It’s the kind of story that would give animal rights activists and SPCA officials sleepless nights. They get a lot of those lately, when migrants like myself slaughter goats in our suburban backyards as a “connecting call” to our ancestors.
In the inner city that afternoon, there were no voyeuristic neighbours to sound the alarm about any slaughtering. This time, the slaughtering had happened hours before the immigrant trader bought his wares from the butchery.
The metro police official to the left of the former hair-product salesman didn’t know whether to shift his attention to his boss, who was relaying a point to his other colleague in a white shirt, or face the camera.
The camera, standing ready to capture this moment of heroism by mayor Herman Mashaba, who had left his air-conditioned office to make a “citizen’s arrest” of a “citizen” who wasn’t really a “citizen”. But that’s beside the point.
The trolley, an innovation of sorts — Pick n Pay trolley meets Californian skateboard — was filled to the brim with fresh cow heads. Blood dripped on the tarmac in transit to a cooking pot for tomorrow’s lunchtime rush. Until the hair man, duty-bound to defend the hygiene and health of the selfsame market for cow heads from Ebola, “saved the day”. Ebola? In the Johannesburg CBD? It was more like using a sledgehammer to crack the head of a dead cow.
In the season of electioneering, with its precipitous rise in ceremonial displays of competence, urgency and feigned alarm by politicians, such ‘citizen’s arrests’ shouldn’t surprise us.
This overzealous messaging that the city administration is vested in law and order has racial and class undertones that reveal the conscious and unconscious biases of the city administration. An immigrant transporting cow heads is an easy target in the universe of lawlessness that has taken root in the inner city and other affluent parts of Johannesburg the mayor frequents.
I accept the hygiene concerns raised however it is a tactically awkward and futile response to effect a citizen’s arrest on a small-time cow-head courier in a larger conversation about how notions of a world-class city (and associated by-laws) limit the space for urban livelihoods in the context of widespread deindustrialisation, joblessness and poverty.
As a friend reminded me last week, rapper, singer and songwriter Andre 3000 aptly describes this phenomenon:
He's yelling selling's a sin/ Well so is telling young men that selling is a sin/ if you don't offer new ways to win.
The tropes of illegality, hygiene and Ebola complement already widespread Afrophobic perceptions and beliefs of criminality, illicit trade and danger associated with inner-city immigrant communities. Mashaba wouldn’t throw around these figurative themes if he didn’t know that it was a widely peddled narrative with notable support. It started with theft of jobs, then women, and now is a discourse on fake food, which fits nicely into Mashaba’s concerns on hygiene.
The arrest was ceremonial and filled with showmanship for Twitter. Electoral politicking in Johannesburg has coalesced with Afrophobic middle-class sensibilities and antipoor sentiment.
It is not only the DA that has done this. I remember vividly the antipoor implementation of “Operation Clean Sweep” by the ANC administration under Parks Tau in 2013 when middle-aged women ran to cover their wares with banana boxes to hide from the metro police’s siege. That campaign and its associated confiscation of goods and evictions was initiated to “rid the city of unsightly and disorderly trading areas” that “give rise to criminality and obstruction of the right of citizens to proper use and enjoyment of facilities in and around trading areas”.
In the season of electioneering, with its precipitous rise in ceremonial displays of competence, urgency and feigned alarm by politicians, such “citizen’s arrests” shouldn’t surprise us. Kiss a baby here, sleep in a shack there and mix that up with a grocery run for food parcels. Add to this real-time tweets and an image with a sombre or upset pose, and you have a “winning formula”.
A friend once remarked that if a political party campaigned on a ticket of Afrophobia and antipoor sentiment, it would get wide appeal. I shudder to think we may be nearing that day, and that it took a few bloody cow heads to remind us of that.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts Power Business on Power FM.
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