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Collective violence, community protestand xenophobiaKarl von Holdt a & Peter Alexander aa Debate at the University of Johannesburg , Bunting Road CampusPublished online: 06 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: Karl von Holdt & Peter Alexander (2012) Collective violence,community protest and xenophobia, South African Review of Sociology, 43:2, 104-111, DOI:10.1080/21528586.2012.694253

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South African Review of Sociology VOL 43 NO 2 2012ISSN 2152-8586/Online 2072-1978© South African Sociological Association pp 104–111DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2012.694253

DEBATE

COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE, COMMUNITY PROTEST AND XENOPHOBIA

Karl von Holdt and Peter AlexanderKarl.VonHoldt@wits.ac.za; palexander@uj.ac.za

Social Change Forum, 12 August 2011Debate at the University of Johannesburg, Bunting Road Campus

The following is an abridged version of the debate between Prof Karl von Holdt from the University of the Witwatersrand and Prof Peter Alexander at the University of Johannesburg over the question of service delivery protests and xenophobia. Karl recently co-authored a report, ‘The Smoke that Calls: Insurgent Citizenship, Collective Violence and the Struggle for a Place in the New South Africa’. Peter is working on a book called The Rebellion of the Poor,1 based on his research. In this debate Karl argues that there is a complex relationship between xenophobic violence and service delivery protests, while Peter indicates that these two issues must be considered separately.

KVH One thing that is distinctive about this study, is that unlike other studies, we have studied community protests as well as xenophobic violence, rather than one or the other, and we were trying to engage in a comparison of the differences and similarities of all the collective action.

right to be heard, and this is the meaning of the ‘smoke that calls’ the Premier. There are, in many of our cases, years of peaceful protest before there is a turn to violence. Now, what characterised every single one of our protest sites was divisions in the local ANC and divisions in the local council. So, for example, in one council the mayor and the speaker do not speak to each other and are clearly engaged in a struggle over who is going to become the next mayor. They communicate through memoranda and the speaker is accused of passing information to the crowds outside, who mobilise around issues that are raised by the speaker.

In another case the town councillor has lost contact with the branch and is no longer supported by the ANC branch but has the support of SANCO. So, the branch accuses him of being SANCO’s councillor and not the ANC branch’s councillor. These kinds of divisions characterised all our studies. Then we come to this issue of the dual nature of protest, internal ANC struggle mixed

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with subaltern protest and the crowds are quite aware of this, and so they tell

for tenders, but using the community to do so, but that doesn’t stop the crowds from joining the biggest march in the history of the town. In a certain sense they are using this leadership to put their issues on the agenda and at the same time those particular leaders, those factional leaders, are using the crowds to

research team, puts it. One of the consequences of this is that in the aftermath there is no residue, no durable independent organisation, civil society, that remains after the protest. Once the councillor has been dismissed and a new councillor put in or there have been by-elections or whatever, the committees and the crowds disperse. The leadership is absorbed back into the ANC and in some cases, one or two independent candidates emerge but it is quite striking the extent to which the local ANC is absolutely the place where community

power lies, that is where resources lie, that is where their networks lie.…What do we make of the comparison? Some of the intriguing pointers in

the case studies are that, for instance, protests and xenophobic violence occur in the same communities. Xenophobic attacks form an adjunct quite often to protests where the protests are the main event; I want to reserve that for later discussion, but it is quite a striking thing that either a few foreign national shopkeepers are targeted, their places are looted, sometimes homes are attacked and so on. Once again some of the instigators seem to be local South African businesses, but also crowds who simply talk about ‘getting a free lunch’ and there is a sense in which the carnival of protest includes, with its burning down of a library or a hall if people have been pushed to that extreme, the possibility of xenophobic attacks.

