Abstract
Between 2009 and 2014, South Africa experienced widespread protests. In contrast to prominent examples of global protest during the same period, they were localized and did not push for broad political and economic transformation. To explain these features, this article draws from three ethnographic and interview-based case studies of local protest and organizing within informal settlements in and around Johannesburg. The author argues that urban poverty and the experience of market insecurity, on the one hand, and democratization and the experience of state betrayal, on the other hand, gave rise to specific political orientations. Residents responded to market insecurity by demanding collective consumption for place-based communities, and they responded to state betrayal by demanding fulfillment of a national liberation social contract through administrative fixes. Both strategies confined activism to the local level and limited broader challenges. The findings have implications for research on both the urban poor and social movements.
Introduction
Between 2009 and 2014, the globe erupted in protest. The Arab Spring, including revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the rise of the indignados in southern Europe, the Occupy Movement in the United States, and uprisings in Turkey and Brazil came to signify a new wave of popular resistance. Curiously, scholarly accounts of the new global protest rarely mentioned South Africa (Ancelovici et al., 2016; della Porta, 2015; Mason, 2012; Tejerina et al., 2013). The omission is curious because the country experienced a surge of popular resistance during the very same period. Between 2009 and 2014, news outlets reported an average of 26 local protests per month in South Africa, while police-recorded event data suggest that the actual numbers were even higher (Paret and Runciman, 2016).
Two key differences begin to explain this lack of attention. First, South African resistance was highly localized. Rather than massive gatherings in city centers, it took the form of smaller and disconnected local protests. There was no single gathering place, and thus no South African parallel to the now iconic public squares – Tahrir Square in Egypt, Zucotti Park in the United States, Puerta del Sol in Spain, Gezi Park in Turkey – which quickly became symbols of global resistance. Second, South Africa’s local protests did not push for broad political and economic transformation. In the prominent examples of global protest between 2009 and 2014, protesters challenged authoritarian rule, austerity policies, the corruption of democratic institutions, and the power of finance capital or the ‘1%.’ Prefiguring an alternative world, some activists rejected mainstream politics and experimented with forms of participatory democracy (della Porta, 2015). In contrast, protests in South Africa pursued narrow demands around local development and public service delivery, and consistently engaged with government agencies and the ruling party (Paret and Runciman, 2016; von Holdt, 2014).
Why were protests in South Africa confined to local areas, and why did they fail to present a broader challenge to the political and economic order? To address this question, I draw from three ethnographic and interview-based case studies of local protest and organizing within informal settlements in and around Johannesburg. I argue that urban poverty and the experience of market insecurity, on the one hand, and democratization and the experience of state betrayal, on the other hand, gave rise to specific political orientations. In all three cases, residents responded to market insecurity by demanding collective consumption for place-based communities, and they responded to state betrayal by demanding fulfillment of a national liberation social contract through administrative fixes. Both strategies confined activism to the local level and limited broader challenges to the political and economic order. The findings affirm previous research, which shows that the urban poor tend to engage in localized forms of resistance. They also contribute to studies of social movements by showing how political opportunities may facilitate both mobilization and demobilization.
Class, opportunities, and political orientation
Addressing the South African case requires attention to questions of political orientation. Walder (2009) highlights two possible approaches to studying the political orientation of collective action. One approach is to examine the connection between social structural factors, such as class, and the emergence of political orientations. Another approach is to view political orientation as a by-product of political opportunities, which close off some orientations while enabling others. Each approach offers useful insights into South Africa’s local protests.
A focus on class reveals a crucial difference between the protests in South Africa and the prominent protests in the Middle East and North Africa, Europe, and the United States that defined the global protest wave. Accounts of the latter underscore the prevalence of privileged groups, including middle classes (Sassen, 2013), a ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ (Tugal, 2015), educated fractions of the ‘precariat’ (della Porta, 2015; Standing, 2014), and ‘graduates without a future’ (Mason, 2012). In contrast, the urban poor – individuals who did not have stable employment and lived on very low income – propelled local protests in South Africa (Alexander and Pffafe, 2014). This is significant because protests by the urban poor frequently assume a local character.
For Pithouse (2013), impoverished urban shack dwellers prioritize the local level for multiple reasons. Most centrally, they frequently lack access to formal work or to means of transportation and communication. Not only does this preclude engagement in transnational politics, it may even undermine organizing ‘across a single city’ (p. 104). The urban poor also confront spatial exclusion and containment, which invites struggles over territory that ‘invariably take a powerful local form’ (p. 104). Further, due to a lack of mobility, the urban poor tend to ‘depend on spatially situated sociality for child care, for security, for caring of the sick, for fire fighting, and for burying the dead’ (p. 105). As a result, Pithouse suggests, they develop a ‘stronger sense of place’ than their better-off counterparts in affluent areas, who have access to resources, services, and networks that extend well beyond any single place.
Bayat (2013) similarly argues that the ‘urban dispossessed’ necessarily focus on ‘localized struggles’ (p. 201). This stems partially from the fact that ‘the poor cannot afford to be ideological,’ as they must emphasize ‘strategies, organizations, and associations that respond directly to their immediate concerns’ (p. 201). Local protests are more ‘meaningful and manageable’ than broad transformative struggles, he suggests, because the urban poor can make sense of them, understand their consequences, determine their aims, and control their outcomes (p. 201). Bayat thus distinguishes the localized struggles of the urban poor from the 2009 Green Revolt in Iran and the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 – key pillars of the new global protest – in which young and educated middle classes pushed for a mixture of reform and revolution (pp. 259–283). In contrast, the urban poor placed greater emphasis on ‘quiet encroachments,’ such as squatting or illegal electricity connections. Local protests in South Africa fell somewhere in-between these ideal types. They were often more ‘audible’ than ‘quiet,’ featuring explicit demands on the state and disruptive tactics such as barricading roads (Paret, 2015). Yet they were localized, and focused primarily on immediate needs.
