664920

research-article2016

JAS0010.1177/0021909616664920Journal of Asian and African StudiesOHalloran

JAAS

Article

Contested Space and

Citizenship in Grahamstown,
South Africa

Journal of Asian and African Studies

114
The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0021909616664920
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Paddy OHalloran
Rhode Island, USA

Abstract
This paper discusses two distinct political mobilisations of October 2015 in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape
Province, South Africa. Student protests against racial, class-based, and gender-based oppression coincided
with xenophobic violence in the city. These events demonstrated both challenges to and continuity with the
long history of politics in Grahamstown, a history marked by the contestation and control of space, race, and
citizenship. The paper argues for the continued relevance of these themes to thinking about contemporary
South African politics. By considering together the two events of October 2015, we can interrogate aspects
of colonial political continuities in post-1994 South Africa which variously influence mass protest action for
democratic opening, anti-democratic violence, and state responses to both.

Keywords
Space, citizenship, xenophobia, South Africa, student movements, Unemployed Peoples Movement

Introduction
During October 2015, Grahamstown, a depressed university town in the mostly rural Eastern Cape
Province of South Africa, was the site of two important political mobilisations. Protests by students
at South African universities against experiences of racial, class-based, and gender-based oppression that had begun earlier in the year achieved country-wide, partial coordination (with local variation and diverse movements) in October in a mass uprising against tuition fee increases scheduled
for 2016. In Grahamstown, the student protests coincided with the (unrelated) mobilisation of
xenophobic violence in the city. In the period of some ten days, these two distinct sequences of
political events changed, at least for a time, the shape of Grahamstowns politics while also exhibiting continuity with the long history of politics in Grahamstown. That history is marked by the
contestation and control of space, race, and citizenship.
Henri Lefebvre coined the phrase the production of space (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991), arguing
that (Social) space is a social product with a sort of reality of its own; furthermore, that it
serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also

Corresponding author:
Paddy OHalloran, 98 Rutherglen Avenue, Providence, RI 02907, USA.
Email: paddy.ohalloran1@gmail.com

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Journal of Asian and African Studies

a means of control, and hence of domination, of power (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991: 26, emphasis
original). While Lefebvre imagined contemporary forms of power to be practised through the
homogenisation of space (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991: 23), it was the Martinican psychologist, theorist,
and activist, Frantz Fanon, who theorised the differentiation of space through power relationships.
Fanon located the racialised production of space of a world divided into compartments (Fanon,
[1961] 1963: 37) governed through different modes and logics at the centre of the system of
colonialism.
Lefebvre and Fanon both theorise a fundamental resistance to oppressive space production. The
former writes, The violence of power is answered by the violence of subversion. State-imposed
normality makes permanent transgression inevitable (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991: 23), echoing Fanons
more specific formulation of a decade earlier:
The violence which has ruled over the ordering of colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the
rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference
of the economy, of the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken
over by the native when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden
quarters. (Fanon, [1961] 1963: 40)

Linking the worlds of the colony and post-colony, Fanon writes that this system of compartments implies and reveals certain lines of force; [t]his approach to the colonial worldwill
allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized (Fanon, [1961]
1963: 37). Shortly after the end of apartheid, Mahmood Mamdani theorised South Africa as a spatially and politically bifurcated state, deracialized but not democratized, in which differentiated
access to citizenship is mediated by the boundary between urban and rural (Mamdani, 1996: 18).
South Africa is a country where space and citizenship have been politicised, racialised, contested,
and controlled; where space, race, and citizenship inflect daily on political life in the post-colony
in ways similar to and emerging out of colonial spatial organisation and political relationships.
South Africans today practise politics that both inscribe and transgress those lines of division.
For 10 years, Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack dwellers movement based in Durban, has sought
to build a popular counter-power through the construction of self-managed and democratically
organized communities engaged in collective struggle (Pithouse, 2016). They have faced violent
(and illegal) eviction and repression from the state when they assert their right to access urban land
for housing and living: actions of lived necessity that are termed land invasions by the state.
Similar violence has been meted out to shack-dwellers in Cape Town (Knoetze, 2014; Sacks, 2014)
and Johannesburg (Keepile, 2010). The repressive narrative imagines the provenance of the
repressible poor as elsewhere, often meaning rural, as in Durban, where activists have sometimes
been cast as from the Eastern Cape (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2015a).
In 2008 and 2015, major episodes of xenophobic violence occurred which targeted mostly poor
Africans from elsewhere on the continent, and, since mid-May of 2015, this violence, it has been
argued, has been taken up by the state via Operation Fiela (Nicolson, 2014), which has mobilised
South African National Defence Force and police units to harass and coral foreigners (although
many families suspected of foreignness are South African). Operation Fiela includes land invasions by the urban poor among the crimes it will target (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2015b).
The confluence of space, race, and citizenship is of crucial conceptual and practical significance
in the contemporary South African political context. Camalita Naicker observes that student political practices of 2015 at times resembled community organising practices, and that repression of
students, even at elite institutions, took forms familiar to community struggles in South Africa
(Naicker, 2016: 5759). This paper seeks to historicize contemporary politics in Grahamstown,

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arguing that spatial exclusion of the past, which entrenched a certain form of citizenship, is among
the political precursors of contemporary modes of exclusion that were evident in both the student
protests and xenophobic looting in Grahamstown in 2015. By considering together these two
events, we can interrogate aspects of colonial political continuities in post-1994 South Africa
which variously influence mass protest action for democratic opening, anti-democratic violence,
and state responses to both.

