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SAP0010.1177/0081246318787682South African Journal of PsychologyCanham

South African Journal of Psychology 2018, Vol. 48(3) 319­–330 © The Author(s) 2018
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Article
Theorising community rage for
decolonial action

Hugo Canham

Abstract
Rage is under-theorised in South Africa. This absence is more pronounced in psychological
scholarship. This is a remarkable oversight since we have gained infamy as the world’s epicentre of
protest action. In this article, I read the landscape of scholarly production to conduct an analysis
of how community rage and protests are made sense of. The analysis focuses on work from the
past decade as it has been reported that this period has witnessed the greatest intensity of protest
action within the post-apartheid period. I contend that protests are a form of community rage at
sedimented oppressions. I demonstrate that the expression of community rage provides us the
opportunity to work towards our collective decolonisation. In this analysis, I offer that affective
meaning making in the theorisation of rage can craft a scholarship that enables praxis towards
decolonial action.

Keywords
Affect, community, decolonisation, emotions, rage, social change, violence

In this article, I begin with a meditation on the necessity of disorder for advancing decolonisation.
I then read protests in relation to rage, before considering how psychology has worked with rage
and the limitations of this. I offer alternative readings of rage grounded in an affective register that
takes emotions and protests seriously. Finally, I think through what a scholarly agenda of rage
would look like in South African psychology and the implications of this for advancing the deco-
lonial agenda. In thinking about protests and subjectivity, I take direction from Bowman et al.
(2015) who offer a balance between the systemic and subjectivity. I contend that rage encapsulates
this theoretical interface between the systemic and subjective. In thinking about violence studies,
Bowman et al. (2015) argue for ‘. . .better theorizing [of] the mechanisms that translate risk into

Department of Psychology, School of Human and Community Development, University of the Witwatersrand, South
Africa

Corresponding author:
Hugo Canham, Department of Psychology, School of Human and Community Development, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. 2050.
Email: hugo.canham@wits.ac.za
320 South African Journal of Psychology 48(3)

enactment, and that mobilize individual and collective aspects of subjectivity within these enact-
ments’ (p. 1).
In studying rage, psychological scholarship has not adequately held the space between the
systemic and subjective. Indeed, it is not trite to say that psychology has not strayed too far from
the middle class psychotherapy couch. In South Africa and elsewhere, the emergence of commu-
nity psychology has broadened the application of psychology beyond individual psychotherapeu-
tic encounter. This has meant that we can now hold the community as the unit of analysis to better
account for the socio-political context in which people live to better understand behaviour
(Carolissen et al., 2017). In this article, I take up the values of community psychology to claim
that working class contexts, local realities and their accompanying affects should be central to
how we make sense of communities. I suggest that the place for a psychology that is decolonial
in character is in the interface between local knowledges, socio-historical rootedness and affec-
tive theorisation that takes community rage seriously. The wave of violent resistance that is being
waged by working class communities gives us the opportunity to see rage as a productive force
for freedom from oppression. I offer that the avoidance of a productive theorisation of rage makes
psychology complicit in perpetuating coloniality. I take up Jasper’s (1998) challenge to theorise
rage based on his contention that while emotions are always associated with protests, they are
almost never theorised.

Decolonisation
An abbreviated definition of decolonisation is provided by Mignolo (2009) when he asserts that it
entails the central recognition of the culture and humanity of local people to drive the idea of what
it is to be human as well as the character of knowledge generation. The wave of sometimes violent
protests raging through South Africa has brought decolonisation into the common lexicon and
consciousness of ordinary people. Decolonisation and its pairing with violence is not new. In The
Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (1963) had sharply explicated this relationship. A central feature of
decolonisation is complete disorder which is based on the need to disrupt colonialism and its rem-
nants, coloniality. For de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, and Hunt (2015), coloniality is
understood as ‘a system that defines the organization and dissemination of epistemic, material, and
aesthetic resources in ways that reproduce modernity’s imperial project’. Fanon posits that decolo-
nisation requires the clash of two forces between those whose lives are untenable and therefore
insist on change, and those who maintain and benefit most from the status quo. Oppression is
central to the creation and maintenance of inequality. In South Africa and across the former colo-
nial territories, the coloniser (settler) has created and maintained a position of privilege relative to
the colonised (native) through violent means. Fanon (1963) characterises this violence thus: ‘. . .
the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and
cannon’ (p. 28). For Fanon then, because the wealthy depend on the existence of the impoverished
for their comfort, they violently suppress any efforts towards equality. There is therefore no way
out of oppression but through violent means. Fanon observed that violence is a unifying force for
oppressed people as it conscientises them of their own oppressive subjugation and destroys the
divisive barriers of regionalism and tribalism fostered by colonialism.
Since Fanon wrote within the first wave of African resistance and struggles for independence,
readers may question the relevance of his analysis for the present. Further questions may be posed
about the particular relevance of this for the post-apartheid situation especially since South Africa’s
history and trajectory is somewhat different in character to the independence movements on the
continent. I however contend that it is for these reasons that Fanon is especially useful for South
Africa. The sedimentation of oppression through the imposition of apartheid on top of colonialism
Canham 321