Understanding such explicit claims on the state requires attention to the political context. McAdam’s (1996) foundational statement identifies four key political opportunities that facilitate collective action: (1) popular access to the political system; (2) elite divisions; (3) the presence of elite allies; and (4) the absence of state repression. Along these lines, the democratic transition in South Africa – including the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s and the rise to power of the African National Congress (ANC), the widely-acknowledged leader of the national liberation movement – created important new openings. The new constitution, adopted in 1996, enshrined the right to vote and participate in government, and protected the right to protest. Growing divisions within the ruling party also generated opportunities, as emergent leaders and factions drew upon and amplified popular antagonisms in their attempts to wrestle control of the ANC and the state (Hart, 2014). While the post-apartheid state’s creeping emphasis on security and repression did sometimes frustrate residents’ legal right to protest (Duncan, 2016), the democratic climate – including independent media, a progressive constitution, and a formidable judicial system – provided an important counterbalance.
If these political opportunities help to explain popular mobilization in South Africa, they leave open the question of why such protests remained local and narrow. How did urban poverty and democratization combine to reinforce localization? To address this question, I turn to Ching Kwan Lee’s (2007) study of worker protests in China’s ‘Rustbelt.’ Her analytical framework is relevant because it illuminates a pattern of ‘cellular activism,’ resembling localized protest in South Africa, and traces localization to interweaving class and state–citizen dynamics. Despite crucial differences, the dramatic transition from socialism to capitalism in China offers useful insights into the dramatic transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa.
Political orientations of local protest: Lessons from China
Situated within a larger study, Lee’s (2007) analysis of protests by one specific group of Chinese workers – state employees in the old and decaying socialist economy – is especially relevant to local protests in South Africa. The protests, and their surrounding context, differed significantly from the South African case. Not only did workers propel them, rather than the unemployed, but workers in China protested their downward mobility, whereas in South Africa protest was more about a future that failed to materialize. Finally, the Chinese economy was a global powerhouse, contrasting with the more stagnant and peripheral South African economy, and the Chinese state remained committed to authoritarian rule, while South Africa was more firmly democratic. It will be crucial to account for these differences.
Nonetheless, ‘protests of desperation’ in the Chinese Rustbelt, as Lee calls them, were also highly localized. Lee traces this ‘cellular activism’ to the twin and mutually reinforcing experiences of market insecurity and state betrayal. In terms of market insecurity, she complements Pithouse and Bayat by showing how emphasis on place-based identities reinforces localization and fragmentation. In terms of state betrayal, she shows how political opportunities reinforce localization when they encourage protesters to focus on narrow corrections to the state, rather than broader challenges.
China’s growing reliance on market mechanisms engendered economic insecurity. For workers in the Rustbelt, the sale, restructuring, and closure of state-owned enterprises marked the collapse of the ‘iron rice bowl’ of social protection. Yet former state employees continued to live in old enterprise-based residential quarters. Targeting various state-provided goods such as pensions and neighborhood services – what Castells (1983) referred to as demands for ‘collective consumption’ – protesters mobilized through the very same work units that organized urban life under socialism. As Lee explains, ‘State work units provide the physical sites of communication and coordination, organize workers’ interests, and define the boundary of the aggrieved community’ (2007: 112). Resistance was local, therefore, because activists emphasized historically constituted, place-based units (pp. 114–116).
State betrayal, of a socialist contract that guaranteed employment and welfare, was the other side of market insecurity. Protests in the Rustbelt signaled withdrawal of consent: ‘Direct street action prevails and signals workers’ withdrawal of political acquiescence when the social contract is not honored by the state’ (Lee, 2007: 112). Workers identified as ruoshi qunti (a ‘weak and disadvantaged group’), positioning themselves as supplicants deserving of state protection (p. 117). Focusing their demands locally, workers criticized the immorality and corruption of local party officials, while maintaining trust in the central government and ruling Communist Party. They submitted open letters and petitions to government bureaucracies, and appealed to officials to adhere to communist principles and policies (pp. 117–120). Rather than challenging the Communist party-state or market capitalism, emphasis on state betrayal encouraged workers to focus on narrow demands for recognition from state officials and correction of administrative flaws.
Before drawing parallels to the South African case, it is important to note two crucial differences. First, protesters in South Africa did not have a strong legacy of urban work units that could serve as a basis for organization. Within the impoverished urban areas, residents had widely variant histories of precarious employment and unemployment. A lack of stable employment shaped daily life, forcing activists to construct non-workplace identities. Second, in contrast to China’s one-party state, post-apartheid South Africa had a representative parliament and democratic elections. Party competition provided a release valve for popular frustration and dissent, and may even have reinforced investment in the post-apartheid state.