Spatial politics in Grahamstowns history

The founding of the British settlement of Grahamstown in 1812 on the western frontier of land
inhabited by Xhosa people was a significant moment in the development of the politics of space
and citizenship in South/ern Africa. The British town, in a hollow in the hills some twenty miles
west of the Great Fish River, symbolised what Nol Mostert has called the first great removal
in South African history (Mostert, 1992: 389). The town site was the military headquarters of
Colonel John Graham in the war of 18111812, during which the British cleared the Xhosa from
the fertile region between the Sundays and the Fish Rivers, the Zuurveld. It was a campaign and
clearance which Graham undertook, in the words of Governor of the Cape Colony, John Cradock,
with a proper degree of terror (Maclennan, 1986: 128). The extent of the violence which drove
thousands of people eastward over the Fish River is captured in Cradocks admiring phrase. As
Mostert writes, By finally succeeding in drawing this line between Xhosa and colony, the Cape
government had created a new reality by emphasizing separation of the races as a divide between
natural enemies and irreconcilable cultures, the only solution for which was complete severance
(Mostert, 1992: 389390). It was not simply a matter of severance, but of politics and control,
and the logic behind this separation has operated through two centuries.
On 1 December 1818, a commando an armed column of British soldiers under Colonel
Thomas Brereton, with some Boer and African auxiliaries, departed Grahamstown heading east
towards the Great Fish River. They aimed to force Xhosa, already driven so violently across the
Fish, further east beyond the Keiskamma River so that the Fish River border might be tranquil
(Mostert, 1992: 469). The pretense for the raid was cattle theft committed by Xhosa against White
farmers in the colony, who lived and ran their cattle on land which had been taken from the Xhosa
only within the last seven years; land the control of which and access to which was still contested.
To achieve tranquility, when Brereton found that the Xhosa had fled the commando and hidden
themselves and their cattle in the bush thickets along the Keiskamma, he turned his artillery on the
bush and kept firing blindly into it as indiscriminate as gunfire can be. Almost 25,000 head of
cattle were rounded up and taken to the British colony. Within a few weeks, Xhosa were raiding the
colony for cattle in earnest, because they had lost their most important source of food (Mostert,
1992: 470).
In the Brereton Raid, as the December 1818 commando is known, a rationale can be recognised which has flowed steadily, if adapted, through South/ern African political relationships into
the present: the colonised space west of the river was governed by laws, and African incursion into
it was perceived to be criminal; it was a civilised space where political belonging citizenship
was determined by race and allegiance to the British Crown. East of the river was a space (in
British imperialcolonial eyes) of illegitimate authorities, an African, uncivilised space inhabited
by African, uncivilised people, where both space and people were governable or controllable first
with violence rather than with liberal systems of law, and then with laws designed for their exclusion. Domenico Losurdo critiques the core of liberalism as defining precisely these sacred and
profane spaces (Losurdo, 2011: 299). On the contrary, of course, east of the river was a space of
established and enduring systems and traditions of political legitimacy and belonging, and the

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Journal of Asian and African Studies

