Paroxysms of township violence always set off alarms. Sometimes the clashes are the result of ethnic or xenophobic backlash. At other times they mark a political statement, as with the recent protests at Standerton, 90 miles or so Southeast of Johannesburg in Mpumalanga. Often such alarming events represent the various fissures in South Africa’s socio-economic fabric that are a continued legacy of the country’s difficult history. These events warrant analysis, concern, and action. But what such violence does not need is shrill hand-wringing and sky-is-falling assertions. The recent violence at the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban provided an opening for just such shrillness from two South African scholars, Nigel Gibson and Raj Patel in an article in Pamabazuka News. Here are the opening paragraphs:
You don’t need presidential palaces, or generals riding in tanks, or even the CIA to make a coup happen. Democracy can be overthrown with far less pomp, fewer props and smaller bursts of state violence. But these quieter coups are no less deadly for democracy.
At the end of September, just such a coup took place in South Africa. It wasn’t the kind involving parliament or the inept and corrupt head of the ANC (African National Congress), Jacob Zuma. Quite the opposite. It involved a genuinely democratic and respected social movement, the freely elected governing committee of the shack settlement at Kennedy Road in Durban. And this peaceful democracy was overthrown by the South African government.
This is unadulterated nonsense. The conflation of the violence in Durban with a coup against democracy is silly and unhelpful. It obscures more than it clarifies and the sparks from the grinding of axes simply serves further to make clear vision impossible. What took place on Kennedy Road was a tragedy and warrants understanding. It surely even reveal flaws in South Africa’s still developing democracy. But the idea that it represents a coup, and that it can be traced to Jacob Zuma, is absurd reductionist piffle.
