Durban and Soweto rise over undocumented migration as 30 are held

South Africans in the Durban CBD, in Soweto and in Johannesburg took to the streets this week to demand action on undocumented immigration, and the state’s answer so far is a standing police deployment and 30 arrests.

Twenty-five of those arrests were in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng. The offences listed are public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. That is the record from the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, NATJOINTS, which briefed the public on the week’s events. As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS says heightened police deployments will remain in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg, and that criminality will not be tolerated.

The protests were against undocumented immigration. That is the demand residents carried into the streets, and it is the demand the state is now answering with a deployment rather than with a policy announcement.

For anyone who lives in these areas, the week’s events are not abstract. The Durban CBD is one of the busiest trading and transport corridors in the country, and it is where informal traders, commuters and residents meet the pressures of the inner city every day. Soweto and Johannesburg carry the same load. What residents say they are dealing with is a strain on space, on trading, on services and on policing that they can see and feel in their own streets. That is the argument they took to the streets this week, and it is the argument that has to be answered.

NATJOINTS is the structure that coordinates the South African Police Service with the intelligence community and other arms of the state during operations that cross provincial and departmental lines. When it briefs, it is speaking for the security cluster as a whole, not for one station or one province. Its statement that deployments will remain in place at the hotspots means the police presence in Durban and Johannesburg is not being wound down after the marches. It is being held.

The arrests are a fact and they are on the record. They are also not the whole story of the week. The reason people were in the streets is the demand on undocumented migration, and that demand has been building in South African cities for some time. It is the same demand that has been put to Home Affairs, to the police and to local government in one form or another, and it is the demand that will still be there after the deployments are eventually scaled back.

What the public has not yet been told is who the 30 arrested are, what specifically each is alleged to have done, and how the cases will proceed. Those are ordinary questions in any policing story, and they are the questions a South African reader is entitled to have answered as the cases move through the system.

What is clear is the shape of the week. Residents in three of the country’s biggest urban centres made their position on undocumented migration visible. The state responded with a security deployment and a set of arrests. The underlying question, which is what the country does about undocumented migration and the load it places on South African communities, remains where it was before the marches, and it is the question the state has not yet answered in policy.

The Enquirer will follow the cases of the 30 arrested as they are processed, and will keep reporting what residents in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg say they are dealing with, because that is the demand the state is being asked to meet.