There is something of a misconception when it comes to the great urban/rural divide that runs through SA, both physically and mentally. The assumption is that it is “out there” where the roots of extreme discontent are to be found — in the frontier that is the country’s rural expanse.
It is here, consensus would have it, that people are most susceptible to revolution. The rural poor, uneducated, isolated and held hostage by a “peasant” economy and culture. Here is where anger, apathy and alienation form the most potent cocktail. And thus, where radical socialism is most intoxicating. But, if recent events are anything to go by — and by recent one means the last decade — it is unlikely that, if a revolution does come, it will manifest first in the great expanse. More likely, it will explode into life in our cities.
Johannesburg and Tshwane are currently in the grips of a wild chaos. Cape Town has seen the army deployed. Xenophobia has manifested to devastating effect in places such as eThekwini. And those smaller metros — places such as Mangaung and Buffalo City — have seen their fair share of mayhem. And in each city, it is in the CBD where violence is at its most intense: in the compact, tense epicentre of each concrete jungle — where big businesses meet micro-economic activity, where locals and foreigners are forced together, and where the great metaphors for power, from courts to political head offices, are to be found.
All of which is relentlessly concentrated by the massive influx of people from the outskirts and into urban centres, driven by desperation and fleeing the economic wastelands that are the peri-urban, the farms and homesteads, villages and towns that constitute life on the SA margins. They are brought together by little more than pressure. The result is not a diamond, however, but rather social, political and economic plutonium, and few things are more volatile
It is difficult, at any moment, to say who exactly is in control. Not the DA, occasionally the EFF, but certainly not the ANC, which seeks only to disrupt and undermine, at every level
Johannesburg and Tshwane are, perhaps, the most interesting of the country’s big cities in this regard. Close enough to the border to be the first stop for many immigrants, the nation’s economic and political hubs, and a vast sprawling urban concrete sheet, every day the two creep closer together, destined to form one mega-city in the near future. But they are disparate affairs.
Johannesburg boasts multiple CBDs. Apartheid spacial planning means there is no centre. No Tahir Square. The Johannesburg CBD, itself a forgotten slum, is as close as one gets but, even then, it is so dense it defies any attempt to facilitate a spontaneous mass gathering. There is an argument to be made that apartheid’s geographic legacy has saved the ANC on many occasions.
These cities are laboratories for social unrest. When xenophobia first manifested in a serious way, it was in Johannesburg. Outside of the Western Cape, with its distinctive demographics, it is in Johannesburg and Tshwane that the ANC is at its most vulnerable. Likewise, where the EFF is at its most powerful: in the townships and among the working class.
The EFF, for all its promises of transforming SA into a giant agrarian utopia is, in truth, a party of the cities, and of the aspirant working class, not the rural poor. And it is in cities where it is most able to feed the rage that underpins its limited support base, to drive up racial animosity and provoke violence. Cities such as Johannesburg and Tshwane are where its particular brand of hostility most resonate.
In turn, they are the places where the ANC’s influence is at its weakest. The party has abandoned or forgotten the middle-class, and the black middle-class in particular. These people should form the backbone of any city but the ANC, by its own admission, has lost touch with them, as its policy agenda, ever-more defined by a programme of action designed first and foremost to satiate the rural poor, has come to drag it ever further into the distance. The middle-class wants modernity, a strong economy, a safe environment, good education and healthcare. It does not want land in Mpumalanga. But, although the ANC feigns such concerns, it cannot deliver on them.
Where uncertainty meets illegitimacy
Little surprise, then, that both Johannesburg and Tshwane have found themselves governed by opposition coalitions. These experimental laboratories have delivered on that front too. And the uncertainty and confusion that has accompanied these ramshackle administrations has only served to heighten tension.
In Johannesburg, the mayor fuels xenophobic prejudice on a regular basis. In Tshwane, the mayor, the second in just two years, is invisible; a flailing figure unable to rise above the profound mismanagement and corruption he has inherited. It is difficult, at any moment, to say who exactly is in control. Not the DA, occasionally the EFF, but certainly not the ANC, which seeks only to disrupt and undermine, at every level. The result is uncertainty and fear, and those two things are a powerful accelerant, to add to an inherently volatile situation.
Then there is the grand, national picture. The state’s authority is perceived as weak across the board. It cannot control or impact on crime, it cannot turn education around or arrest corruption in any believable way. It can promise only ever-more extreme and fundamental changes to our core democratic infrastructure, in the hope that the dream of some promised land is enough to placate any contemporary unhappiness. Its hegemonic hold on the SA public mind is fragile. And its promises increasingly experienced as fantasies, not reality.