Experiences of market insecurity and state betrayal encouraged the localization of protest in South Africa, just as they did in China (Table 1). Responding to market insecurity – especially in relation to the labor and housing markets – protesters similarly prioritized demands for collective consumption, which they referred to as ‘service delivery.’ Instead of urban work units, however, activists mobilized around residential areas, which they referred to symbolically as ‘communities.’ Place-based notions of community gave protests moral weight, but they also reinforced local geographic boundaries around groups of potential beneficiaries. As in China, market insecurity in South Africa reinforced feelings of state betrayal. If Chinese Rustbelt workers longed for a disappearing socialist social contract, however, protesters in South Africa longed for an elusive ‘national liberation social contract’: a tacit understanding, forged through the democratic transition, that the post-apartheid state would lift the black majority out of poverty. Demanding state protection, residents sought to correct the state through narrow administrative fixes. This narrow focus discouraged struggles for broader transformation.
Politics of local protest in South Africa.
Three case studies of protest
To illustrate these dynamics, I draw on three ethnographic and interview-based case studies of informal settlements that experienced protests between 2009 and 2014: Motsoaledi and Thembelihle, located within the Johannesburg municipality, and Tsakane Extension 10 (Tsakane10), located within the adjacent Ekurhuleni municipality. All three areas were typical examples of South Africa’s extreme inequality and urban poverty. Residents of informal settlements within the two municipalities suffered from high levels of unemployment and low income, and lacked access to basic resources such as water and electricity (Table 2). These harsh material realities underpinned local protests.
Characteristics of informal settlement populations, Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, 2011.
Source: 2011 South African Census, author’s calculations. The expanded unemployment rate includes ‘discouraged’ work-seekers. Measured at household level, the food poverty line (FPL) is R320 per month per person, and the upper bound poverty line (UBPL) is R620 per month per person.
Tin shacks and bumpy dirt roads characterized all three informal settlements, but their histories were quite different. Situated about 15 kilometers apart on the southern periphery of Johannesburg, land invasions in the dying days of apartheid led to the formation of both Thembelihle and Motsoaledi. Beginning in the mid-1980s with the occupation of vacant land within Lenasia – a township that the apartheid state designated for the Indian racial group – by 2015 Thembelihle grew to a population of 8000 households and 17,000 people. Motsoaledi began with squatters occupying vacant land within the heart of Soweto in the early 1990s, and the area eventually grew to a population of 3500 households and 10,000 residents. Despite these similar beginnings, however, they had very different relationships to the state. Thembelihle residents faced the constant threat of eviction. Residents had to physically resist forced removal in the early 2000s, and government officials continued to promise their eventual relocation. In contrast, government officials continuously promised to establish Motsoaledi as a permanent housing settlement. Tsakane10 was located on the edge of a conglomeration of three black townships – KwaThema, Tsakane, Duduza – on the East Rand, a manufacturing hub during apartheid. In contrast to Thembelihle and Motsoaledi, the informal settlement only emerged in 2007, more than a decade after the democratic transition. The state constructed the informal settlement by relocating residents from other areas within Ekurhuleni. By the early 2010s, Tsakane10 mushroomed to 6500 shacks and 20,000 people.
The analysis draws on 28 months of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2010 and 2017. The research included, but was not limited to, the three case studies presented here. I participated in rallies, protests, public mass meetings, smaller organizing meetings, and community outreach activities. I had hundreds, if not thousands, of informal conversations with activists and ordinary residents. I also collected 107 in-depth interviews and 147 brief interviews with activists at protest events. The interviewees did not comprise a representative sample. With a focus on residents of protest-affected areas, and especially activists involved in organizing and protest, I identified interviewees primarily through the ethnographic research and to a lesser extent snowball sampling. The interviews typically lasted between 30 minutes and two hours.
To illuminate the politics of localized resistance, the analysis below traces the four elements of protest identified above: (1) collective consumption and service delivery, (2) place-based units and community, (3) the national liberation social contract, and (4) recognition, correction, and administrative fixes.
Service delivery
The notion of ‘service delivery’ permeated everyday discourse in the impoverished informal settlements. Whereas ‘service’ denoted the object of desire, ‘delivery’ referenced the state’s obligation to provide it. Residents conceptualized services loosely. While demands for housing, water, and electricity were especially prevalent, protesters also sought tar roads, streetlights, toilets, refuse removal, jobs, and access to education, among others. The provider or source – the state – represented the unifying thread. Severe material deprivation underpinned these demands. Most residents lacked stable employment, and poverty engulfed the three informal settlements. Residents also lacked access to formal housing, formal electricity, flush toilets, and piped water inside their homes. With little means by which to eke out a living, they turned to the state to provide a level of social protection. While the broad demand for service delivery resonated across areas, the specific historical and material circumstances of each place gave service delivery local meaning.
Motsoaledi residents launched multiple protests between 2009 and 2013, with housing as their primary demand. Residents frequently commented that ANC officials had promised to provide housing as early as 1994, the year of the democratic transition. Rejoice, a long-time ANC member who moved to the area in 1994, recalled that, ‘they have never said we must move and that is why we are still here because they come and promise us houses’ (Interview 45, 29 January 2014, Motsoaledi, female, 56 years old). The demand for housing encapsulated other demands, particularly around water and electricity. Motsoaledi residents had access to communal taps for water, and some residents extended them illegally into their own yards. Yet there was no electricity. According to residents, while the state did provide streetlights, it later disabled the lights because residents were tapping into them for illegal connections. Residents understood that the state was unlikely to provide piped water and formal electricity to shacks. They first needed the state to move them into formal houses.
