With six months of hindsight, what can be said about last July’s explosive violence? In what condition has it left SA’s politics and society?
These questions were asked at a forum I attended last week, convened by the Centre for Development & Enterprise. While I am not at liberty to share what others said, I can offer my own thoughts. For me, one of the most important features of the violence was its geography: where it happened, and perhaps more importantly, where it did not.
Almost without exception, the disturbances occurred in locales with long histories of disorder and bloodshed. Since the student uprisings of 1976, migrant worker hostels on the Reef have periodically been nodes for the eruption of sustained violence.
The East Rand war of the early 1990s; the attacks on foreign nationals of April 2008: these are just the two most famous episodes, but the list goes on. They are sites where violence has an old, deep currency, and has been used, instrumentally, for a hundred different purposes for years. That they were the nodes from which the Gauteng violence spread last July came as no surprise.
Similarly, in KwaZulu-Natal, many of the areas of the most intense violence traced the geography of the bloodletting of the 1980s. Civil wars may end with ceasefires, but their legacies live on for generations, in memory, in ongoing recrimination and in the use of violence as a technology stitched into the very fabric of life.
The fact that those who wished to mobilise violence succeeded only in zones of long-standing disorder matters a great deal. A crucial part of the story of July 2021 is of all the dogs that did not bark. Across the towns and cities of the Free State, for instance, improbable alliances of ANC branches, churches and businesses formed rapidly to prevent disturbances before they began.
Travellers found themselves approaching makeshift roadblocks at the edges of towns where their vehicles were searched with civility and respect. Similar practices sprang up almost everywhere across SA. That such searches were illegal is their dark side; that people came together spontaneously to keep peace is important beyond measure.
What is the significance of these observations? One is that SA was probably not nearly as close to a state of generalised disorder as many feared. It is in the country’s DNA to think that it is always about to explode. The evidence from last July suggests otherwise.
A second implication is that the use of violence as a political tool comes at a price. If violence is only successfully mobilised in pockets where it already has a long history, those who organise it are tarnished. Despite our fears, SA very much remains an elective democracy where power is won and lost at the polls. The ANC was diminished by the violence, and the “radical economic transformation” faction was diminished even more. It looked more parochial, narrower and more chauvinistic than ever before.
If those behind the violence hoped to unravel Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency, they failed. If they hoped to create mayhem on a national scale, triggering a coup, they did not come anywhere close. But some of the plotters may have had very different goals in mind.
Anyone who has not been living in a box for the last decade knows that the ties between politics and organised crime have grown intricate and thick. What the violence may have done is send out a powerful warning: try to drive organised crime out of politics and we (organised crime) can cause mayhem. Come after us and we can set pockets of the country on fire.
This is not the same as a coup. Nor is it the same as a state of national anarchy. But it is pretty depressing nonetheless. Violence has been used as a tool for countless purposes throughout SA’s history. Here is a new one: violence as a weapon to make permanent and inviolable the criminalisation of vast chunks of the state.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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