means that the violence of oppression has endured much longer. Moreover, the negotiated settle-
ment (Mamdani, 2015) which took us into democracy means that the disorder and disruption
required for decolonisation was stalled. Bolstered by neo-liberal capital accumulation and struc-
tural adjustments, post-apartheid South Africa has maintained the logic of oppression characterised
by Fanon’s ‘settler’ minority retaining wealth at the expense of the Black majority that has remained
in the service of the wealthy (Canham & Williams, 2017). At the time of writing, of the 27.7% of
the unemployed, only 1% are White (Statistics South Africa, 2017). This figure does not include
the disgruntled who no longer actively seek employment. It is the unemployed who most sharply
experience the brunt of living in a country with one of the greatest levels of inequality (Alexander,
2010; World Bank, 2018).
Post-1994 transformation efforts have been most successful in the creation of elites. This has
enabled a small number of Black people to join the ranks of the wealthy White population (Gqubula,
2006). Patrick Bond (2000) has termed this an elite transition. As a function of a costly and a small
higher education sector, universities have largely served as a conduit for the production of old and
new elites. Efforts to expand access to universities mean that the working classes within higher
education have first-hand experience of the consequences of their oppression (Soudien, 2008).
Financial and academic exclusions demonstrate that they are precarious citizens of the academy.
Following Freire (1968/1972), I argue that the dual influence of the protests within their working
class communities as well as the conscientisation that they obtain within the university means that
resistance to oppression was inevitable (Kiguwa & Canham, 2010). Importantly, they have couched
their freedom through the related discourses of decolonisation and free quality education. Efforts
at using formal structures to be heard have not yielded positive results. It is against this backdrop
that the student protestors have used violent means to obtain institutional and national attention and
to disrupt the system responsible for their continued colonisation.
Protests that are met with violent resistance by the police generally become more violent. The
violence is escalated by violent efforts to stop it. This is evident whenever police intervene to stop
protests (Amnesty International, 2011; Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa [SERI],
2017). In South Africa, the Marikana Massacre of 2012, the confrontations between the ‘Red Ants’
used to evict tenants and vulnerable communities, and the murder of community protestor Andries
Tatana by the police, are prominent examples of the escalation of violence in relation to interven-
tions by state or private security forces. Already indignant communities engaged in protest action
become enraged when their struggles are deligitimated and when there are efforts to dismiss their
frustrations without addressing them.

Regarding protests and rage

In this article, I understand rage as an affective response which arises as a consequence of people
being unable to take any more oppression. Grier and Cobbs (1992) contend, ‘They have had all
they can stand. They will be harried no more. Turning from their tormentors, they are filled with
rage’ (p. 4). While rage is a form of anger, unlike anger, it has an active component. This action is
commonly expressed through community unrest. Perhaps the most comprehensive account of
community unrest in South Africa is documented in the collection titled ‘The smoke that calls’ (von
Holdt et al., 2011). The largely sociological account of community-based protest violence is pri-
marily a rational account of violence where participants and hidden instigators often have some-
thing material to gain. Karl von Holdt et al. (2011) calls these instigators ‘thuggish elites’. These
material gains vary from basic services and employment, to corrupt financial gains and political
jobs or influence. On the contrary, the more common discourses by middle class publics and politi-
cians attribute community protests that turn violent, to hooliganism and unthinking or misguided
322 South African Journal of Psychology 48(3)

radicalism. When politicians condemn violence, it is those who commit violent acts that are por-
trayed as unthinking instruments. Condemning violence recently, former President Zuma stated
that leaders of violent protests were turning young people into ‘instruments of destruction’
(Independent Online, 2016). von Holdt et al. (2011) reports that a mayor dismissed protestors as
‘unemployed, unwashed boys who smoke dagga’ (p. 23). The dominant narratives therefore posi-
tion enraged protestors as societal outcasts.
And yet, protestors repeatedly and articulately state their demands. When the community of
Ennerdale in the South of Johannesburg closed off all the roads in their area with burning tyres and
rocks in 2016, residents told journalists,