I shouldn’t generalise, but it is quite striking how in the one particular case study, a protest meeting led to a march to the police station to get escorts into town to march to the councillor’s house. The police declined to escort them, and the crowds went back into the informal settlement and that’s when the xenophobic attacks started. A really interesting point is that both set up a counter-law from below. So, when you talk to protestors about why they turn to violence and the meaning of this, they will talk about having protested within the law and according to the constitution for two or three years, and when no one listened to them or there was corruption, they then said it was

ubuntu – which of course is an

I think, of understanding how people see what they are doing. We have seen it also in our research into strike violence, the way people set up an alternative notion of ‘law’. In fact, the other quote from the protest is ‘When it comes to

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quote from a striking worker talking about the turn to violence and the sense in which putting the Bible aside becomes a metaphor for putting aside a whole lot

In the case of protests we see the insurgent citizenship (Holston 2008) directed against the state and the grievances people have, demanding services, jobs and respect, and apartheid policing. So insurgent citizenship in these protests is closely linked to violence, as it has been since the time of apartheid. These repertoires are very well known and they are available all the time for people to move into; that you burn down a symbol of local authority like a library and what people say about the library or the clinic that they burnt down is ‘It is the apartheid library that we burnt down’.

With xenophobic attacks, in contrast, the struggle over citizenship is directed both against the state, the grievances that people have not been recognised, not getting services and moreover that the state isn’t implementing its own laws in relation to immigration, as well as directly at the competitors, at what is perceived to be the competitors – foreign nationals who are shopkeepers or who are simply in shacks. It is a way of enforcing a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. So it is a forceful imposition of a particular order of citizenship.

This is why we use this conceptual framing of insurgent citizenship to try and understand both protests and xenophobic violence and some of the relationship between them, as the struggle of the poor for citizenship and

there are other people who must be kept outside. So, it is about reinforcing boundaries and that goes back to the quote I mentioned from Holston, about the destabilisation that attends insurgent citizenship and how violence attends that. Now I think also very interesting is Chatterjee’s work in The Politics of the Governed, where he talks about the dark side of political society, where local prejudice and violence emerge in the struggle to claim rights. It is very important to capture the violence of the police as well, which often appears as an invisible violence – in the sense that it is not regarded as violence.

As I mentioned before in relation to protests, there is a history of peaceful protest, there is frustration and anger at the lack of response, violence becomes a form of agency and it is very clear in our interviews when people talk about violence how it empowers them, how it gives them a sense of being able to engage the authorities. The police presence is what often provokes the violence and police violence itself. There is a pattern of police violence, the shooting of teargas and rubber bullets which then leads to running street battles but also

called ringleaders, including breaking into homes and assaulting families of

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so-called ringleaders who are hiding and also allegations of torture. So, it is not only the crowds that make use of apartheid repertoires but the police as well.

So it is quite clear that violence provides the poor with agency to challenge authority, to force a response, to make an impact on the world. But violence at the same time – through digging into it in our case studies – it is also clear that

that it then becomes a kind of known and accepted practice to use violence against a rival for a particular position. A house is burnt down, someone is beaten up and it sets up cycles of collective trauma, of revenge and so on. Yes, of course the agency of violence enforces a response, the President comes but it has got negative effects. For example, women often withdraw from public life, withdraw from politics, because they fear going to a public meeting because violence is going to break out there.

PA There is no doubt whatsoever that xenophobia is a major problem in South Africa, and there are instances of xenophobia even in the middle of some of the service delivery protests. But this is a debate.

We [need] to get to grips with the question of scale and chronology. There is a reference, several references in fact, to the work of Charles Tilly; and the term ‘collective violence’, used in the title, is drawn from his work. Charles Tilly makes great use of the notion of ‘event catalogues’ and of trying to measure – measure strikes, measure violent protests and so on. He does it with great effect. In part, that’s the case because he is looking at the history of particular protests, and using that as a basis for understanding patterns. Now, if we begin to do that, it also assists us with making certain value judgements. So let me try to put in some numbers.

If we think about xenophobic violence, we know that in the awful killings of 2008 there were between 60 and 80 people killed. The estimates vary, and of course there were more before that and some since that date. In terms of the community protests that we are talking about, the service delivery protests if you like, as far as I know, and I am quite happy to be proved wrong, there have been no deaths so far [at the hands of the protesters]. So they are quite different in that respect. In terms of the community protests there have been killings, but these are killings undertaken by the police. I have a list now of 13 people killed by the police, and I suspect there are more.

