Paddy O'Halloran, CounterPunch
Last week, activists
staged protests in Ferguson, Missouri to memorialize the death of unarmed,
black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of an armed policeman a year ago. The
protesters marched and shouted, publicly challenging the legitimacy of the
police department. The police response shows continuity with a longstanding
logic and practice of colonialism in regard to protest and space.
On Monday, 10 August,
marchers were ordered by police to disperse, and police began to drive them out
of the street. The people resisted, and several were arrested. In the telling
words of the St. Louis County Chief of Police, “They will not take the street
tonight. That will not happen.”
The street, in the
Chief’s logic, becomes something contestable, something to be taken. To go
further, the street is something which can belong to someone, and, conversely,
not belong to someone else. In short, some people belong in the street, whiles
others do not. In the United States today, as in the United States for over two
hundred years, this is a highly racialized belonging. And, like race, the
matter of belonging is a political one. There is no person or group of people
for whom the street space is innately off limits; the only boundaries to the
street are politically determined. Because of the Ferguson activists’
collective protest and criticism—and very likely because of their race, for
those who were black—they put themselves politically out of bounds in the
street, at least as far as the police were concerned. This politicization of
space and the exercise of force to create boundaries has a long history in
colonialism, in the United States as much as in other colonized zones.
To highlight this,
consider the United States alongside South Africa, a country more “famous” for
its colonialism (but not more violent). Though the details differ, the
similarities are conspicuous. The specific events recounted here are typical of
their contexts; they illustrate a spatial politics that was characteristic of
colonial modes of control.
In 1811, British troops
under a Colonel Graham fought and drove thousands of Xhosa people in the
eastern frontier of the Cape Colony across the Great Fish River. It was a
“clearance” accomplished with enough violence, in the words of the colony’s
Governor, to inspire “a proper degree of terror.” The river was then enforced
as the “permanent” border between the European colony and Africans to the east.
In 1818, a mounted, armed column—a “commando,” to use its South African name—of
British soldiers with Boer and African auxiliaries crossed the Fish to punish
Xhosa “incursions” into the colony—the pretense was Xhosa cattle theft—and once
again meted out extreme violence. The commando fired cannon into forests where
Xhosa people had hidden, killing indiscriminately, and then made off with more
than 20,000 head of cattle. The logic is clear: the political separation of
people could be enacted and enforced with violence.
In 1838, after a local
war between white militias and Cherokees, the United States Army was ordered to
remove all Cherokees from Georgia to Indian Territory beyond the Mississippi
River. This was in accordance with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which legislated
the “clearance” of Native Americans from the southeastern United States of. As
General Winfield Scott, of Civil War fame, put it to the Cherokees, they would
acquiesce or several thousand soldiers would “render resistance and escape
alike hopeless”; if the Cherokees hid in the forest, they would be “hunted
down.” According to the United States Government, with the enforcement of its
army, the many Native Americans of the South did not belong. The Cherokees
walked for a thousand miles as prisoners of the United States Army, and at
least four thousand died en route to Indian Territory.
Back in South Africa, in
Grahamstown (named after the terrorizing colonel), 1917, several hundred black
residents from the “location” marched to the City Hall to protest against
oppressive lease agreements and indiscriminate shooting of Africans.
“Locations” were designated areas in which black people could live, under white
administration. Grahamstown was intentionally divided when the locations were
instituted: the white town in the west, the black locations in the east. The
most marginal land was (and still is) the site of self-built, “informal” shack
settlements. The activists in 1917 were refused a proper audience, and
retreated to the location but did not disperse as they had been ordered. The
next morning almost 1,000 armed whites on horseback and in cars invaded the
location alongside the police. A local headline read, “Grahamstown Army Marches
on the Location.” Several dozen of the protesters were arrested. Police action
and abuse intensified in the months after the protest. The logic is again
clear: people belonged in certain spaces, and those spaces were policed,
violently if their boundaries were challenged.
In 1932, about 20,000
marginalized poor, styled the “Bonus Army” and mainly unemployed war veterans,
some with starving families with them, built an enormous shack settlement
across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. They demanded that their bonuses
promised during the war be paid early, while there were no opportunities for
work, no money for rent and food. An enormous military force (including tanks)
was sent against the “Bonus Army” with tear gas and bullets. The shack
settlement was burnt down. While separate space was not as central to this
event as it was to similar ones in South Africa at the time, the idea that
spaces of protest were subject to control and dispersal through massive
violence is clear. Simultaneously, post-slavery racist violence was unremitting
and racial segregation institutionalized in parts of the United States. It
represents a nearly permanent “police action” in the United States from the
1860s through the 1930s to prevent any people perceived as “not belonging” from
“taking the street.”
Grahamstown, August 2014,
where the racial division is still stark and marks enormous inequalities: A few
hundred protesters led by the Unemployed People’s Movement marched to City Hall
to demand the dissolution of the municipality because of corruption that
prevents the adequate provision of housing, water, and electricity—and
dignity—to people living in the locations. During the hundred years we have
passed over, apartheid, with its utterly coercive creation of boundaries, had
intervened and then gone; but the inequality, spatial division, and state
violence persist. Among other instances, but definitely the most brutal example
of this violent repression, thirty-four striking miners were killed by police
at Marikana in August 2012—the first post-apartheid massacre by the South
African state. Though no police violence ensued at the Grahamstown protest, the
“incursion” of the protesters into “town” was met with a huge show of police
force. Several armored vehicles and cars blocked the roads to the west, and
cordons of armed police in riot gear blocked the entrance to City Hall. The
potential for violence was brandished, and the protesters’ unwelcome was
manifest.
That was the same month
that Michael Brown was murdered, and the large-scale protests began in
Ferguson, Missouri, sparking violent police responses. Brown’s death, and the
death or detention of many other people in the United States demonstrates the
gun-enforced fact that “the street” is not a safe place for many Americans—that
they do not belong there. This is a highly racialized threat. It coincides with
the enduring marginalization of Native Americans on reservations and the
erection of a militarized wall to keep out people from south of the Rio Grande.
All of these are intensely colonial demarcations of space.
South Africa is sometimes
called the “protest capital of the world,” and it is also the most unequal
society on earth. Inequality in the United States is widening, and the
persistent low-grade war by police against (mainly) poor, black people has
sparked a level of protest not seen in America for several decades. How far
will police and military go to contain protest? Will the space of protest be so
closed that the United States ends up with its own Marikana massacre in this
century?
