Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

2. From Bredell to Marikana: The Dialectics of Protest and Containment

28 Rethinking the South African Crisis 28 2 From Bredell to Marikana The Dialectics of Protest and Containment STARTING WITH THE Bredell land occupation and ending with the Marikana massacre, this chapter draws on ethnographic engagements, media reports, cartoons and other sources to convey as graphically as possible the turbulent forces that erupted over the (long) decade of the 2000s: proliferating expressions of popular discontent coexisting with often sullen acquiescence to ANC rule by many who feel sidelined and betrayed by the post-apartheid order; efforts by the successive ruling blocs in the ANC government to contain and capture this mutinous energy, to borrow a phrase from Sitas (2010: 190); and intensifying battles within and between the ANC and its alliance partners, as well as the ANC Youth League. Focusing on a sequence of ‘defining moments’ – a series of events in specific places that have unfolded in relation to one another – my purpose is to provide insights into how the processes that form the focus of later chapters have been produced in practice in the multiple, interconnected arenas of everyday life. Defining Moments Bredell, June–July 20011 In late June 2001, a small group of people allegedly belonging to the Pan Africanist Congress (a party with a minimal political base) ‘sold’ tiny plots carved from Bredell, a barren patch of land between Johannesburg and Pretoria, for R25 (approximately $3) to thousands of hopeful settlers who immediately started erecting ramshackle shelters. The occupation provoked a national uproar in which spectres of Zimbabwe were widely invoked, and the ANC govern- 29 From Bredell to Marikana ment moved swiftly to evict the settlers using the 1959 Trespass Act, an apartheid law kept on the statute books after 1994 (Marais 2011: 450). Television broadcasts carried images, eerily reminiscent of the apartheid era, showing heavily armed police – supported by the hated and feared East Rand (now Ekurhuleni) Dog Unit – pushing people into armoured vehicles, while many who had evaded arrest declared their defiance of the state. Other vivid images include the Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele beating a hasty retreat in her Mercedes-Benz as angry settlers shouted ‘Hamba! Hamba!’ (Go away! Go away!); Minister of Land Affairs Thoko Didiza declaring on television that ‘when foreign investors see a decisive government acting in the way we are acting, it sends the message that the government won’t tolerate such acts from whomever’; and Didiza proclaiming that ‘these people must go back to where they came from’ as ‘Red Ants’ (workers in red overalls employed by a private company to which the removals were outsourced) ripped apart the rudimentary shelters. The last shack left standing was that of an 80-year-old woman, that had been consecrated as a church – and even the Red Ants hesitated before ripping it apart. Although protests over the evictions were quickly contained, the moral fallout reverberated powerfully through South African society. Bredell represented a dramatic conjunctural moment, exposing the cracks and fissures that accompanied what Saul (2001) called the ANC’s efforts to build its hegemonic project on the altar of the marketplace. Most immediately Bredell shone the spotlight of attention on the fierce extremes of wealth and poverty that intensified in the 1990s, despite a degree of deracialisation in the upper reaches of the income distribution.2 By chance – but very significantly – the day before the Bredell occupation began, a coalition comprising the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the Treatment Action Campaign and a number of churches issued a press release calling for a universal Basic Income Grant of R100 a month.3 In the Mail & Guardian of 13 July 2001, the inimitable cartoonist Zapiro offered scathing commentary on this hegemonic crisis of the post-apartheid state. 30 Rethinking the South African Crisis While Bredell was about far more than access to land, it exposed the ‘land question’ as a particularly vulnerable flank in the ANC’s armoury of state. Less than two weeks after the Bredell evictions, on 23–24 July 2001, the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) was launched in Johannesburg to protest the snail’s pace of land reform, and its framing in terms of a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ model.4 The LPM was established under the auspices of the National Land Committee – an umbrella organisation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), with affiliates in each of the provinces, set up since the late 1970s to oppose forced removals. After 1994...