We’re not burning to be violent or aggressive, we’re making a point. We were promised housing two years
ago and haven’t even been included in the budget. We want the government or the MEC for Housing to
come out here and talk to us. (Chernick, Dipa, & Panyane, 2016)

Young protestors take offence at being characterised as mindless agitators:

It is an insult to my intelligence for people to think we are marching because someone has bought us liquor.
We are not mindless. People, especially you who are educated, think we are marching because we are
bored. We are dealing with real issues here. Like today we don’t have electricity. We have not had water
for a whole week. (von Holdt et al., 2011, p. 23)

The last 10 years have seen a significant amount of writing on service delivery protests. Violence
has taken a central place in the analysis of this research. For example, Paret (2015) contends that
the meaning of violence during protests needs a nuanced analysis that centres its liberatory poten-
tial; Langa and Kiguwa (2013) have looked at violent masculinities in service delivery protests;
Lodge and Mottiar (2016) have explored the motives and meanings of service delivery protests in
relation to democratisation; and Alexander (2010) has argued that local community protests amount
to a rebellion of the poor. Like Langa and Kiguwa (2013), Banjo and Jili (2013) have provided a
close reading of protests in Mpumalanga Province. Booysen (2011) and Lodge & Mottiar (2016)
take a positive view of protests. They are of the view that protest should be seen as part of the
milieu of political participation and as enhancing democracy rather than detracting or challenging
democratic governance.
While the resurgence of protest action in the past decade has drawn much attention, protests
both in South Africa and elsewhere are not a new phenomenon. For example, Hassim (2006) writes
on the women’s protest of 1956. Ralf H. Turner (1969) reflected on the 1960s protests in the United
States. The question of the public perceptions of protests was a matter of interest, then as it is now.
Turner summarised five theoretical perspectives to predict perceptions of protests as follows:
events must be credible as protest; an optimal optical balance is required between appeal and
threat; protest interpretation is often an aspect of conciliation to avoid full-scale conflict; protest
interpretation can be an invitation to form a coalition; and protest interpretation can be a phase of
bargaining by authorities. During the apartheid period in South Africa, protests generally met these
five conditions with relative ease as the protest action was generally directed at a system whose
illegitimacy was widely accepted (Dubow, 2014). In the post-apartheid period, the lines are less
clear as it is corrupt democratically elected officials that are sometimes complicit in perpetuating
inequality (South African Local Government Association [SALGA], 2015). Of course present day
inequalities and lines of socio-economic oppression are built on the legacy of the preceding periods
of colonisation and apartheid. The perceptions of protests shift with vested interests of on-lookers.
Simiti (2015) has illustrated that the rage of protestors is never independent of political interests
Canham 323

and identities. Most often, it is the privileged middle classes that have a stake in maintaining the
status quo. Middle class protests in South Africa are related to drawing attention to escalating
crime such as farm murders. The divergent class interests of protestors where apparent in the 2016
student protests on some campuses where middle class students demonstrated to assert their rights
to undisrupted education while working class protested for free quality decolonised education
(ENCA, 2016).
Working class protests are generally associated with their rage at the oppression manifested by
pervasive inequality. This is evident from the SALGA (2015) investigation into the causes of pro-
tests at local government level. According to SALGA (2015), some of the leading causes for pro-
tests are land and housing, water, electricity, ignored grievances, infrastructure, and sanitation and
waste. The unemployed were perceived as some of the main participants in protests. 71% of protes-
tors were unemployed, and 8% were employed on a part-time basis (SALGA, 2015). Indeed, all the
South African studies cited in this study centre socio-economic inequality as one of the primary
drivers of rage and protest. I contend that inequality should be read as a form of oppression.
Alexander (2010) summarises the form that community protests have taken as follows:

They have included mass meetings, drafting of memoranda, petitions, toyi-toying, processions, stay-
aways, election boycotts, blockading of roads, construction of barricades, burning of tyres, looting,
destruction of buildings, chasing unpopular individuals out of townships, confrontations with the police,
and forced resignations of elected officials. (p. 26)

