- New Frame: South Africa - A moment of rupture
Posted by sashimi
on July 14, 2021, 9:57 am
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13 July 2021 (quote) S'bu Zikode, leader of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the largest movement of impoverished people to have emerged after apartheid, warned in 2008 that the "anger of the poor can go in many directions". He was right. Not long after he first made this statement, migrants and ethnic minorities were attacked, driven from their homes and murdered in various parts of the country. Zikode has not been the only person to issue this kind of warning. Year after year, grassroots activists have warned that something will snap. The state and middle-class society have been largely indifferent to these warnings and, indeed, to the suffering of millions of people who must survive without work or a viable income, without decent homes, and without being able to meet a need as urgent and as basic as food. There is also a generalised indifference to the increasing violence with which impoverished people are ruled. People have been regularly killed by the police in street protests, during evictions and disconnections, and activists assassinated, without any sense of there being a general social crisis. There has been a common tendency to understand the ways in which impoverished people make their lives and express their demands as consequent to criminality rather than material and political conditions. This lens always works to compound the social crisis. The oppressed are taken as a threat to be excluded, controlled and disciplined, rather than as fellow citizens - or even fellow human beings - who are suffering as a consequence of grievous injustice and with whom a viable and shared future must be constructed. Just over a month ago, as new unemployment statistics showed that just less than 75% of young people were without work, New Frame warned that "South Africa is not a viable society for a large proportion of the people who live here, and if history is a reliable guide to the future, something will have to give". That moment has arrived. Clear vision It is imperative to understand clearly the project that has cohered around Jacob Zuma. It is the contemporary expression of a long-standing form of authoritarian and ethnically organised reaction against the democratic and progressive politics that began to emerge in Durban in the late 1960s and early 1970s and mobilised millions across the country during the 1980s. It is a predatory and violent politics, a reckless politics entirely willing to incite xenophobic and ethnic hostilities. It pursues elite accumulation at the direct expense of the majority and cynically misrepresents this, through the trickle-down fantasies cultivated by every prosperity cult, as being in the interests of the people as a whole. After Zuma handed himself over to the prison in Estcourt, KwaZulu-Natal, trucks were attacked and burnt on the N3 in a manner that repeated key elements of previous forms of xenophobic violence. The escalation of the impunity long awarded the violent posture and thuggery of Zuma's supporters in the ANC tore enough of a hole in the social order for huge numbers of people, operating without any centralised organisation or expressed political programme, to begin appropriating food on a massive scale. Many people close to the riots have said that participants were clear that "this is not about Zuma, it is about our stomachs". As the food riots, initially marked by a carnival atmosphere in some places, turned into wider forms of appropriation and destruction, and simple opportunism in which many well-off people participated, things rapidly worsened. In some areas, known and feared criminals, often with connections to local ANC politics and associated business interests, entered the tumult. Terrible things have happened. Lives have been lost, livelihoods destroyed, the long cycle of social trauma escalated and all kinds of existing social fractures rapidly widened as, with the police largely absent, people gathered to organise their own security. Yesterday we saw the rapid widening of all kinds of lines of rupture and antagonism in society. Grassroots activists expressed great concern that popular anger could turn against migrants or ethnic, racial and even religious minorities. A leading activist, himself umZulu, expressed alarm about what he termed a desire for "Zulu supremacy". Another leading activist, seeing shopkeepers identified as migrants, Indians and as Muslims organising to protect their businesses, expressed equally serious concern about the possibility of escalating hostility and violence. All this was exacerbated by vigilantism, some of it deeply racialised. (/quote) -- Cont'd at https://www.newframe.com/a-moment-of-rupture/ |
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