invasion of European soldiers and administrators, violence and politics was resisted for over a
century before war and starvation ensured hegemony of the colonial system.
Nearly 100 years after the Brereton Raid, in Grahamstown, 23 April 1917, a group of between
500 and 1000 African activists marched from the towns location designated African spaces in
South/ern African parlance since the 1830s, referring both to urban and rural areas to the doors
of the Municipal Hall on High Street. This was a time when a local newspaper moaned that location mattershave been intrusive enough of late as to make them almost offensive (Local Opinion,
25 July 1914), invoking classic principles of racialised, spatialised urban politics (Fanon, [1961]
1963; Goldberg, 1993). Decisions taken by the Municipal Council in 1914 that limited legal residence by Africans in Grahamstown to those employed in the White city, set unfavourable conditions for leases for Africans, and which limited the number of cattle that could be legally kept by
the residents of Grahamstowns locations had been the subject of protest by petition in the city for
three years (Southey, 1990). Furthermore, there had been many evictions from the locations and
indiscriminate shooting of Africans. All of these exemplify the increasingly micro-managed control of African space that was expressed most fully in apartheid. This state of affairs motivated the
march. This protest, during which some of the demonstrators were armed, was a signal not only of
frustration with municipal laws but also of a political autonomy extant in the African locations, and
therefore, following the logic of the commando, it was crushed.
The marchers were met by municipal officials, protected by a posse of foot police armed with
rifles and bayonets fixed, drawn up in a cordon across High Street and were told that they must
present their demands in a reasonable way. They were ordered to return to the location unless they
disarmed. The marchers would not disarm as long as the police were armed, but did retreat to the
location (Southey, 1990: 7). In traditional commando style, auxiliary paramilitary forces were hastily enlisted and armed and, By nightfall, the outskirts of the city [meaning the White section of the
city] and especially those areas contiguous with the locations were thoroughly picketed
(Southey, 1984: 247). The next day almost 1000 police and paramilitaries invaded the locations,
armed and mounted or driving cars, where they surrounded the hill called Makanas Kop and
arrested some fifty-five people (Southey, 1990, 910). Headlines in the Grahamstown Journal
read, Grahamstown Army Marches on the Location and Cavalry Charge on Makanas Kop
(Grahamstown Journal, 26 April 1917). The spatialpolitical division demonstrated in the Brereton
Raid can be identified in this action as well, and its purpose remained the same: violent control of
Africans in specific space, and maintaining a tranquil border.
Almost a century later a century that saw the implementation of the violent ultra-compartmentalisation of apartheid, as well as formal democracy and the election of the African National
Congress (ANC) government in August 2014, members of the local Unemployed Peoples
Movement (UPM)1 and other Grahamstown residents were once more protesting outside of the
(now Makana) City Hall. Several hundred people mobilised against corruption in the municipality,
calling for its dissolution; for transparent management of a corrupt Reconstruction and Development
Programme housing programme; and against a poor municipal response to a long-lasting and
recurring water shortage problem that affected most of the town but was worst felt in the impoverished Black township (location). Also arrayed once again in front of Makana City Hall was a
massive display of militarised police power: several heavily armoured cars as well as smaller
South African Police Service (SAPS) vehicles with blinking lights blocked the road and the square
on the west side of City Hall, and cordons of police in riot gear stood in front of the building,
shields raised. When speakers from the UPM addressed the protesters from a platform immediately
in front of City Hall, their backdrop was rendered in SAPS shields and helmets. The meaning was
clear: the march and the protest constituted, in the eyes of the municipality, an infringement to be
controlled by force.

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Space in student protest and community struggle2

On Monday, 19 October 2015, Rhodes University in Grahamstown was blockaded and shut down
by students joining in a countrywide series of protests against the scheduled increase of what are,
for some, already unaffordable fees for tertiary education. The students were also motivated by
what has been called decolonisation of higher education and by the disadvantaged access to universities and the discrimination once in them that are faced by (especially) working-class, Black
students. These experiences had been the subject of more localised struggles across South Africa
beginning in March and continuing during the year (see Naicker, 2015).
Members of the UPM participated in the student protests that day in October 2015, because the
issues of class, race, and access to education were as much theirs as they were the students. Since
Rhodes students began sustained organisation in March 2015, the UPM had been involved and
offered support, which usually took the form of the UPMs participation in marches and of informal discussions with student activists. A few members of the UPM were also members of the most
prominent group of political students, the Black Student Movement (BSM), for much of the year.
The UPM, and, to a lesser degree, the BSM, viewed collaboration as a necessary part of their programmes, explained through a discourse of uniting student and community struggles. Rhodes
Universitys site at the extreme western end of Grahamstown emphasises its elite-ness, its inaccessibility, and its distance from the Black and poor township in the east. One UPM member spoke of
Rhodes as distant from the community, but she also suggested that a connection between the UPM
and the BSM would be an important link to make. The student movements links with the UPM
differed from other times that people in the western end of town had associated with the UPM: for
instance, the August 2014 protest, when some (non-organised) students and suburban Grahamstown
residents joined the UPM outside City Hall. Their participation was motivated by a city-wide water
shortage, and not by solidarity with the UPM or other township residents. There remained a spatial
(and largely racial and class-based) political distinction between participants from the township
and the town. When asked whether this participation should be viewed positively or not, the same
UPM member explained that it was not a good thing that they only started getting involved with
the community when they were affected. When they are not affected, they do not want to be part of
it (Author interview, 14 May 2015, Grahamstown).
At times, a different approach than this was apparent in the relationship between the UPM and
the BSM. Rather than reinforced, Grahamstowns spatial divisions were sometimes challenged
through this political relationship. For instance, the BSM and the UPM planned a joint march from
Fingo Square in the old Fingo Location (Grahamstowns second location, established in 1848) to
Rhodes on 28 May 2015 under the banner Decolonise this Institution in order to highlight the
colonial character of Grahamstown and the universitys position in it. Although miscommunications resulted in only a small number of UPM members participating in this march, the BSM,
joined on the way by some members of the community, undertook the march.
When the BSM began protest action in earnest in late August, UPM members continued to be
involved. Demanding a long term solution to the universitys short vacation accommodation
problem3 the BSM began an occupation of the universitys Council Chambers in the Main
Administration Building on 26 August 2015 which lasted for over a month, and, on many days, a
few UPM members participated in the occupation. The occupation was a contestation of space in
multiple ways. Students occupied the symbolic decision-making chambers of the university, and
they redecorated it with black-and-white pictures of important Black and African revolutionaries,
thinkers, artists, and militants. The participation of the UPM brought a different dimension to the
occupation, in which community members accessed the elite space named after a British imperialist (Cecil Rhodes) whose exploitation of South/ern African people had involved their separation