Residents frequently discussed the challenges of living without electricity, such as the difficulty of studying for school, heating water for baths, or cooking and storing food. According to one pair of activists, the desire for electricity propelled protest action:
Electricity is life …
… as much as we seek houses, proper ones, as much as we do want proper sanitation, flushing toilets and water inside our houses, but if they can just put electricity … (Interview 32, 22 July 2013, Motsoaledi, both male)
The demand for electricity came to the fore during a protest in 2010. Residents noted in a public statement that they wanted electricity ‘for education purposes,’ for their health, and because ‘we also want to enjoy the big tournament, the FIFA 2010 World Cup, watching the matches on TV.’
The demand for electricity featured even more prominently in Thembelihle, where residents had a longer history of resistance due to the threat of eviction. In 2002, activists disrupted a government commemoration in nearby Soweto to protest their relocation, and later barricaded roads to prevent the forced relocation (Murray, 2008: 110–111). By the early 2010s, Thembelihle residents had varied demands. Some preferred relocation to Lehae, a new housing settlement nearby. This demand was consistent with the government’s desire to relocate the population and eradicate the informal settlement, but the construction took time and the state also sought to accommodate residents from other areas. A full decade after the beginning of construction in 2005, many residents were still waiting to be located, prompting protests.
Other Thembelihle residents were more concerned with securing development in the area. Beginning in 2004, national housing policy placed new priority on the in situ (in the original place) upgrading of informal settlements, thus making relocation a measure of last resort. This policy clashed, however, with the parallel goal of eradicating informal settlements by the year 2014. In practice, eradication took precedence over upgrading, and officials continued to call for the complete relocation of Thembelihle residents (Huchzermeyer, 2009). Residents nonetheless pushed forward. In 2009, local activists began to connect electricity illegally. The city responded by disconnecting and moving connection points, thus forcing residents to buy longer and more expensive cables. These reactions sparked resistance, but over time the situation stabilized. Thabo, a prominent activist in the area, bragged that ‘even the police were told that now, if you are going to arrest these people who are connecting electricity, we are going to riot’ (Interview 88, 2 August 2014, Thembelihle, male, 25 years old). Activists began to set their sights on the installation of formal electricity.
Thembelihle activists were especially proud of major protests for ‘proper electricity’ in late 2011 that lasted a full week. During the protests, residents burnt down the electricity supply boxes, shutting off electricity in the surrounding Indian neighborhoods. Thabo explained that the purpose, ‘was to keep the Indian communities in [the] dark, as we are also living in the dark.’ A similar cycle of disconnections, protests, and burning of electricity boxes occurred again in 2014. In a public statement, local activists pronounced, ‘We will not be treated as second-class citizens. Apartheid is over. If we can’t have electricity, then no one will.’ Electricity was the most prominent demand, but it was not the only one. Another statement from 2016 explained, ‘we have had many strikes [protests] in Thembelihle. Why? Because we want houses, roads, electricity, water, clinics, sports facilities, etc. right here in Thembelihle.’
Similar demands proliferated in Tsakane10, where popular frustration stemmed from the way in which the state organized the settlement during the relocation process. The state settled households in groups of three, with each group sharing a plot or ‘stand.’ Residents complained that the stands were too small, and that it was uncomfortable and unsanitary for three families to share a single toilet. Ayanda, a leading organizer of a 2014 protest, summarized the demands: Our first priority is to be separated. We want one stand for one family, one toilet for [one] family. We don’t want to share as we believe it’s unhealthy to share the toilet. We demand clean water, streets, and we also demand to have playgrounds for our kids, of which we believe that is what is going to limit crime in our area. (Interview 68, 23 April 2014, Tsakane, male, 40 years old)
Perceptions of empty promises compounded mounting frustration. Residents asserted that government officials had promised them that their situation would be temporary. They believed that the government was going to move them into either formal housing or their own stands. By the time of the 2014 protest, seven years after relocation, the state had only moved 50 families.
The common demand for service delivery, in the form of housing, electricity, water, roads, parks, and other amenities, gave the protests in Motsoaledi, Thembelihle, and Tsakane10 an inherent affinity. Yet the protests also addressed specific circumstances rooted in historical legacies, and especially the different ways in which residents related to the state: the consistent promise of formal housing loomed large in Motsoaledi; the persistent threat of eviction underpinned struggles in Thembelihle; and the promise of separation fueled protests in Tsakane10. Consistent with Pithouse (2013), specific modes of governance and spatial exclusion shaped the politics of resistance in each area.
Community
During the 1980s, opposition to apartheid helped to create bridges between instances of local resistance. Importantly, though, the democratic transition facilitated both the demobilization of popular forces and their incorporation into the ruling party, the ANC. The anti-apartheid umbrella organization United Democratic Front disbanded in 1991, and the ANC absorbed women’s and youth organizations, respectively, into the ANC Youth and Women’s Leagues. Meanwhile, both community-based ‘civic’ organizations, through the South African National Civic Organization (SANCO), and organized labor, through the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), entered into formal partnerships with the ruling party (Marais, 2011: 63; Neocosmos, 1998: 210–216). Due to this process of political incorporation, local activists had to forge struggles without the organizational resources developed under apartheid.
In South Africa, activists turned to ‘community’ to fill the void with respect to vehicles of collective resistance. Notions of community are powerful because they enable segments of a population to infuse ‘their collective identity with a moral content’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 57). In all three informal settlements, local activists consistently promoted the idea of community, by which they meant geographically limited, place-based units. Residents used the idea of community to imbue their struggles with legitimacy and worth and, in turn, secure recognition and resources from the state (Paret, 2017). Yet notions of community also served more explicitly political functions. They enabled activists to avoid both political divisions, which were prevalent due to increasing party competition, and accusations that they were seeking personal enrichment or political power. While assertions of community facilitated internal solidarity, however, they also reinforced localization by focusing attention on geographically-bounded local areas.
