Police block March and March at Berea as Durban marchers demand action over motorcycle attack

Marchers gathered on Moore Road in Durban on Tuesday, opposite the Home Affairs office, and then moved to Berea police station, where officers blocked them from proceeding with their planned march.

They had come out over an alleged attack on a South African by a foreign national riding a motorcycle. The demand they carried to the station is the one South Africans have been putting to the state across the country: that the attack be answered, and that enforcement follow.

Jacinta Ngobese Zuma, who leads March and March, was there with members of the movement. Members of the South African National Defence Force and police were also in attendance, and officers were seen blocking the group from going further when they reached the station. As IOL reported on 27 October, the gathering at Moore Road was held opposite the Home Affairs office before the movement set off for Berea.

For readers outside Durban, the geography matters. Moore Road runs past the Home Affairs office where applicants queue for documentation, and Berea police station is where a case opened over an attack would sit. A movement that starts outside Home Affairs and ends at a police station is making a point about both halves of the same argument: who is in the country, and what the police do when a South African is hurt.

The allegation at the centre of the march, that a South African was attacked by a foreign national on a motorcycle, is the movement’s account as it was carried. This paper has not independently established the facts of that attack, and the police account of the case has not been set out in the material before us. What is established is that the march happened, that it was held over that alleged attack, and that police stopped it at the station.

What South Africans are asking for is not complicated. They want an attack on one of their own treated as an attack, and they want the enforcement machinery of the state to work where they live. That demand does not need a policy paper to be understood. It needs a police station that answers, a Home Affairs office that functions, and a state that does not treat the people queuing outside it as a problem to be managed.

The heavy security presence at Berea is itself part of the story. A movement that has grown out of public anger over attacks and over the load on services now draws a security response when it tries to walk to a police station. The people who marched were not there to cause damage. They were there to be heard on a specific allegation, and they were stopped short of the door.

March and March has built its following on exactly this ground: that South Africans are entitled to say what is happening in their streets and to demand that the state act on it. The movement’s leader was present on Tuesday, and the march was organised in the open, from a public road to a public police station.

What happens next rests with the police and with Home Affairs. The case behind the march needs an answer that the public can see, and the enforcement questions the movement raised on Moore Road are the same ones South Africans raise at every Home Affairs queue in the country. This paper will keep reporting on the case and on what the state does with the demand the marchers carried to Berea.

This account draws on IOL’s reporting of 27 October for the sequence of the march and the security presence at Berea police station.