But perhaps we should step back, and think about violence generally in

life expectancy of black males was nine years less than the life expectancy of white males. If we look at very recent data from the mid-year population estimates, we see [that] a quarter of a million people died in one year of Aids – unnecessary deaths for the most part, because people are not getting anti-retroviral drugs.

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I would like to challenge Karl partly on this idea that the protests and the xenophobic violence occur in the same communities. They do sometimes, but even if that does happen it is different people mobilising and motivating. For instance, the decisions taken to mount community protests are protests made openly by community meetings for the most part, and the people involved in

the role which they have played. [This is] different from what happens with the xenophobic violence, which is undertaken by small groups, and often people are rather shamefaced about their involvement in those activities.

We conducted a survey at a recent workshop that we held here [at UJ], of people engaged in the protests. We found that out of 21 cases, ten involved stay-aways, i.e. actions by workers in support of the poor who were leading

involved in xenophobic protests. And with the service delivery protests that we know about from the survey, in 14 out of 22 cases, barricades were erected because [protesters] wanted to defend themselves from the police.

The key distinction that I would make is that while service delivery protests unite communities, xenophobic violence divides communities. One can see this in the kind of interviews that one undertakes. People are [generally] very critical, in the places that I have been to, about the xenophobic violence. Some will give some support, and those people tend to be from the petty bourgeoisie.

What is very clear is that in every case that I know of where there has been xenophobic violence, it has been criticised by the leaders of the protests. These are two different kinds of attitude, two different kinds of politics, that

involved in service delivery protests unite virtually the whole of communities. They are about making sure everybody has decent lights; they are about making sure that people have decent roads; they are about housing; they are about access to sewerage; and so on. They are the kind of demands that unite people; quite a difference from attacks on foreign traders. When it comes to foreign traders, those attacks clearly are in the interests of some, if not all, local business people, and the ideological support for that has come from traders; for instance, from the Greater Gauteng Traders’ Forum. It hasn’t come from working-class organisations.

When people are interviewed about these attacks on the foreign traders, many say: this is not what we want because these people are charging lower

because their shops or their s are closer to us; and sometimes, even, that they treat their workers better than do people in the locally owned shops.

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My next point is about opposition to xenophobia. I want to emphasise the importance of ordinary people in challenging xenophobia in communities. There is a marvellous example in Ramaphosa, which perhaps suffered most of all from xenophobic violence. A number of people are [demonstrating against] the shops of the traders, with some support, initially at least, from the police, but in the end, when it comes to the moment where they went to attack the foreign shopkeepers, neighbours came around, and they stopped this from occurring.

I wanted to say something about comparisons versus lumping. Comparison, in my view, is absolutely essential in studies of this kind, but it needs to be a comparison where we are explaining differences as well as similarities, and I think there is a tendency here to look at what is common and explain that, rather than looking at the differences between xenophobia and the service delivery protests and understanding those differences.

It means that we don’t really get inside the xenophobic violence and understand that it is not one phenomenon; it is a range of different phenomena. One can, I think, understand the role of business people, but what about the role of others? From discussions that I have had there are a number of issues here. Certainly

people. Some of it can be a question of excitement. Throwing stones at the police; running away; enjoy [the police] running after and not being able to catch [the youngsters]. This has clearly been happening in Britain over the past week [as well].

Some of what was happening in 2008 – some of what was really appalling violence – was much more about people not getting jobs and not getting housing, and therefore an attack on foreigners in general. What we are seeing at the moment is not attacks on foreigners in general (with a few exceptions, and those are outside the areas where there have been protests), but foreign

the townships, but about dealing with Somalis. We have to understand the different dynamics, if we are to come up with responses which could allow us to deal with the problems.

