’s fears and warnings, the immediate aggression exercised against students by SAPS at EMC contrasted sharply with instances on Wednesday in which police allowed people to loot shops; and, despite many arrests, the contrast between policing in the township (for township residents) and in the wealthy quarters (against young Black people) shows a stark spatial divide (O’Halloran, 2015b). Indeed, the spatial division of Grahamstown was glaring. The police line strung across Beaufort Street, declaring and dividing with yellow tape and rifle-bearing officers the zones in which looting would be tolerated and would not be – the township, and the ‘town’ – was reminiscent of the logic of crime, criminality, and control of earlier Grahamstown. Southey’s depiction of events in 1917, when the White town was ‘thoroughly picketed’ against the ‘unrest’ in the township, is worth recalling (Southey, 1984: 247). Grahamstown’s violence differed from earlier instances of xenophobic mobilisation in South Africa, for example in May 2008 and April 2015, in that the ‘foreigners’ under attack were mostly defined as Muslim rather than as ‘other African’. The politics of division, exclusion, and xenophobia are not precisely the same as in the past, but the spatial divisions through which they operated are not lost, either.

In an interview exactly two weeks before the xenophobic crisis began in Grahamstown, a UPM member brought spatial arguments into our discussion of the political situation that eventually produced the crisis. He described how, at an event organised by the UPM, women raised the issue of the rumours of murders in the township to a UPM activist, and urged that they meet not only with Makana Municipality but with SAPS. “We went in a meeting with the [police] at the police station, but we were sent to the police station in Joza.” This matter of being sent to a different police station is significant. The man explained:

The [town] is divided into two. Most of us after the river ⁸ […], we’re supposed to do everything that needs involvement of police in Joza, then this [station] is in town. So that’s why we couldn’t get tangible results here.

Apparently the things of the past, even after the 1994 change, core issues didn’t change. There is still Black and White, because this one police station actually is like an extension of security of a White monopoly. Whereby for example if there’s a break in or a robbery at Checker’s [grocery store in the centre of town], they can be easy dealing with that. [But] usually in the community, in the township, there are many cases they are dealing with – you know, differences between people, where there are fights and all those stuff – but in this side it’s more about financial problems, guarding the finance, the whole economical sense of it. It’s an individual economical [sic] sense, the break-ins and such. (Author interview, 7 October 2015, Grahamstown)

The way people are treated at these police stations differs, as well, he explained. In the Joza station, people wanting to open a case are usually required to produce a suspect, which is not the case at the other police station catering to the mostly White population. The way police responded before and during the xenophobic attacks is consistent with this racial–spatial argument. The police do not serve the township community – ‘the’ community, in many people’s perceptions – but control it (O’Halloran, 2015a).

Divergent modes of citizenship

It is important to note that like the historical events discussed above, the events of October accentuate the importance of citizenship. Following this, it is also crucial that historically citizenship had spatial referents (at times determinants), and that particular forms of xenophobic and racist politics had spatial overtones as well. October 2015’s events in Grahamstown evinced spatial politics and demarcated space in specific ways, as we have seen. These can be linked to the question of citizenship. Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between ‘real’ and ‘formal’ citizenship, in which only those with access to the former are fully rights bearing citizens, is useful here (Chatterjee, 2004: 4). South Africa’s citizens are extended ‘formal’ citizenship, but the relegation of the majority of the population to a second-rate physical and political space belies a ‘real’ citizenship. This latter group often considered ‘encroachers’ and ‘polluters’ in the urban sphere are not considered a part of rights-bearing ‘civil society’ but of the governable ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 140).

Some of the women affected by the xenophobia, calling themselves Voices of the Foreigners’ Wives, organised a protest against xenophobia, crime, violence against women and poor service delivery at City Hall on 30 October 2015. They had the support of the UPM, the nearby Rural People’s Movement, local non-governmental organisation Masifunde, the local Economic Freedom Fighters party, and other local organisations, students, academics, and residents, but the Mayor refused to accept their memorandum. It was a patent announcement, made throughout Grahamstown’s history, that only some residents enjoyed access to the protection and services of the formal authorities; that is, citizenship. In the days before the march, as the municipality and police manoeuvred to prevent any public protest by the women, the Mayor had told these women that she had ‘forgotten’ about them. It requires little effort to proceed from this ‘forgetting’ to an invocation of the phrase ‘surplus people’ that was so fundamental to the project of excluding Black people from South African citizenship during apartheid.