The upsurge of local protests between 2009 and 2014 took place during a period of simultaneous ANC dominance and ANC decline. While the ruling party continued to control much of the state apparatus, it also began to suffer at the polls. In national elections, for example, ANC support dropped from 70% in 2004 to 66% in 2009 and 62% in 2014. This decline raised doubts about the ruling party’s previously unquestioned hegemony (Paret, 2016). At the local level, ANC loyalists inside and outside of the state moved to defend the ruling party by suppressing collective resistance. State employees and party loyalists pressured activists to join the ANC, offered them bribes to keep quiet, and subjected them to physical violence and arrest. Beyond repression, the ruling party also claimed significant popular support. For these reasons, organizing around opposition to the ANC was a losing battle.
Acutely aware of these challenges, activists were frequently at pains to demonstrate the ‘a-political’ character of their struggles. Andrew, a prominent activist in Tsakane10, explained that, ‘inviting the community to a meeting wearing political colors, only those who believe in that political party will go. If you come not wearing any political colors, then people will come and join you’ (Interview 95, 30 June 2015, Tsakane, male, 32 years old). Local activists consistently asserted that protests were not about party-driven opposition to the ANC, but rather the poor performance of the government or particular officials. The notion of ‘community’ symbolized this detachment from party politics.
In all three informal settlements, activists understood their organizations as organs of the community, rather than broader political interests. This emphasis crossed party lines. In Motsoaledi, for example, where the ANC was especially dominant and many activists identified as ANC supporters, the main local organization, Motsoaledi Concerned Residents, defined itself as ‘an organization formed by the community of Motsoaledi irrespective of their political affiliation.’ On the other end, while some activists in Tsakane10 supported the opposition party Democratic Alliance, as one activist affirmed: ‘We all come from different political parties, but when we march, we march with one voice – community … I am a member of the DA. But when we are working we are not working as DA. We are working as community’ (Interview 81, 29 July 2014, Tsakane, male).
In some instances, the emphasis on place-based community became an obstacle to building solidarity across protest-affected areas. Growing tensions within Tsakane10 illustrated this dynamic. In the buildup to an April 2014 protest, some activists sought to link the local struggle to both surrounding areas and broader social movements. The main protest organizers, however, explicitly rejected this emphasis. With a national election the following month, they demanded that people refrain from wearing t-shirts bearing party symbols. Ayanda explained: ‘We did not invite any political parties … we explain to the people that we are not fighting against anyone, and we are not trying to organize … It was just a peaceful march for Extension 10’ (Interview 68, 23 April 2014, Tsakane, male, 40 years old). Rather than build a broader movement or challenge the current power structure, they only wanted to put pressure on the ANC to deliver development. From the perspective of the protest organizers, the very authenticity of the protest depended on localization. The narrower the scope, the more closely the demands aligned with grassroots interests, and the more genuine they appeared.
The local struggle in Thembelihle was an exception that proved the rule. Beginning in 2006, the leading protest organization in the area, the Thembelihle Crisis Committee (TCC), joined the nearby Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) to form an electoral front called the Operation Khanyisa Movement (OKM). Through OKM, TCC sought to connect the local struggle for service delivery to a broader socialist movement that would build solidarity across areas. Yet OKM drew its legitimacy primarily from local ties. This became clear in the lead-up to the 2016 local government elections, as TCC activists promoted OKM by emphasizing their deep local involvement. Simphiwe Zwane, a long-time Thembelihle resident and OKM representative, explained: ‘I think the special thing about us is that we are a community-based movement, so we are able to deal with the community’s challenges directly, and as such have grown a lot of trust between ourselves and the community of Thembelihle’ (Simelane, 2016). While OKM did make broader appeals to working-class struggle and socialist transformation, its popular support rested primarily on the narrow, place-based demands of Thembelihle residents.
Like the emphasis on work-based units within China’s worker protests, the emphasis on community within service delivery struggles in South Africa reinforced localization. Most importantly, this emphasis limited the boundaries of potential beneficiaries. Protests only addressed the grievances and desires of residents who lived within specific local areas. Residents’ desire to distance themselves from broader political challenges also contributed to this narrowing. In avoiding party competition, and defending their legitimacy through commitments to ‘community’ and the grassroots, activists prioritized the local rather than building wider networks of solidarity. The seductive promises of national liberation amplified these dynamics.
National liberation social contract
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of South Africa’s democratic transition for the politics of post-apartheid protest. Two general processes were especially significant. First, the transition abolished formal racial discrimination and enshrined a new constitution based on principles of formal equality. This dramatic political change did not stimulate a similarly dramatic transformation of the economy, though it did create new, albeit limited, opportunities for black upward mobility. Second, the transition brought to power the ANC, the historic liberation movement (founded in 1912) and hegemonic leader of the national liberation struggle. The ANC assumed power in 1994 with the popular mandate to redress the racialized disadvantages solidified by apartheid, and thus to secure ‘a better life’ – the ANC’s popular campaign slogan – for the black majority.
