30 arrested as Durban and Soweto protest fires spread, and the record still won't say who they are

Thirty people have been arrested after several days of protest over undocumented immigration in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg. Twenty-five of the arrests were in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, according to the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the body that coordinates the police, the metro departments and the intelligence services during a public order event.

The charges, as NATJOINTS set them out, are public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

What the state has not done is put a name to any of the thirty, or said in which of the three areas each arrest was made. That is the gap that matters to the family of anyone who was on those streets this week. A parent in Umlazi or a brother in Zola who has not heard from someone since Monday cannot check a number against a name. Thirty is a figure. It is not an answer.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS said heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg, and that criminality will not be tolerated.

That is one half of the record. The other half is what put people on the streets in the first place.

The protests were against undocumented immigration, and they follow a pattern South Africans in these areas will recognise from the last several years. The complaints that surface in Durban’s Warwick Avenue and along the informal trading strips of the inner city, and in the hostels and streets around Soweto, are consistent and specific. They concern traders who say they are undercut on the same pavement. They concern rooms rented to too many people at once. They concern clinics where the queue is longer than the staff can serve, schools where places are contested, and a police station that residents say cannot keep up. Those are the conditions people were marching about, and they are the reason the marches happened.

NATJOINTS has not disputed any of that. Its statement is about enforcement, not about the underlying complaint, and the two should not be confused. A deployment at a hotspot is a response to a crowd. It is not a response to a queue at a clinic.

What the state can actually enforce is the harder question, and it is the one the protest has put in front of Home Affairs rather than the police. Immigration enforcement is not a public order function. It runs through the Department of Home Affairs, the immigration officers at ports and inland, and the courts that hear asylum and deportation matters. A police cordon in the Durban CBD does not process a single asylum claim, does not verify a single permit, and does not remove a single person who is in the country without the right to be. If the demand on the street is enforcement, the answer will have to come from a different department than the one making arrests.

The numbers this week are small in the context of the country. Thirty arrests across three areas over several days is not a mass detention. What it is, is the visible end of a much longer argument that has been running in South African cities for years, and that argument has not been settled by a deployment order or a charge sheet.

There is also the question of what happens to the thirty after the cells. Public violence and illegal gathering carry serious consequences, and a person charged is not a person convicted. South African law is clear on that, and so is this paper. The state’s case against each of the thirty will be made in a court, on evidence, and each of them is entitled to that process.

For residents in Durban and in the Johannesburg areas where the protests took place, the immediate facts are these. The deployments stay. The arrests stand at thirty. No one has been named. And the conditions that brought people out, the trading, the housing, the clinics, the schools and the policing, are exactly where they were before the first crowd gathered.

The Enquirer has asked NATJOINTS and the South African Police Service for the names and areas attached to the thirty arrests, and for the current status of those detained. We will publish the answer when it comes, and we will keep reporting the conditions in these areas rather than only the crowd count.