thesmokethatcalls Local community protests have spread across South Africa since...
Local community protests have spread across South Africa since 2004
- Sectors: A! Active Citizenship
Local community protests have spread across South Africa since 2004, with a dramatic upsurge in 2009 and
2010, as the record of larger and more visible protests captured by Municipal IQ, demonstrates (see Fig. 1). At
the same time, protests have become increasingly violent, marked by the destruction of public and private property,
and confrontations between armed police and stone-throwing crowds. While protest action showed a small
reduction from 2007 levels in 2008, the latter year was indelibly marked by the eruption of concentrated xenophobic
violence against foreign Africans, which started in Alexandra and spread across the country. Over a two-week
period, foreign nationals were attacked in at least 135 locations, at least 61 people were killed, of whom 21 were
South Africans, either mistaken for foreign nationals or associated with them on the basis of ethnicity, and over
100,000 people were displaced (Misago et al., 2010: 9, 164).
Share