Perhaps the greatest impact the EFF has had on the ANC is to transform it from a party that lives in the here and now, into one which lives in a future only it can see; a future which bears no resemblance to life on the ground. The EFF has helped sever the link between the ANC and the middle-class, and it is unlikely it will ever be fully restored. The governing party serves two extremes now: a rich, disconnected and politically nepotistic elite, dripping in conceit and self-interest; and some imagined archetype of a rurally destitute constituent, for whom it has never had the capacity, skill nor money to deliver real change, but to whom it always addresses its promise of a better tomorrow. No wonder it doesn’t know what to do with cities that defy this kind of crude, binary worldview. They are a paradox, for which the ANC has no response.
It is in our cities that all these forces meet: the legitimacy of the state; the lack of planning; the incoming wave of the desperate and forgotten; the forced, intense proximity of the familiar and the foreign; the hope of economic prosperity and the despair of economic impoverishment; the intensity of service delivery failure (for no electricity in a city means no work, and factories and fear fail and are fueled respectively when the lights go off); and they are leaderless in the face of the consequences, nationally, provincially and locally.
It is no coincidence that, this week alone, the ANC has suggested the idea of a referendum on the death penalty be taken to the cabinet and the ANC Women’s League has called for the chemical castration of rapists. These are the responses of a government that has lost control of the population
If SA is a frontier state, when it comes to the constitutional norms and standards we take for granted, our cities are the lawless towns, where the sheriff fears a gun fight more than upholds the law, and the law left long ago regardless.
Indeed, even our idea of a revolution is itself misplaced to a degree. Typically, there is a leader — an idea or a person. Here we have neither, although there are no shortage of pretenders to the throne. It is as if we have the perfect ingredients for a revolution but not the singular idea or person around which all these forces can be directed from above. The EFF pretends to be the vanguard but it never actually acts on its grandiosity. The ANC says it is in a perpetual revolution, but its plays out like torture.
On the ground, issues of discontent cut across the political divide. In the cities, every party is to blame for something. Many of these uprisings are organic more than orchestrated, although undoubtably influenced and augmented where convenient by above, always to some narrow, temporary agenda. Generally though, they rise from below. But the forces themselves are real enough, fluid, broad and overlapping. They wash through our streets and communities, carrying all comers in their wake. If they crest, they will both defy explanation and encompass entirely the blatantly obvious. That is, unless someone is able to give them shape and form; a terrifying possibility.
A world unto itself, sealed in a bubble
The state’s response to spiraling violence is always to enforce the law. But, when violence takes off in environments where the law is perceived itself to be illegitimate, it cannot. Today the police are the first to retreat, they are as much an enemy as the detached political leader to whom the violent sometimes address their concerns. And, in response, the state panics.
It is no coincidence that, this week alone, the ANC has suggested the idea of a referendum on the death penalty be taken to the cabinet and the ANC Women’s League has called for the chemical castration of rapists. These are the responses of a government that has lost control of the population and a party that has only ever known one response to a brutal reality: the promise of a magical policy, to appease and satisfy the masses. “Shoot to kill”, say police ministers and commissioners alike; that tells you everything you need to know.
Marikana was an interesting political and socio-economic event. It played out in the rural expanse. A bubble formed around that mine, micro-economic hub of its own. Inside, an ostensibly modern police service came face-to-face with a series of forces it could not comprehend or address. In the end, it opened fire out of little more than sheer terror. And for all the blood and bodies it left in its wake, it appears to have learnt nothing.
These protests in our cities are no less of a mystery to law enforcement. They do not understand them, cannot foresee how to pre-empt them, and cannot deal with them, as they unfold. The police know only that they are dangerous, and that they have a gun strapped to their waist. In Marikana, after the smoke had cleared, people scattered to the wind. In the cities, there is nowhere for them to go. And there are more of them. If the police do ever panic in Johannesburg or Tshwane, it will be their bodies strewn on the ground, when the gunfire stops.
Our metros are becoming bubbles. Inside them, a series of powerful forces are coming together, slowly but systematically. And once that bubble is fully formed, the conditions inside will defy logic. Many are making plans, leaving for the greener pastures, in the Western Cape or abroad. Or, at least, for any pasture. Simultaneously, many others are arriving. Both are attracted and driven away by economic uncertainty. Neither have any real home. But no one seems to be doing the maths.
No-one is looking at this phenomenon and trying to understand it in its grand sense, or the implications inherent to it, if it is left unchecked. People ask, “Why are people taking to the streets in Johannesburg?”, and condemning the xenophobia. Good points all, but there are bigger forces at play still. And they are coalescing in a manner that, soon enough, will be irresistible.
What is the SA city? Now there is a question. One without an answer. No one has a vision of the city of tomorrow, although there are sometimes allusions to the idea. In truth, they are chaotic, unsupervised and seething cauldrons of resentment, fear and uncertainty. They grow without direction, they run on emergency response, as opposed to forethought, and they taking on a life and political culture of their own.
There are the people, and there is the state, and the two are at war with themselves and each other. We are building a series of battle zones for this conflict to play out in, not cities where both parties can progress and thrive. No one can see the bubble. We aren’t even looking for it.
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