These changes imbued the government with a great deal of legitimacy. In sharp contrast with apartheid, residents often referred to the post-apartheid state as ‘our government.’ Many hoped, and expected, that democracy would bring concrete material improvements, and the ANC consistently reinforced these aspirations. The ANC’s first macroeconomic policy, the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), promised to ‘meet the basic needs of our people as soon as possible,’ including jobs, land, housing, water, electricity, telephones, transport, a clean and healthy environment, nutrition, health care, and social welfare (ANC, 1994). While the ANC quickly abandoned the RDP two years later, the ruling party continued to present itself as the harbinger of an ongoing National Democratic Revolution (NDR). Deploying nationalist references to the past, notions of the NDR enabled the ANC to ‘tap into popular understandings of freedom, justice and liberation from racial oppression’ (Hart, 2014: 23).
The results of this project were far from straightforward. The post-apartheid settlement restored favorable conditions for capital accumulation, including reconnection with the global economy and substantial capital flight, and reproduced structures of extreme inequality and material deprivation (Hart, 2014: 157–165; Marais, 2011). Yet from the middle of the 2000s, the ruling party, the ANC, also embarked on a more ambitious program of welfare provision. The post-apartheid state provided more free homes than any another democratic state, including more than 4 million subsidies within the first two decades of democracy (Levenson, 2017). Even more significant was the dramatic increase in cash transfers known as ‘social grants,’ which by 2014 the government was providing to 16 million recipients, nearly one-third of the entire national population. Three-quarters of the grants were Child Support Grants, which provided small monthly stipends (R350, roughly $25 in 2016) to poor families with children (Seekings and Nattrass, 2015: 136–139). The state also implemented public works programs, which typically provided temporary employment at modest wages. These various measures provided crucial buffers against grinding poverty, without modifying fundamental economic structures or eliminating economic insecurity.
Social spending reinforced the ANC’s political legitimacy, reinvigorating the party’s historical legacy and nationalist discourses. It also reinforced the idea that residents could, and should, target the state as the legitimate caretaker of their basic needs. Nationalism and social spending thus encouraged a popular focus on ‘service delivery’ as the key antidote to economic insecurity. If references to national liberation were key sources of strength, however, they also left the ruling party vulnerable to criticism that it was betraying its historical mission (Hart, 2014: 189). Feelings of betrayal were especially acute in the informal settlements, where a lack of resources attested to the fact that residents had not benefitted from post-apartheid development.
This sense of betrayal propelled protests. One Motsoaledi activist described the shame and frustration that he felt due to living in a tin shack. Referring to the ANC as ‘a girlfriend that is not faithful to you,’ he held the state responsible for his poor conditions: ‘Our self-esteem has been taken away from us, the way our government has treated us. It’s very sad’ (Interview 30, 22 July 2013, Motsoaledi, male). Motsoaledi residents measured such neglect against the high expectations and consistent promises of government officials. A 2009 memorandum from local activists read, We [are] the poor and continuously disadvantaged people of Elias Motsoaledi Squatter Camp … the black and ANC government gave them an impression ‘it will improve the lives of the black and poor majority’ … The first democratic government in 1994 promised to bring development. This was supported by the mass media newspapers. Again the officials and ANC from local government came with landscape maps. Proving that ‘the development is coming and no one will be re-located’ they said repeatedly. Now the 4th elections came and go still nothing has happened … This [is] making the lives of people at Elias Motsoaledi Squatter Camp to [feel] ‘meaningless’. (original emphasis)
Thembelihle residents expressed a similar sense of betrayal. On a Sunday afternoon in February 2015, residents decided to protest after a provincial-level official ‘failed to respond to residents’ demands for housing.’ In explaining the road barricades that residents erected shortly after, a public statement by the Thembelihle Crisis Committee explained: Thembelihle, an informal settlement consisting of 20,000 people in Lenasia (South of Johannesburg) are fed up with waiting for what the government calls democracy and development … As usual, the ANC makes promises, but fails to deliver. When they do not cooperate, residents are left with no other alternative but to engage in mass direct action. As one resident stated, ‘we cannot wait to apply for a march, after 20 years we still live in shacks, we need houses now.’
Both statements referenced the high expectations generated by the democratic transition, as well as subsequent promises that the state left unfulfilled.
Empty promises also weighed heavily in Tsakane10. Prominent activists noted how, ‘On TV government act[s] sugar sweet, they try and make us believe that they are very caring and democratic, but the reality is something different’ (Malebo and Mokgope, 2014). Speaking on the sidelines of a protest action, an activist explained how the local ward councilor was ignoring them: ‘she is arrogant. Every time when she has to come to the residents and explain why there is a delay in answering their complaints, she is always busy. Because of that, we say she doesn’t take us serious’ (Interview 59, 14 April 2014, Tsakane, male). Frustrated by empty promises, as in Motsoaledi and Thembelihle, Tsakane10 residents felt that the post-apartheid state was undermining and neglecting them.
A sense of competition often underpinned feelings of betrayal. If existing development projects renewed hope and faith in post-apartheid democracy, they also generated feelings of jealousy. Residents were aware of ongoing development, and expressed frustration about their own lack of incorporation. This dynamic was evident in all three informal settlements. In Tsakane10, residents expressed concern that the state was relocating residents from other areas into a new housing settlement, despite official promises to de-densify their stands within three months. Similarly, concerned about the state prioritizing residents from other areas for new housing, some Thembelihle residents threatened to occupy the houses directly. Likewise, Motsoaledi residents often complained that the state prioritized the nearby area of Freedom Park over them. In a 2010 statement, activists lamented that, ‘we have been denied the right to benefit from the economic growth in our country.’