Neocosmos writes, ‘Xenophobia emanates in society as a direct outcome of the hegemony of a state discourse’, as opposed to ‘popular-democratic’ discourse on citizenship (Neocosmos, 2006: 21). During the xenophobic looting, members of the UPM protected shops under attack in the first hours of the crisis, and worked over the following days to try to end the violence and looting. In the emergency meetings convened by the UPM after the onset of the xenophobic looting and destruction, the right of the shop owners to live and trade in South Africa and Grahamstown was affirmed, not as foreigners who had the appropriate documentation, but as community members who, in both their countries of origin and in South Africa, had to confront the same exclusions as many locally- and South African-born people. During the looting, the UPM and other local organisations mobilised to stop the attacks and to talk with community members about the struggle that the shop owners shared with them, no matter where they were born. As one man of 50 years who lives in a shack on the outskirts of Grahamstown had said in our interview during calmer times, ‘But everybody, this is our country – everybody, no matter you are White, not matter you are Black, no matter you are green, we are here in South Africa’ (Author interview, 11 August 2015, Grahamstown). This logic, put into practice during the crisis and differing from current state practices, demonstrates an open and egalitarian approach to the issue of citizenship.

In contrast to this praxis, the xenophobic violence that took place in Grahamstown in late October 2015 offered a different logic of citizenship: a closed and exclusionary approach conceived through narrow definitions of identity and belonging. Though most of the ‘foreign’ shop owners who were attacked are South African citizens and most are married to South African women, they were considered by some to be outsiders who did not belong – who, whatever the official documentation might say, were not citizens of South Africa. People were mobilised around this political logic, encouraged by local business and political interests, to drive ‘foreigners’ out of Grahamstown.

Neocosmos writes that xenophobia is ‘a discourse and practice of exclusion from community’; furthermore, ‘this process of exclusion is a political process’ ‘concerned with exclusion from citizenship [that] denotes a specific political relationship between state and society’ (Neocosmos, 2006: 15–18). Historically, xenophobic politics have been strongly linked to colonial racism and to the manufacture of inequality still experienced in South Africa today. Xenophobia has been a politics of oppression and control of poor people and ‘foreigners’ – those who are deemed not to belong, who have most often been identified as Africans. The state, in its many forms from the colonial period through apartheid and into the post-1994 era, has actively participated in defining ‘foreignness’ in ways that exclude poor, Black people. Monopolies and business interests – beer, taxis, shops – have had a role in deciding who and what is ‘foreign’, in producing exclusion and in inciting violence. In the daily experiences of xenophobic mobilisations in Grahamstown, the spatial politics discussed here, clear historically, are manifested in the present as well. South African states, colonial and post-colonial, have also mobilised poor people against other poor people and Africans against other Africans in this project of exclusion, control, and oppression. After members of the UPM went through the township distributing flyers with an anti-xenophobic message and speaking to residents, one UPM member said, ‘We heard two things. We heard about the rumours [of the murderer being a foreigner], and we heard the frustration of unemployment.’ While xenophobia is not a natural progression from poverty, we cannot divorce both frustrations from the politics of inequality and exclusion that have a long history in South Africa and Grahamstown.

The idea of a ‘popular-democratic’ citizenship was visible at times in the student protests, as well. In addition to the rebellion against structural oppression through class and race, the question of citizenship remained at the core of the student protests posed in the forms of who had a right to the higher education institutions of South Africa and who had a right to determine the content and future of higher education in South Africa. At Rhodes, the students demanded that the levy for foreign students be reconsidered and standardised across the country’s universities.

The national student uprising and the outbreak of xenophobic looting are undoubtedly a part of the longer narrative of politics and inequality in Grahamstown and South Africa more broadly. The place of contemporary moments of politics in this narrative deserves close attention. As Neocosmos has argued, the crisis of xenophobia in South Africa is a feature of the country’s crisis of democracy (Neocosmos, 2006), and the students categorically expressed their position that their struggle was an effort to hold the state accountable to its people and to have universities that are accessible to and function for the people of South Africa (Naicker, 2015). Space, race, and citizenship were implicated in the political mobilisations in Grahamstown in October 2015. In Grahamstown, xenophobic politics affected most the people who live in the township, the ‘coerced’ space.