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from the land and an important moment in their spatial and political exclusion.4 The student struggles objectives of improving the experience and access of working-class, Black students at Rhodes
is an important one in Grahamstown, where high school matriculation rates (except at the expensive, elite high schools) are extremely low (Westaway, 2015), and very few local students attend
the university which is within walking distance of their homes. The opportunities for solidarity
between students and the UPM, and, in the beginning of September, for unity among the student
movement, the UPM, and National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union members who
work at Rhodes and mostly live in Grahamstowns township were clear, though such solidarity has
not been fully realised; nonetheless, when the countrywide student protests began in October a
small number UPM members once again joined the students at Rhodes.
A few hours after the Monday, 19 October 2015, protest at Rhodes began in the early hours of
the morning, students from Rhodes marched to nearby Eastcape Midlands College (EMC) to show
solidarity with EMC students whose protest beginning on Friday had allegedly been met with
police violence. Solidarity was extended because the students at Rhodes, who had burned tires and
blocked roads just as the students from the college had done, had not been met with aggression
from police. The issues of race and space were certainly at play: Rhodes is an elite and formerly
all-White university, with a relatively diverse student body, while EMCs student body is mostly
Black, working-class, and the college is located in a wealthy neighbourhood of Grahamstown.
What appeared to be the assumed criminality of Black people in White town mimicked the logic
whetted during colonialism and systematised under apartheid. Shortly after the Rhodes marchers
arrived at EMC, students from both institutions were dispersed with police stun grenades. The
protesters returned to Rhodes to regroup, and in the mid-afternoon marched back to EMC. After an
hour, SAPS ordered the students to disperse, which they refused to do until five oclock. SAPS
then scattered them by force, deploying more stun grenades and a mobile water cannon. A mass
meeting organised at Rhodes in the evening included students from both institutions and several
members of the UPM.
Rhodes University remained closed for the week while nationally the scale and scope of both
the student protests and their repression intensified. As part of the demonstrations across South
Africa on Wednesday, 21 October 2015, Rhodes students and staff marched through town, taking
a route that passed EMC. Police had issued a permit for this march, and monitored its progress.

Space and xenophobia in Grahamstown

While the students marched, another protest by the taxi drivers associations in Grahamstown had
initiated violence. The protesting taxi drivers had delivered a petition bringing attention to the terrible state of Grahamstowns roads and the rise of violent crime, focusing on rumours of murders
committed by foreigners. The Mayor, Nomhle Gaga, did not meet with them, and the taxi drivers
turned against foreign-owned spaza shops owned by Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali, and
Ethiopian residents of Grahamstown. It was a premeditated move. Some of the taxis taking part in
the protest had xenophobic slogans painted on them, and a crowd was mobilised by the taxi drivers
to attack and loot the shops, beginning in Bathurst Street not far from the centre of town and then
proceeding into the township. The xenophobic violence was legitimated by the looters on the basis
of rumours that a foreigner an Arab, a man with a beard had killed and mutilated several
women in recent months; rumours which SAPS had done nothing to dispel in spite of repeated
warnings by the UPM members and other Grahamstown residents that they could result in violence
(Unemployed Peoples Movement, 2015).5 For almost a week, looting, destruction of property, and
threats continued against shops and shop owners. Some three hundred shops were looted and several hundred people were displaced.