Mpho, a 20-year-old Motsoaledi resident, captured the sense of competition through a compelling metaphor. He was unemployed, but had been moving in and out of brief jobs and studying to complete his secondary degree. He lived in a shack with his mother and several extended family members. Speaking to his situation, Mpho related the underdevelopment of Motsoaledi to the neglect of an older brother: Let me go back to this example … at home they know you love this watch, and they buy it for your brother, and your brother is younger than you. How would that make you feel? … Freedom Park was our little brother. [It] came way after Motsoaledi. But look at it, everybody has houses … now they have proper sanitation, they have electricity, they have everything that we do not have, and actually it makes some of the people very angry. (Interview 38, 16 September 2013, Motsoaledi, male, 20 years old; emphasis added)
In short, feelings of state betrayal had a relative dimension. They were not only about market exclusion and economic insecurity, but also about inferior treatment in comparison to peers.
Yet notions of betrayal also denoted a certain amount of faith or hope that the state might eventually deliver. Neglect and hope proved to be an explosive combination, propelling militant protest. Hope also reinforced localization. Popular belief in the capacity of the post-apartheid state, to fulfill the promises of national liberation, undermined broader challenges to post-apartheid capitalism. Rather than overthrow the government, residents wanted to pressure it to do better. Just as workers in China’s Rustbelt sought to persuade the Communist party-state to correct itself, so local protesters in South Africa sought to persuade the ANC-led state to provide the ‘better life for all’ that it promised. Emphasis on administrative fixes complemented this desire to restore the national liberation social contract.
Administrative fix
In addressing the problem of state betrayal, activists frequently sought administrative solutions. Local protests directly confronted the state, and were often far from quiet, but like Bayat’s ‘quiet encroachments’ they did not push for major policy reform or revolution. Activists focused, instead, on improving government functions without disrupting the existing order. This meant getting officials to respond to immediate service delivery grievances within local areas. Residents used protests to re-establish connections to the state and set it back on the correct path.
Demands for recognition were central. For many residents, disruptive tactics such as burning tires, barricading roads, or destroying property were the only way to attract the attention of state officials (Paret, 2015). A common refrain across all three informal settlements was that ‘violence’ is the only ‘language’ that the state understands. One activist from Tsakane10 explained: ‘Sometimes it is better if we scare them a little, because if we marched relaxed they will think we are not serious. If we twist a little they will see that we are serious’ (Interview 66, 23 April 2014, Tsakane, female, 32 years old). In Thembelihle, where protesters frequently blocked a nearby intersection, one activist explained that disruption was necessary because the official channels did not work: ‘Government officials are not fulfilling their promises to the community. So that’s why all the time we are going back to the streets … we follow the procedures all the time, but they don’t seem to be complying with their own procedures’ (Interview 88, 2 August 2014, Thembelihle, male, 25 years old).
For many activists, therefore, protests were crucial for correcting the actions of public officials and getting the state to ‘work’ as it should. These dynamics were especially visible in Motsoaledi, where residents referred to their apparent invisibility to the state by suggesting that state officials did not ‘know’ them. One resident put it plainly that, ‘They have forgotten. Maybe they don’t even know that we exist’ (Interview 37, 4 September 2013, Motsoaledi, female). Feelings of misrecognition fueled protests. Explaining the goals of a major 2013 protest, during which residents blocked a road, toppled a traffic light, and burnt down a nearby KFC restaurant, one activist noted: When we want a meeting for the councilor, mayor, just to come and see us, and just to talk to us, to see how is the progress – there’s nothing that they’re doing to us like that. So these guys, the only language they understand is protest … So, you know what, we started to make protest and everything. Then after that, they came to us, they listened to us. (Interview 30, 22 July 2013, Motsoaledi, male)
Rather than presenting a broad challenge to the state and ruling party, protesters sought to pressure officials to recognize residents and their material needs. Indeed, popular hope for administrative fixes often focused attention on problematic individuals, rather than capitalism or the structure of the state. Rejoice from Motsoaledi, who had her hopes set on a new RDP house, remarked: We’ve been staying here, we’ve been promised, nothing is happening … They [political leaders] are greedy, they are keeping it to themselves. Chances are there, but they are keeping it to themselves and not spreading it. Even when one gets a tender he just misuse the money … Maybe that’s why we don’t see that the government is working for us? (Interview 45, 29 January 2014, Motsoaledi, female, 56 years old)
Like Rejoice, many residents believed that the state was ‘not working’ due to the poor performance of public servants, who put their own individual interests ahead of community interests. Complaints about corruption and maladministration frequently accompanied protests for improved service delivery.
As in Lee’s analysis of worker protests in China, protesters in South Africa frequently targeted the local state. The new democratic constitution mandated that local government should both enable popular political participation, and provide services and development. It follows that many activists viewed local state officials – especially ward councilors – as agents of democracy and service delivery. Explaining why residents had marched to nearby municipal offices, for example, a Thembelihle activist referred to the councilor as a ‘messenger of the community’ who was responsible for convincing the utility City Power to electrify the area (Interview 88, 2 August 2014, Thembelihle, male, 25 years old). A Tsakane10 activist similarly suggested that councilors resembled workplace shop stewards. Just as a shop steward communicates upward the views of rank-and-file workers, he explained, the councilor ‘comes through to the community to take the problems … [then] he goes to the housing [department], or to the mayor, to put that problems [on behalf of] the community. It’s the same tools, actually’ (Interview 67, 23 April 2014, Tsakane, male, 35 years old).