These two mobilisations of October, one which seeks to democratise higher education in South Africa and has met with repression from universities and the state ⁹ and one which seeks to exclude through violence and is countered with activism driven by shared humanity, shared rights, and shared struggle is a significant facet of the immediate future of other social movements across South Africa. Liberal modes of citizenship inflected with colonial concepts, especially of race, are key aspects of this discussion. While some expressions of popular politics offer possibilities of more open and democratic modes of political belonging, it is a crucial observation that popular politics can be about limiting politics, as well.

2016: continuity in politics of space, race and citizenship

Just as the events of October 2015 in Grahamstown were not isolated from the past, it is important to note that neither were they the culmination of a specific political trajectory: they are still unfolding. The politics that produced student revolt, xenophobic looting, and official and community responses to these events have continued to influence daily life and decisions in Grahamstown and South Africa. As a postscript to this study, it is worth briefly mentioning more recent events.

While Grahamstown’s immediate displacement crisis was resolved by January 2016, xenophobia remains very present in South African discourse. In March 2016, the Premier of the North West Province, Supra Mahumapelo, announced that foreigners leasing spaza shops in the province would no longer be able to operate their businesses, as more ‘indigenous’ business was necessary. Presented as a matter of land, the project was undertaken in conjunction with local traditional authorities, and one report described it as a ‘grass-roots development programme’ (BuzzSouthAfrica, 2016). The procedures of colonial indirect rule are only slightly modified in the post-colony, and in this case are used to legitimate both state and popular forms of xenophobia. For Neocosmos, xenophobia is ‘a consequence of an understanding of politics which presupposes boundaries and territories’ that differentiate rights and which are ‘linked to the rise of the territorial state in Africa as this develops primarily with colonialism/apartheid and which is then consolidated in the post-colonial period’ (Neocosmos, 2006: 18). Forms of politics at work historically were important to defining people through race, tribe, and citizenship in ways that were increasingly spatialised. The spatial exclusion of the past, which entrenched a certain form of citizenship, is among the political precursors of contemporary modes of exclusion. As seen in Grahamstown, these have local history, configuration, expression, and significance that provide opportunity for reflection on broader political contexts.

Student protests for decolonisation have also continued at South African universities in 2016. Repression has increased, intensifying the possibility of and, indeed, leading to, greater violence by police, private security, and students. At Rhodes, student political activity continued without major incident until April, when students organised protests against ‘rape culture’ at the university. Several students had approached the university administration with concerns about specific instances of sexual violence and rape that they argued the university had not addressed appropriately, and they demanded that changes be made to the university’s disciplinary policies regarding sexual violence. After two weeks, without satisfactory response from the university, students began protest action. Disruption beginning Monday, 18 April 2016, came to a head on Wednesday, 20 April 2016, when roads into the university were blockaded, much as they had been six months earlier in October. Six students were arrested by an aggressive police force that used stun grenades and pepper spray against the protesters; other students reported police violence against protesters, including punching of one student. Police and the university justified the dispersal of these protests, while defending the constitutional right to protest, by pointing out that two of the three streets students had blockaded were public streets (SABC Digital News, 2016). Therefore, the protests were no longer legal.

The invocation of the ‘public street’ returns us to the question of space. In August 2015, protests in Ferguson, Missouri at the year anniversary of the murder of the unarmed, Black teenager Michael Brown by a police officer prompted the Chief of Police of St Louis County to comment, ‘They’re not going to take the street tonight. That’s not going to happen’ (Al Jazeera America, 2015). The liberal logic of ‘sacred’ spaces theorised by Losurdo (2011) is clearly on display: certain types of politics, especially practised by certain types of people – in this case, Black or poor – are not permissible in the spaces deemed ‘public’. In South Africa, this mingles with the spatial and racial compartmentalisation of colonialism – Fanon’s ([1961] 1963) ‘forbidden quarters’. The legitimate response of authorities, in this view, is control by force. This politics, in determining that certain people do not belong while others do, attests to Chatterjee’s (2004) theory of ‘real’ and ‘formal’ citizenship. In Grahamstown, during the mobilisations of October 2015 and continuing in 2016, this politics has been both defended and challenged.