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OHalloran

While Michael Neocosmoss study of South African xenophobia shows that it has been a problem since the transition to democracy in 1994 (Neocosmos, 2006: 1) xenophobia is not unique to
the post-apartheid era. Indeed, the history of Grahamstowns differentiated spatial politics has
threads of xenophobia running through it from the beginning. The voluntary arrival and forced
relocation of Africans to the immediate Grahamstown area during the 1830s and 1840s, spurred the
colonial governments decision to set up the first official African locations in Grahamstown.
These were days when Africans were counted as foreigners in the Cape Colony. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, fear and suspicion of Africans arriving in Grahamstown from
further east on the advancing colonial frontier inflected the particular racism of the town and
region. In this xenophobic view, in which to be African was to live perpetually on the edge of
criminality, to be more African, from the rural frontier, was even worse.
From the 1860s on, White suspicions of the unemployed and of vagrants or illegal inhabitants, which often referred to African people from rural areas, was prevalent at the turn of the
twentieth century. In April 1878, with war once more on the frontier, the people following a chief6
named Oba were relocated away from the frontier. Of 500 people relocated to Grahamstown, some
250 remained, about half of them children, apparently because there was concern about
Grahamstowns proximity to the frontier and the danger to the town posed by large numbers of
possibly hostile adults (Gibbens, 1982: 273274); shortly thereafter, White Grahamstown wailed
about a great influx of utter heathen into the citys locations (Gibbens, 1982: 276).
The distinction between Africans from the town and from the country must be noted. Those
arriving from the frontier were considered undesirable fomenters of unrest and disturbances, suggesting at least fear of (and probably existing) political allegiances and activity that was unacceptable to colonial Whites. In another example, from the late nineteenth century through
apartheid, the criminalisation of the brewing of sorghum beer was strongly linked to racist and
xenophobic perceptions of African-ness. Citizenship was closely guarded through spatial and
racial control and imbued in some cases with perceptions of urban and rural that mirrored the
logic of xenophobia. A properly historicised account of xenophobia in South Africa that draws on
such local examples would be valuable in analysing the politics of today. However, the purpose
here is to demonstrate continuities in the xenophobic event of October 2015 with the spatial politics of colonialism. What is important here is that historical modes and logics of exclusion in
Grahamstown are linked to the ways in which race and foreign-ness are intertwined today, and
the possibility that this discourse, originally levelled against inhabitants of Grahamstowns locations, can be mobilised by their descendents. As Mamdanis study of the Rwandan genocide
shows, politics of the colonial state can have both state and popular manifestations in the postcolony (Mamdani, 2001).
In South Africa, xenophobia has retained much of its racialised character. In April 2015, xenophobic attacks in Durban targeted foreign-born Africans, particularly Congolese people, as well as
people from the Eastern Cape (imagined as rural) living in informal settlements. To be poor and
African the more African, the worse were the criteria for victimisation. When members of
Abahlali baseMjondolo organised a (legal) anti-xenophobia march, it was violently prevented by
police. Abahlali baseMjondolo identified the police, the ruling party, and local taxi drivers as supporters and instigators of xenophobic violence in Durban (Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2015a).
Shortly afterwards, beginning in July 2015, Operation Fiela deployed SAPS and army units to
combat crime by rounding up foreigners and other illegal inhabitants, including people participating in land occupations around the country. Poor people, Africans from other countries, and
Africans living in informal settlements were targeted. The same understanding that the authorities
employed over a century ago in Grahamstown, which views illegal inhabitants (foreigners) and
unemployed people as problems, which led the Grahamstown Journal to observe in 1908 the

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Journal of Asian and African Studies

regular crusade against squatters and vagrants, is at work today (17 October).. It legitimates, as
it did in colonial Grahamstown, various forms of prejudicial politics and violence. It also emphasises the notion that poverty signals non-belonging, or, alternately, that poverty breeds violence,
both of which conceptions involve spatial assumptions, being largely aimed at township residents.
As in Durban, local politicians and businesses were implicated in Grahamstowns xenophobic
politics. Although Makana Municipality convened a meeting at City Hall on Friday, 23 October
2015, asserting there that the municipality and SAPS would handle the situation, these authorities
not then proceed in subsequent days to ameliorate either the political situation or the emergency
needs of the affected people. No SAPS representative attended the meeting. Democratic Alliance
ward councillor, Marcelle Booysen, expressed her belief, highly enabling of xenophobic action,
that when the foreigners came back, they should have fewer shops.7 Community members allege
that, the night before, an ANC councillor, Mthuthuzeli Matyumza, had addressed a crowd, saying
the foreigners would go (OHalloran, 2015a). Grahamstowns taxi associations actively instigated
and supported the looting by bearing xenophobic slogans and transporting looters for free, according to community members.
Police played a central role, as they had in Durban and, indeed, in Grahamstown in the past.
Inexplicably, SAPS claimed that their restoration of order and support of the foreigners after
the week of looting was a success for Operation Fiela (IOLNews, 2015). Contrary to this narrative,
Grahamstown shop owners affected by the looting as well as members of the UPM have recounted
police behaviours that ranged from indifference, to laughing at people whose shops were being
looted, to facilitation of and participation in the looting. In addition to their failure to respond to the
Grahamstown communitys fears and warnings, the immediate aggression exercised against students by SAPS at EMC contrasted sharply with instances on Wednesday in which police allowed
people to loot shops; and, despite many arrests, the contrast between policing in the township (for
township residents) and in the wealthy quarters (against young Black people) shows a stark spatial
divide (OHalloran, 2015b). Indeed, the spatial division of Grahamstown was glaring. The police
line strung across Beaufort Street, declaring and dividing with yellow tape and rifle-bearing officers the zones in which looting would be tolerated and would not be the township, and the town
was reminiscent of the logic of crime, criminality, and control of earlier Grahamstown. Southeys
depiction of events in 1917, when the White town was thoroughly picketed against the unrest in
the township, is worth recalling (Southey, 1984: 247). Grahamstowns violence differed from earlier instances of xenophobic mobilisation in South Africa, for example in May 2008 and April
2015, in that the foreigners under attack were mostly defined as Muslim rather than as other
African. The politics of division, exclusion, and xenophobia are not precisely the same as in the
past, but the spatial divisions through which they operated are not lost, either.
In an interview exactly two weeks before the xenophobic crisis began in Grahamstown, a UPM
member brought spatial arguments into our discussion of the political situation that eventually
produced the crisis. He described how, at an event organised by the UPM, women raised the issue
of the rumours of murders in the township to a UPM activist, and urged that they meet not only
with Makana Municipality but with SAPS. We went in a meeting with the [police] at the police
station, but we were sent to the police station in Joza. This matter of being sent to a different
police station is significant. The man explained:
The [town] is divided into two. Most of us after the river8 [], were supposed to do everything that needs
involvement of police in Joza, then this [station] is in town. So thats why we couldnt get tangible results here.
Apparently the things of the past, even after the 1994 change, core issues didnt change. There is still Black
and White, because this one police station actually is like an extension of security of a White monopoly.