While the post-apartheid state initially prioritized mechanisms of local participation, they remained extremely weak. Technocratic decision-making, and the relegation of residents to clients and consumers, stifled democratic participation (Heller, 2001). Further, local ward councilors were more accountable to party structures than they were to voters, and despite rhetoric about the value of popular participation, officials often viewed such participation as a nuisance (Benit-Gbaffou, 2008). Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that activists in all three areas fixated on the poor performance of local government officials. In some instances, changing personnel became a top priority. One Tsakane10 activist explained during a 2014 protest: ‘So we took a decision that the person who [is] oppressing us is the councilor, no delivery … Our memorandum was that the councilor must step down because she has failed this eight years’ (Interview 60, 14 April 2014, Tsakane, male). In Motsoaledi and Thembelihle, at various points, activists put forward their own candidates in local government elections, with the hope of replacing the existing ward councilor and inserting their voice into official discussions.
These efforts were mostly ineffective. The central significance of the popular focus on administrative fixes, however, was that they frequently led to engagements with local government officials. As Tebogo Mokgope, a prominent activist within Tsakane10, explained to a public seminar on protests, residents were quite willing to engage: Most communities, we’re always willing to work with government to make sure that they address certain things … most community forums that I know, when the government calls the meeting, [residents] come to the meeting … We don’t have the resources to build houses. The government must build houses, the protests will stop. Simple. Quick solution. (Human Sciences Research Council, 2016)
Contrasting with the sense of urgency that typically accompanied protest action, activists frequently assured me that they were willing to wait for the government to deliver. Rather than building a broad movement, they simply wanted evidence of local development.
Protest action, and subsequent negotiations with government officials, often bore fruit. In Motsoaledi, within six months of a major 2013 protest, the state began to construct formal houses within the settlement. In Tsakane10, following a surge of protests in 2014 and 2015, the state relocated more than 100 households to a new formal housing settlement nearby. In Thembelihle, after more than a decade of protests, the provincial government officially registered the area as a formal housing project in April 2015, and later installed formal electricity. To a certain extent, then, protests worked. Yet concessions also dampened resistance. Activists often remarked that it was difficult to sustain struggles, precisely because residents disengaged once they secured concrete gains. As Jakobo from Tsakane10 put it, for unemployed activists it is ‘too hard to keep on holding the flag forever.’ Once ‘the government delivers what it has promised,’ he noted, ‘you find that the opportunity to mobilize people around any other issue just becomes an issue’ (Interview 104, 29 May 2016, Tsakane, male, 36 years old). In short, mobilization for administrative fixes was especially vulnerable to quick demobilization.
Closely linked to the other pillars of local protest – service delivery, community, and the national liberation social contract – emphasis on administrative fixes reinforced localization. In response to unemployment and grinding poverty, and combined with the perception of a sympathetic state, residents did not seek large-scale transformation. They focused instead on pressuring officials and securing narrow improvements within local residential areas. Given these narrow goals, it makes sense that activists prioritized local mobilizations over gatherings in city centers.
Conclusion
Between 2009 and 2014, pronounced patterns of democratization, inequality, economic insecurity, and welfare state expansion underpinned an explosion of local protests across South Africa’s impoverished urban areas. A lack of resources certainly contributed to their emphasis on local, rather than national or transnational, networks and targets. Yet the politics of protest, stemming from experiences of market insecurity and state betrayal, reinforced localization. Residents responded to market insecurity by demanding service delivery for place-based communities, and they responded to state betrayal by demanding fulfillment of the national liberation social contract through administrative fixes. These strategies focused protesters on local solidarities and locally-defined outcomes.
This analysis builds on previous research about both the urban poor and social movements. In terms of the former, it affirms the finding that the poor and unemployed tend to engage in localized resistance. Yet it also demonstrates the importance of how activists politically constitute the local. In the South African case, concepts such as service delivery, community, and national liberation, and the significance of recognition from local officials, helped to define ‘the local’ as a key terrain of struggle. These strategies connected everyday experiences of local ‘sociality’ (Pithouse, 2013), and what was ‘meaningful and manageable’ (Bayat, 2013), to collective resistance. In terms of social movements, the analysis demonstrates how social structure and lived experience – in this case, experiences of market insecurity and state betrayal – shape political orientation. It also shows that political opportunities may contribute to demobilization, or at least the limiting of resistance to brief and local episodes.
What stands out especially in the South African case is the ideological power of national liberation. In Lee’s analysis of China’s Rustbelt, worker commitment to the state rested upon a legacy of welfare provision under multiple decades of socialism. In contrast, in South Africa’s informal settlements, it was the legacy of the anti-apartheid struggle, and the promise of a ‘better life for all,’ that kept poor residents invested in the state and post-apartheid capitalism. Whereas in China, workers sought to correct the state by bringing it back into line with the socialist past, in South Africa, unemployed residents sought to correct the state by bringing it into line with the expectations and aspirations of the national liberation struggle. If worker protests in China’s Rustbelt were about a disappearing past, local protests in South Africa were about an absent future.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Nhlakanipo Lukhele for impeccable research assistance, Eli Friedman and two anonymous reviewers for comments on previous drafts, and participants in the 2016 Sociology of Development conference at Cornell University for valuable feedback. The Center for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg, and the University of Utah provided valuable support.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