In this article, I take up these themes but in the vein of Fanon’s (1963) analysis, I posit that
violent protest is intimately tied to decolonisation. For instance, while a particular protest might be
about access to water, the underlying drive is for freedom from the violence of oppression (Canham,
2017). I use the word protests rather than the more popularly used ‘service delivery protests’ in
recognition of the multiple motives and meanings of protests as being more than about material
goods (Lodge & Mottiar, 2016). Following Paret (2015), I note that violence is an ambiguous con-
cept for which there is no one definition. However, Bowman et al. (2015) warn that the variability
in how violence is defined has resulted in a number of challenges. Following Zizek (2009), they
assert that a lack of interdisciplinary understandings of violence leads to

. . . moments when defining violence relies on foregrounding the subject at the expense of situational,
contextual, socio-cultural and historical analyses, or alternatively, evacuating the subject and his or her
agency in favour of focussing on the social determinants of violence through situational, contextual socio-
cultural or historical lenses. (Bowman et al., 2015, p. 2)

I am interested in violence as one of the possibilities that might emerge from rage. For me, vio-
lence entails disruption, disorder, and unsettling of the status quo. Theorising rage allows for hold-
ing the subjective agency of individuals and the situational, historical, and socio-cultural. Rage is
not necessarily violent. It can also manifest in what might be considered peaceful or non-violent
protest. Violence might follow from repeated attempts to be heard by state officials or employers.
Incremental improvements or the resolution of a single issue is generally not the aim of protests
(Lodge & Mottiar, 2016). While wages might emerge as the single issue in a protest, the example
of the miners’ strike in Marikana in 2012 suggests that the general living conditions of protestors
were the underlying problem. Radical change across a spectrum of issues that amount to the
oppression of people is generally what brings people out into the streets even with the threat of
police violence. Protests are about material goods, democratic participation, dignity, and related
forms of discontent in relation to oppression. They are fuelled by rage. While individual protestors
324 South African Journal of Psychology 48(3)

may feel more passionately about particular issues, many of the problems that motivate people to
participate in protest action are related.
Collectively, I contend that these multiple motivations are driven by the impulse for decolonisa-
tion. This view is closer to that of Alexander (2010) and Pithouse (2007) who assert that the nature
of local protests is a rebellion of the poor with revolutionary intent meant to advance full citizen-
ship. I offer the argument that an affective rage born of sedimented oppression is pivotal for
advancing decolonisation. Sedimented oppression foregrounds a historical view of generational
oppression that is inherited over time. The central contribution of this article is therefore to centre
the psychological role of affect and rage in obtaining a shared freedom for the oppressed.

The limitations of psychological scholarship in understanding rage

Mainstream psychological research has tended to steer clear of the concept of rage. Explanatory
frames have tended to hone in on the subject and evacuated the systemic. When rage is engaged, it
is generally theorised as a rogue or excess emotion that is juxtaposed with reason (e.g., Batson,
Turk, Shaw, & Klein, 1995; Freud, 1924; Kant, 1781/1900). Moreover, there is generally a confla-
tion between anger and rage. I posit that while the two certainly overlap, rage has a heightened and
agential energy that is not necessarily the hallmark of anger. Psychological scholarship contends
that rage degrades reasoning processes that follow the triggering event. Goldberg, Lerner, and
Tetlock (1999) argue that in traditional psychological scholarship, subsequent judgements are gen-
erally understood as unrelated to the source of the emotion of anger. There is little discernment
between issues and events. In this conception, rage obscures reason. Following Kant and Freud,
anger disrupts ‘rational’ cognition. However, applying the social-functional view of anger,
Goldberg et al. (1999) have found that anger and subsequent judgements are moderated by a sense
of whether or not prior concerns or injustices had been adequately addressed or punished. They
contend that anger escalates and people become punitive when they believe that injustices have
gone unpunished. They conclude that ‘we are not at the whim of our emotional experiences’
(Goldberg et al., 1999, p. 791). While these experimental studies have illuminated the logic of rage,
psychology has not readily applied the findings to make meaning of the injustices that bedevil our
societies.
Outside of experimental psychology, the subject of rage has been dealt with by psychoanalytic
theorists. This reading is however always intra-psychic. Rage is understood in relation to narcis-
sistic injuries suffered in early childhood at the hands of ridiculing parents (Freud, 1921; Kohut,
1972; Ornstein, 1999). Following Kohut (1972), Ornstein (1999) contends, ‘Narcissistic rage,
then, refers to a broad class of angry reactions deriving from an injury to self-esteem and the expe-
rience of psychological vulnerability’ (p. 283). With a basis in drive theories, psychology has been
most interested in rage in as far as it applies to road rage and aggression in boys (e.g., Galovski,
Malta, & Blanchard, 2006). Here too, rage is cast as a problematic and aggressive emotion to be
understood and eliminated (de Castro, Verhulp, & Runions, 2012; Ornstein, 1999).
While the psychoanalytic approach has explanatory value for understanding individual behav-
iour, it is not very useful for understanding group behaviour such as protest action. The attribution
of rage to individual ‘psychopathology’ is a short distance to blaming the victim. This approach
conceives of narcissistic rage as emerging from the revenge-and rage-prone personality. It does not
provide room for the social conditions that might be the cause of rage. Here, I seek to downplay
explanatory frameworks informed by personality theories which individualise responses to oppres-
sion. Impoverished people who engage in protest action are therefore often described as impatient,
driven by the impulse for instant gratification, and as petulant. These descriptions infantilise, pat-
ronise, and deny the agency of people. Consequently, instead of describing some working class
Canham 325