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OHalloran

Whereby for example if theres a break in or a robbery at Checkers [grocery store in the centre of town],
they can be easy dealing with that. [But] usually in the community, in the township, there are many cases
they are dealing with you know, differences between people, where there are fights and all those stuff
but in this side its more about financial problems, guarding the finance, the whole economical sense of it.
Its an individual economical [sic] sense, the break-ins and such. (Author interview, 7 October 2015,
Grahamstown)

The way people are treated at these police stations differs, as well, he explained. In the Joza station,
people wanting to open a case are usually required to produce a suspect, which is not the case at
the other police station catering to the mostly White population. The way police responded before
and during the xenophobic attacks is consistent with this racialspatial argument. The police do not
serve the township community the community, in many peoples perceptions but control it
(OHalloran, 2015a).

Divergent modes of citizenship

It is important to note that like the historical events discussed above, the events of October accentuate the importance of citizenship. Following this, it is also crucial that historically citizenship had
spatial referents (at times determinants), and that particular forms of xenophobic and racist politics
had spatial overtones as well. October 2015s events in Grahamstown evinced spatial politics and
demarcated space in specific ways, as we have seen. These can be linked to the question of citizenship. Partha Chatterjees distinction between real and formal citizenship, in which only those
with access to the former are fully rights bearing citizens, is useful here (Chatterjee, 2004: 4).
South Africas citizens are extended formal citizenship, but the relegation of the majority of the
population to a second-rate physical and political space belies a real citizenship. This latter group
often considered encroachers and polluters in the urban sphere are not considered a part of
rights-bearing civil society but of the governable political society (Chatterjee, 2004: 140).
Some of the women affected by the xenophobia, calling themselves Voices of the Foreigners
Wives, organised a protest against xenophobia, crime, violence against women and poor service
delivery at City Hall on 30 October 2015. They had the support of the UPM, the nearby Rural
Peoples Movement, local non-governmental organisation Masifunde, the local Economic Freedom
Fighters party, and other local organisations, students, academics, and residents, but the Mayor
refused to accept their memorandum. It was a patent announcement, made throughout
Grahamstowns history, that only some residents enjoyed access to the protection and services of
the formal authorities; that is, citizenship. In the days before the march, as the municipality and
police manoeuvred to prevent any public protest by the women, the Mayor had told these women
that she had forgotten about them. It requires little effort to proceed from this forgetting to an
invocation of the phrase surplus people that was so fundamental to the project of excluding Black
people from South African citizenship during apartheid.
Neocosmos writes, Xenophobia emanates in society as a direct outcome of the hegemony of a
state discourse, as opposed to popular-democratic discourse on citizenship (Neocosmos, 2006: 21).
During the xenophobic looting, members of the UPM protected shops under attack in the first hours
of the crisis, and worked over the following days to try to end the violence and looting. In the emergency meetings convened by the UPM after the onset of the xenophobic looting and destruction, the
right of the shop owners to live and trade in South Africa and Grahamstown was affirmed, not as
foreigners who had the appropriate documentation, but as community members who, in both their
countries of origin and in South Africa, had to confront the same exclusions as many locally- and
South African-born people. During the looting, the UPM and other local organisations mobilised to

