Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
On the last day of September Nqobile Nzuza, a seventeen year
old girl, was shot dead by the police near Cato Manor in Durban. She was
unarmed and she was shot in her back and the back of her head. She was part of
a large group of people who were gathering to organise a road blockade in
protest at both oppression, in the form of violent and illegal evictions at the
hands of the eThekwini Municipality, and the repression of resistance to the
evictions in the form of two assassinations. The police claimed that they had
fired at the protestors in self-defence. Witnesses vigorously contest this and
insist that a police officer, who they have named, fired at the unarmed
protestors without provocation or warning.
The police have an undeniable record of dishonesty when it
comes to giving accounts of their own violence. This has become clear to the
general public in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre but their dishonesty
is nothing new. For instance in 2006 when Monica Ngcobo, a young woman on the
cusp of her adult life, was shot dead in E-Section, uMlazi, also in Durban, at
a protest the day after the local governments elections the police claimed that
she had been shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet while attacking the
police with a stone. The autopsy showed that she had been shot in the back with
live ammunition. Witnesses said that she was on her way to work, and not a
participant in the protest, when she was shot. Like Nqobile Nzuza, Monica
Ngcobo was shot dead by the police at a protest that followed the assassination
of two activists. In both cases it is difficult not to conclude that an
implicit sanction for murder on the part of both the police and assassins was
tied to the fact that people had the temerity to organise outside of the ANC.
The KwaZulu-Natal police Commissioner Mmamonnye Ngobeni
justified the murder of Nqobile Nzuza in terms of “a constitutional mandate to
maintain law and order”. He warned the public that the police “will use
necessary force to execute this constitutional mandate”. He said nothing at all
about the failure of the police to act against the unconstitutional evictions
in the area or the equally unconstitutional violence by the state, death
threats against activists from local party leaders and the murders at the hands
of shadowy assassins. Ngobeni, just like the average middle class person
leaving a comment on a news site, implicitly defined a whole group of people as
outside of the law. The result of this is that violence against these people is
made to appear legitimate to the point of not even requiring comment while
their protest at gross, unlawful and at times murderous oppression is made to
appear inherently criminal and anti-social. The lines of continuity between
Ngobeni’s view, which is of course entirely at odds with the constitution, and
an essential feature of racism are clear.
In a similarly cavalier fashion Police spokesperson Solomon
Makgale removed the protest on which Nzuza was shot dead from the political
sphere and placed it in the criminal sphere. “I don’t think we can call it a
protest. It stops being a protest when a
crime is committed - then it is a crime. The police restrained themselves.” For
Jay Naicker, also a police spokesperson, there was “some sinister motive”
behind the protest. “The allegations (sic) that they were protesting at four
o’clock in the morning in winter, in a dark corner, when everyone is sleeping;
this can’t be protest action.”
Of course a road blockade can, just like a policing
operation, degenerate into violent and criminal behaviour. But it can also be a
form of civil disobedience. In fact the road blockade is, around the world, a
tactic that is widely used by the urban poor because this is a group of people
who are often excluded from authorised political institutions and it, like the
strike for workers, enables disruption. The road blockade has become a common
feature of protest in South Africa and will remain so for as long as authorised
modes of engagement are either not accessible to the urban poor or simply don’t
work for the urban poor. When Naicker raised the spectre of a ‘sinister motive’
animating the protestors he said nothing about the fact that their attempts to
use authorised democratic institutions, like the courts, had only confirmed, in
practice, that the Municipality considers them to be beneath the law – people
that can be evicted, beaten and shot with impunity. Even when they had won
orders from the courts expressly prohibiting illegal evictions these were
simply ignored.
When the police try to set the stage for their own violence,
unlawful violence, to be socially authorised they have often had enthusiastic
allies in the media. Newspapers seem to more or less invariably report a
protest at which there was police violence as a 'violent protest' even when the
only violence came from the police. As a result police violence is made to
appear necessary, and sometimes virtuous, even when it is gratuitous, sadistic
or plainly deployed against society and in the interests of the ruling party.
Road blockades, especially when tyres are burnt, are routinely reported as
violent even when no harm is done to any person.
Moreover newspapers have frequently reported police accounts
of their own violence as if they are fact. Given the documented frequency with
which the police have lied about their own violence this is an outrageous
dereliction of basic journalistic duty. In some cases reporting on the murder
of Nqobile Nzuza that simply assumed that the police had told the truth about
their own violence continued even after accounts that vigorously dispute police
claims had been made public. On the 4th of October the ENCA website ran a Sapa
article that declared that “On Monday a 17-year-old girl was shot and killed as
two police officers, whose vehicle had been surrounded by protesters, fired
live rounds to escape.” This report not only uncritically reports the police
statement on this killing as fact but it also ignores a press statement from
Abahlali baseMjondolo issued on the 3rd of October in which it is reported that
witnesses have an entirely different understanding of how Nzuza came to be shot
in the back of the head.
The attempts by the police to win public support for state
repression often appeal to the prejudices of the middle classes, prejudices
that at times are deeply inflected with racism. Naicker speaks in a manner that
clearly assumes that the citizens he's supposed to be protecting are middle
class. He recently observed that "Law-abiding ratepayers from various
communities in the province are also up in arms as these criminals are blocking
roads to their neighbourhoods, damaging property and [ratepayers] are requesting
police to deal decisively with these violent criminals.”
Naicker may have no regard for basic democratic values or
the law but he certainly knows his target market. In suburban areas where road
blockades have been erected in protest at the murderous repression of an
increasingly authoritarian local state residents’ associations have described
themselves as being 'under siege' and there have been calls for the Public
Order Policing Unit to be replaced with the Tactical Response Unit, the same unit
responsible for the Marikana massacre, or the army. There is no record of these
residents’ associations expressing any concern at the unlawful and violent
treatment of their neighbours at the hands of the state and party structures.
The response of the eThekwini Municipality to both the urban
crisis in general, and the housing crisis in particular, has never been
remotely adequate. 'Delivery' has always been an authoritarian and often
violent project that has frequently re-inscribed spatial segregation. But in
recent years it has been so decisively captured, from top to bottom, by the
ruling party's patronage machine that it has become entirely dysfunctional. It
is clear that the local party structures are trying to contain this crisis with
violence rather than to resolve it with negotiation and reform. It is equally
clear that this decision enjoys the enthusiastic support of the police and some
currents in the media and middle class society.
In 1952 Aneurin Bevan, the Welsh coal miner's son who became
Minister of Health in the post-war
British government and founded the National Health Service, famously observed
that “either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property,
or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy”. If the alliance that the police are seeking
to cement between the paranoia and virulent prejudices of the middle class and
local political elites is not challenged property will throttle democracy in
Durban in the name of law and order, the constitution, the rights of ratepayers
and decisive action against crime.
