The rampant belief that all South African protests relate to service delivery issues is ignorant and uninformed, said Political and International Studies lecturer, Mr Richard Pithouse in his talk “Community Politics in South Africa”.
“No investigation, no right to speak,” he said, referencing a well-known Mao Zedong anecdote, which illustrated his own sentiment of how ignorance perpetuates the myth of the one-dimensional nature of South African struggles.
There’s tremendous diversity amongst struggles,” he said, noting the significant increase in protests on a community level since 2004. He said that issues of representation are often overlooked as causing factors, though they should be given greater credence, especially in light of the Marikana incident.
On the community level, motivation for protests can vary -- dissatisfaction with local party structures, land reform and boycotts are among a few examples. However, there is a decided spit between the struggles and the representation of these struggles. “The pervasive distance between power structures, the elite and ordinary people are to blame,” said Mr Pithouse.
Problems with police brutality, ineffective structures and violence organised horizontally by parties are of the pressure-building factors that have lead to the rise of struggles in the last eight years. “Reducing everything to service delivery is too simplistic,” he said, insisting that this paints the issues as narrowly political, thereby erasing the unique grievances of each struggle.
Assumptions about how struggles are organised, namely that there must be a third, sinister force pulling the strings, is also a prejudicial impulse, suggesting people are unable to think or act for or by themselves.
“These struggles are absolutely diverse, not always democratic and sometimes disturbing,” he said. Struggles exist across the political spectrum, and often deal with basic dignity issues; the fact that they are not reflected as unique and nuanced, is a kind of “systematic silencing,”.
Highlighting the fact that these struggles stem from fundamental rights issues, Professor Fred Hendricks discussed the problem of land. Illustrating his point, he gave an example of the Anti-Land Invasion Unit he came across in Cape Town, which exists to ensure shacks don’t become homes and prides itself on its swift ‘delivery’.
The disjuncture between the number of people in line for homes, and the rate at which the government can deliver is a pressing crisis and an obvious contributor to the mounting dissatisfaction in communities. The illustration also challenges the commonly held beliefs about land issues being exclusive to rural regions, though Prof Hendricks noted that the actual protests have been largely an urban phenomenon.
Prof Hendricks agreed with Pithouse’s call for more careful and critical analyses of community struggles in South Africa, adding that the relationships between structure and agency, the ethnic differences and politicisation of struggles, were other aspects that require further investigation. However, he hoped the debate would stretch even further to the fundamental causes for inequality, dissatisfaction and the ensuing protests: the values of the state and capitalism.
Photo and story by Hailey Gaunt