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stop the attacks and to talk with community members about the struggle that the shop owners shared
with them, no matter where they were born. As one man of 50 years who lives in a shack on the outskirts of Grahamstown had said in our interview during calmer times, But everybody, this is our
country everybody, no matter you are White, not matter you are Black, no matter you are green, we
are here in South Africa (Author interview, 11 August 2015, Grahamstown). This logic, put into
practice during the crisis and differing from current state practices, demonstrates an open and egalitarian approach to the issue of citizenship.
In contrast to this praxis, the xenophobic violence that took place in Grahamstown in late
October 2015 offered a different logic of citizenship: a closed and exclusionary approach conceived through narrow definitions of identity and belonging. Though most of the foreign shop
owners who were attacked are South African citizens and most are married to South African
women, they were considered by some to be outsiders who did not belong who, whatever the
official documentation might say, were not citizens of South Africa. People were mobilised around
this political logic, encouraged by local business and political interests, to drive foreigners out of
Grahamstown.
Neocosmos writes that xenophobia is a discourse and practice of exclusion from community; furthermore, this process of exclusion is a political process concerned with exclusion
from citizenship [that] denotes a specific political relationship between state and society
(Neocosmos, 2006: 1518). Historically, xenophobic politics have been strongly linked to colonial racism and to the manufacture of inequality still experienced in South Africa today.
Xenophobia has been a politics of oppression and control of poor people and foreigners those
who are deemed not to belong, who have most often been identified as Africans. The state, in its
many forms from the colonial period through apartheid and into the post-1994 era, has actively
participated in defining foreignness in ways that exclude poor, Black people. Monopolies and
business interests beer, taxis, shops have had a role in deciding who and what is foreign, in
producing exclusion and in inciting violence. In the daily experiences of xenophobic mobilisations in Grahamstown, the spatial politics discussed here, clear historically, are manifested in the
present as well. South African states, colonial and post-colonial, have also mobilised poor people against other poor people and Africans against other Africans in this project of exclusion,
control, and oppression. After members of the UPM went through the township distributing
flyers with an anti-xenophobic message and speaking to residents, one UPM member said, We
heard two things. We heard about the rumours [of the murderer being a foreigner], and we heard
the frustration of unemployment. While xenophobia is not a natural progression from poverty,
we cannot divorce both frustrations from the politics of inequality and exclusion that have a long
history in South Africa and Grahamstown.
The idea of a popular-democratic citizenship was visible at times in the student protests, as
well. In addition to the rebellion against structural oppression through class and race, the question
of citizenship remained at the core of the student protests posed in the forms of who had a right to
the higher education institutions of South Africa and who had a right to determine the content and
future of higher education in South Africa. At Rhodes, the students demanded that the levy for
foreign students be reconsidered and standardised across the countrys universities.
The national student uprising and the outbreak of xenophobic looting are undoubtedly a part of
the longer narrative of politics and inequality in Grahamstown and South Africa more broadly. The
place of contemporary moments of politics in this narrative deserves close attention. As Neocosmos
has argued, the crisis of xenophobia in South Africa is a feature of the countrys crisis of democracy (Neocosmos, 2006), and the students categorically expressed their position that their struggle
was an effort to hold the state accountable to its people and to have universities that are accessible
to and function for the people of South Africa (Naicker, 2015). Space, race, and citizenship were

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implicated in the political mobilisations in Grahamstown in October 2015. In Grahamstown, xenophobic politics affected most the people who live in the township, the coerced space.
These two mobilisations of October, one which seeks to democratise higher education in South
Africa and has met with repression from universities and the state9 and one which seeks to exclude
through violence and is countered with activism driven by shared humanity, shared rights, and
shared struggle is a significant facet of the immediate future of other social movements across
South Africa. Liberal modes of citizenship inflected with colonial concepts, especially of race, are
key aspects of this discussion. While some expressions of popular politics offer possibilities of
more open and democratic modes of political belonging, it is a crucial observation that popular
politics can be about limiting politics, as well.

2016: continuity in politics of space, race and citizenship

Just as the events of October 2015 in Grahamstown were not isolated from the past, it is important
to note that neither were they the culmination of a specific political trajectory: they are still unfolding. The politics that produced student revolt, xenophobic looting, and official and community
responses to these events have continued to influence daily life and decisions in Grahamstown and
South Africa. As a postscript to this study, it is worth briefly mentioning more recent events.
While Grahamstowns immediate displacement crisis was resolved by January 2016, xenophobia remains very present in South African discourse. In March 2016, the Premier of the North West
Province, Supra Mahumapelo, announced that foreigners leasing spaza shops in the province
would no longer be able to operate their businesses, as more indigenous business was necessary.
Presented as a matter of land, the project was undertaken in conjunction with local traditional
authorities, and one report described it as a grass-roots development programme (BuzzSouthAfrica,
2016). The procedures of colonial indirect rule are only slightly modified in the post-colony, and
in this case are used to legitimate both state and popular forms of xenophobia. For Neocosmos,
xenophobia is a consequence of an understanding of politics which presupposes boundaries and
territories that differentiate rights and which are linked to the rise of the territorial state in Africa
as this develops primarily with colonialism/apartheid and which is then consolidated in the postcolonial period (Neocosmos, 2006: 18). Forms of politics at work historically were important to
defining people through race, tribe, and citizenship in ways that were increasingly spatialised. The
spatial exclusion of the past, which entrenched a certain form of citizenship, is among the political
precursors of contemporary modes of exclusion. As seen in Grahamstown, these have local history,
configuration, expression, and significance that provide opportunity for reflection on broader political contexts.
Student protests for decolonisation have also continued at South African universities in 2016.
Repression has increased, intensifying the possibility of and, indeed, leading to, greater violence
by police, private security, and students. At Rhodes, student political activity continued without
major incident until April, when students organised protests against rape culture at the university.
Several students had approached the university administration with concerns about specific
instances of sexual violence and rape that they argued the university had not addressed appropriately, and they demanded that changes be made to the universitys disciplinary policies regarding
sexual violence. After two weeks, without satisfactory response from the university, students began
protest action. Disruption beginning Monday, 18 April 2016, came to a head on Wednesday, 20
April 2016, when roads into the university were blockaded, much as they had been six months
earlier in October. Six students were arrested by an aggressive police force that used stun grenades
and pepper spray against the protesters; other students reported police violence against protesters,
including punching of one student. Police and the university justified the dispersal of these