Is violence always wrong? The implication, I think, [of Karl’s position] is that it is. I would want to challenge that. It seems to me that the history of our transition from apartheid to democracy shows that it was necessary for there to be some degree of force, some degree of violence from the oppressed, to remove the apartheid regime. It didn’t remove itself, it was removed by us.

How do we locate agency? You spoke about that, and I largely agree with what you were saying. But if we are going to locate the kind of agency that can transform society in the kind of direction I think we would both like to see,

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then surely we have to locate that agency amongst people who are prepared to take violent action, if necessary, to defend their communities against the police. It is a means by which people can transform their environments in the short term, if not, indeed, in the long term. So, for instance, to go back to the young Christian man [you quoted]: it was the use of force which brought him clean water.

My conclusion, then, is that we need to distinguish carefully and clearly between xenophobic violence and service delivery protests.

KVHpoint, that there is a real danger in bringing together the notion of xenophobic violence and community protests because they are so different in so many ways. Our argument would be exactly as Peter said – that you want to stop, if possible, xenophobic attacks, but you want to support the strength in community protests.

in complex ways.

PA So my argument then is also partly that we need to properly analyse the xenophobia, make distinctions there as well as simply condemning it and condemning violence in general. …There are going to be continuing problems in terms of upsurges of violence, some of them may have a generally progressive character and some of them won’t. Some of them will lead to new organisation. Sometimes that organisation won’t be sustained, as Karl has said. Sometimes it is possible to sustain that organisation and I certainly have come across instances where that occurs. Even if it is not in the form of the original organisation, there are traces that come out of these struggles, which continue through new social movements, new political formations and so on, and I think that occurrence is a good thing. However, I don’t believe that the outcome of these things is given in advance and, in the end, what matters is an issue which you have raised very strongly in terms of the micro element of struggle, but which I think we need to make into a much larger argument, and that is leadership, on particular occasions and more broadly within society. That means that we have to begin to challenge, generally, the ANC’s politics. We have seen, through your studies and other studies, the limitations of ANC politics, even if on occasions ANC leaders may play a thoroughly valuable and progressive role. The kind of society we live in, in South Africa, is dominated by the politics of the ANC. Much of the violence is associated directly – or indirectly, through the police – with their inability to deal with the problems people face. So, particularly over the longer term, we have to begin to envision and build and develop an alternative to the dominant politics in South Africa.

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KVH I don’t see any way that the ANC can continue to hold the kind of support that it does and absorb all of these leadership energies and get the votes that it does, which have been declining over time, in the face of this kind of crisis. So, at some point there is going to be more and more emergence of those sorts of organisations. I don’t think it is just around the corner, I don’t see that at the

ANC it is exactly about these dynamics. There are a whole lot of reasons why one could say it is quite clear COSATU should walk away from this never-ending struggle for the heart and soul of the ANC, but it doesn’t and I don’t think it will for some time. So, I think we are going to see these outbreaks and outbursts for a long time. It is a little bit similar to something I read about China, which is that the regime accepts that protest has a degree of legitimacy as long as it remains fragmented. It seems to me that the ANC and the government are fairly tolerant of protests because in South Africa we burn things; we know that is what we do as South Africans. When it can be regarded as local outbursts of legitimate anger but it is scattered it has a degree of legitimacy, but the moment there is a hint of linking up that is regarded as really anathema. There was a very interesting interview with COSATU in the Mail & Guardian, about 14 months ago or something, where COSATU was at pains to explain that there is nothing coordinated about these protests; they are simply outbursts of anger from below and therefore a legitimate expression of grievances. You got a real sense that the dominant discourse would not allow COSATU to say ‘We

amount to an illegitimate challenge to the regime. So, that moment when

repression is likely to be unleashed. Judging from the rhetoric of the ANC that is a real likelihood. That would be my view of an uncertain future.

NOTE1 Peter is also the author of the following article: Alexander, P. 2010. ‘Rebellion of the Poor:

South Africa’s Service Delivery Protests: A Preliminary Analysis.’ Review of African Political Economy, 37(23): 25–40.

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