Soweto, Durban and Joburg rise over undocumented immigration as police hold 30
Residents in three cities took their enforcement demand to the streets this week, and the state's answer so far is a heavier police presence and 30 arrests.
South Africans in Durban, Soweto and Johannesburg took their demand for enforcement against undocumented immigration to the streets this week, and the state’s answer so far is a heavier police presence and 30 arrests.
Residents in those areas say the pressure on their neighbourhoods is the reason they turned out. The complaints that carried people into the streets are the ones this paper hears wherever the load is heaviest: competition for informal trading space, pressure on clinics and schools, housing, and crime. Those are the conditions the communities were speaking to, and they are the reason the marches happened.
The demonstrations were concentrated in the Durban CBD and in Soweto and Johannesburg, according to the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the inter-departmental command body that coordinates the police, metro and intelligence services during unrest. NATJOINTS says the gatherings over the past few days were protests against undocumented immigration.
As SABC News reported on 10 October, 30 arrests have been made, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and 5 in Gauteng, for offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest. NATJOINTS says heightened deployments will remain in place at the hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg.
The arrest count is a fact and it belongs in the story. It is not the reason the story exists. What exists is a demand from residents in three of the country’s biggest urban centres, made repeatedly and now made publicly, that the state enforce its own immigration law in the places where they live and trade. Nobody who watched this week can say the demand is a surprise. It has been building in the queues, in the trading strips and in the police station complaints for a long time.
The operational picture as NATJOINTS describes it is a standing deployment across the identified hotspots, with the arrests spread across the two provinces. The body has not said how long the deployment will run, how many officers are involved, or what specific enforcement of immigration law, as opposed to public order policing, will follow. Those are the questions the communities who marched are entitled to ask, and they are the questions this paper will keep asking.
What happens to the 30 people arrested is a matter for the courts, and the charges they face are the state’s case against named individuals. That case will be tested in the ordinary way. It is not the same question as what happens to the enforcement demand that put people on the street in the first place, and the two should not be confused.
The protests did not come from nowhere and they did not come from outside. They came from South African neighbourhoods where residents say the load has become intolerable, and where the answer they have received so far is a police line and a charge sheet. That is not nothing. It is also not an answer to what they were asking.
The Enquirer will follow the NATJOINTS deployment, the progress of the cases against those arrested, and the response of Home Affairs and the police to the enforcement demand itself. The story that matters to the people who marched is the one that answers whether their streets and services will be any different next month. That is the story we are reporting.