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protests, while defending the constitutional right to protest, by pointing out that two of the three
streets students had blockaded were public streets (SABC Digital News, 2016). Therefore, the
protests were no longer legal.
The invocation of the public street returns us to the question of space. In August 2015, protests
in Ferguson, Missouri at the year anniversary of the murder of the unarmed, Black teenager Michael
Brown by a police officer prompted the Chief of Police of St Louis County to comment, Theyre
not going to take the street tonight. Thats not going to happen (Al Jazeera America, 2015). The
liberal logic of sacred spaces theorised by Losurdo (2011) is clearly on display: certain types of
politics, especially practised by certain types of people in this case, Black or poor are not permissible in the spaces deemed public. In South Africa, this mingles with the spatial and racial
compartmentalisation of colonialism Fanons ([1961] 1963) forbidden quarters. The legitimate
response of authorities, in this view, is control by force. This politics, in determining that certain
people do not belong while others do, attests to Chatterjees (2004) theory of real and formal
citizenship. In Grahamstown, during the mobilisations of October 2015 and continuing in 2016,
this politics has been both defended and challenged.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the Unemployed Peoples Movement and Voices of the Foreigners Wives for their
assistance in the writing of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The Author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding
At the time of this research, the author received funding from Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University
(UHURU).

Notes
1. The Unemployed Peoples Movement (UPM) organised in Grahamstown in 2009 to offer a dissenting
voice in the absence of actual democracy and a corrupt municipality (author interview). UPM contests
issues including housing, land, water, education, sexual violence, and corruption. Their first action was
against the bucket [toilet] system in Grahamstown, demanding the dignity of proper toilets for all residents. They demonstrated the urgency of the matter by dumping the bucket toilets in the foyer of City Hall.
2. Except where noted, the accounts of the student and xenophobic mobilisations are firsthand, as a participant in the student protests and in anti-xenophobic activity organised by the Unemployed Peoples
Movement, with whom the author was conducting thesis research.
3. From March 2015, the Black Student Movement was critical of the universitys policy, which required
students to leave during the two short vacations each year or to pay an expensive fee to remain in residences. The costs of travel or the residence fees caused financial hardship for some students and their
families: just one way in which the university was exclusionary of poor or working-class students, the
majority of whom are Black. The occupation ended in an important if negotiated success for the students.
4. Cecil Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony when the Glen Grey Act (1894) was passed, one
of the many Acts to affect detrimentally African peoples relationship to the land and economy, and to
limit their involvement in the colonys politics. He was also a capitalist whose mining ventures accelerated the exploitation of African labour. Changing the name of the university was among Black Student
Movements and other political students objectives.
5. Almost identical events occurred six months later in Lusaka, Zambia, where the Arab of the rumours
was replaced by a Rwandan and some sixty shops were looted and two Zambian nationals killed

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(BBC, 2016). The similarity of these two xenophobic mobilisations should not be considered coincidental and deserves attention.
6. See Landau (2010) for a full discussion of pre-colonial political traditions in South Africa, including the
role of chiefs.
7. Two weeks earlier, government Minister Jeff Radebe argued that foreigners owning more shops than
South Africans had negative effects on South Africas poor communities (Gqirana, 2015).
8. The river which divides Grahamstown, east of which is the township. It earned the name eGazini place
of blood in the battle of 1819 (see Maclennan, 1986).
9. Except when an attempt was made to prevent Black Student Movement members from entering a meeting of the university Senate on 28 August 2015, and when they marched to Eastcape Midlands College,
Rhodes students did not have police deployed against them as students did in almost every other protest
across South Africa. This changed in 2016 (see text).

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Author biography
Paddy OHalloran earned his MA in Political and International Studies from Rhodes University,
Grahamstown South Africa, where he was a student in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University
(UHURU). His thesis was entitled, Landscapes of Division: Social Movements and the Politics of Urban and
Rural Space in the Grahamstown Region of the Eastern Cape.

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