Soweto and Durban streets shut in immigration anger as police hold 30

Residents in the Durban CBD, Soweto and Johannesburg have spent the past week shutting streets and demanding enforcement against undocumented immigration, and the police answer so far is that heightened deployments will stay exactly where they are.

The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, NATJOINTS, said this week that the extra police presence will remain in place at the hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg. Thirty people have been arrested, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng. The offences listed are public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.

For the people who live and trade in those areas, the past week has been disruption on top of a condition they say they have been raising for years. The Durban CBD and the Johannesburg and Soweto corridors are places where informal traders work the pavements, commuters pass through taxi ranks and station entrances, and residents walk to shops and clinics. When those routes close, the day’s takings go with them.

The anger is not new and it is not confined to one city. South Africans in these areas have been arguing that undocumented immigration is loading services they already queue for, that it undercuts people selling on the same pavement, and that the state is not enforcing the law it already has. That is the demand the marches carried. It is a political and social position held openly, and it is the reason the crowds gathered.

What the state has offered so far is manpower. NATJOINTS has not said what will change for the person standing in a Home Affairs queue, what will happen to anyone found to be in the country unlawfully, or how many of the arrests will end in a court. The deployment is the visible part of the answer. The enforcement question underneath it has not been answered.

As SABC News reported on 10 October, NATJOINTS said criminality would not be tolerated and that the deployments would remain. That account is accurate as far as it goes. The arrests, the numbers and the charges are on the record.

What a South African reader brings to that account is the rest of the week. The protests did not begin with a police statement and they will not end with one. They began in the streets where people live, in the Durban CBD and in Soweto and Johannesburg, and they were about a load that residents say they carry every day. A briefing that opens on the police response and closes on the arrest count leaves out the thing the crowd was there to say.

The arrests are a fact and they belong in the story. They are not the story. The story is that thousands of people in three of the country’s busiest urban areas decided the ordinary channels were not working and took the demand into the street. Whatever happens to the 30 people in the cells, that demand is still standing outside the door.

The Enquirer will keep reporting what residents in these areas say they are living through, what the state can actually enforce, and what changes for the people at the front of the queue. We will do that from the street and from the record, and we will not print a demand we cannot stand behind or a promise the state has not made.