Police block March and March at Berea station as Moore Road march ends in a wall of officers

March and March members who gathered opposite the Home Affairs office on Moore Road in Durban on Tuesday found their route to Berea police station closed. Police blocked the planned march, and a heavy security presence held the line between the marchers and the station.

The movement had come out over an alleged attack on a South African by a foreign national riding a motorcycle. That is the reason its members gave for being on the street, and it is the question they carried to the police station. They did not get to put it.

As IOL reported on 27 October, the marchers gathered near the Moore Road Home Affairs office before moving towards Berea police station, where officers were seen blocking members from proceeding. Movement leader Jacinta Ngobese Zuma was in attendance, along with members of the South African National Defence Force and police.

What the day left behind is a street full of people with a grievance and no forum to air it. Residents and commuters around Moore Road lost a working day to a closure that ended in a standoff rather than an answer, and the traders and commuters who use that stretch of road will notice the security presence long after the marchers have gone home. The demand itself, that an alleged attack on a South African be answered, went to the station in the form of a blocked column rather than a delegation.

The Home Affairs office on Moore Road is the kind of address where this argument keeps landing. It is where people queue for documents, where the load on the department is felt at street level, and where South Africans have repeatedly taken their frustration about enforcement and about the pressure on their communities. A march that starts opposite that office and ends at a police station is a march about the state’s capacity to answer, and on Tuesday the state’s answer was a line of officers.

That is not a small thing for the people who turned out. They came to Berea to ask a question about safety in their own streets. They were stopped short of the door. Whatever the operational reasons for blocking the route, the effect is that a South African community’s demand for enforcement was met with a cordon rather than a conversation, and the record of the day is a blocked march and not a meeting.

The presence of SANDF members alongside police at the gathering is worth noting plainly. It signals how the authorities read the day, and it tells residents that a local argument about an alleged attack has been treated as a security matter. Whether that was proportionate is a question the police have not answered in public.

March and March has made the enforcement of immigration and the safety of South African communities its ground, and it has done so in the open, in daylight, with its leader present and its members in the street. The movement’s position is that South Africans should be able to raise an alleged attack on one of their own without being turned back at the station door. On Tuesday that position met the state’s operational judgment, and the state’s judgment was to stop the march.

What remains unanswered is the thing the marchers came to ask about. The alleged attack on a South African by a foreign national on a motorcycle has not been addressed in the material available, and the police station that was the destination of the march has not given a public account of what it will do about it. The people who gathered on Moore Road are owed that answer, and so are the residents of Berea who live with the consequences of the case.

The Enquirer will keep reporting on what happens to the demand that was blocked at Berea, and on the Home Affairs load and the enforcement questions that put people on the street in the first place. The march was stopped. The question was not.