people as open to influence, lacking self-efficacy, and as projecting internal ego conflicts, I con-
tend that social conditions of oppression drive the emotional responses of indignation.
The social psychology of rage explains rage in relation to the fight extreme of its flight counter-
part. In this conception, shamefaced withdrawal is flight and narcissistic rage is fight (Kohut,
1972). In this article, I argue for a view that explains the fight response beyond the instinctual. I
also contend that social theories of obedience (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989; Milgram, 1963) and
social identity studies of crowd behaviour (Tajfel, 2010) remove agency from rage. I favour
approaches that consider social injustice in thinking about rage. I depend on authors such as bell
hooks (1995) and Franz Fanon (1963) as they have sought to meaningfully engage the subject of
rage to think about what happens when people cannot take any more injustice. I draw on affect
theory to advance an approach that takes rage seriously. I offer that while South African psycho-
logical research offers important insights, this scholarship is generally interested in violence and
not rage (e.g., Bowman, Stevens, Eagle and Matzopoulos, 2015). Finally, while recognising the
value of community psychology in elevating the community as the unit of analysis, I contend that
the next frontier of engagement is to centre rage as related to violence but as a distinct subjective
and systemic feature of life within contexts of ongoing oppression.

Affect and community rage: alternative readings of rage

Protests have been most studied within the field of social psychology. It is however only recently
that emotions have been taken seriously as an area of study in relation to protests (Van Stekelenburg
& Klandermans, 2013). While cognitive explanations related to relative deprivation were the dom-
inant lens, Van Zomeren, Postmes, and Spears (2008) note that affects such as indignation and
discontent are now more influential explanatory modes. Simiti (2015) and Jasper (2011) remind us
that the emotions of indignation and rage run parallel with moral and cognitive political appraisals
of the world. Rage is therefore not a rogue emotion. It is socially and politically located. Said dif-
ferently, it has a diagnostic frame. This challenges the assertions of political elites who are often
unable to, or do not want to engage with enraged citizens. Jasper (1998) expands on this by advis-
ing that it not productive to understand emotions as irrational. For Jasper, general affects are part
of all social life, they are relatively stable and predictable, and they are not irrational eruptions.
Consigning affects of rage to the realm of the accidental or irrational is a deliberate misrecognition
and refusal to deal with rage and its causes. For example, Canham (2017) contends that affective
commitments to self and community might, for instance, drive the response of rage at social condi-
tions of poverty or lack of services such as water. Anderson and Smith (2001) point to the conse-
quences of dismissing emotions when they are ‘regarded as something apart from the economic
and/or as something that is essentially private’ (p. 3) and do not co-construct the public and politi-
cal sphere.
Wetherell (2012) offers that affect enables both the everyday and the dramatic to enter into the
scope of analysis. In this article, I think of affect as the study of emotions in human social life.
Following Jasper (1998), I posit that affect patterns the world. All relationships are charged with
emotions. When people gather in groups, their relationships are riven by affective ties and all
aspects are inflected by emotion. Affect is social. Following Wetherell (2012), affect is the con-
cern with embodied meaning-making. In this article, I truncate a complex field by pointing the
reader to Benedictus De Spinoza (2016), Gilles Deleuze (1994), Silvan Tomkins (1984), Brian
Massumi (2002), Nigel Thrift (2008), Kathleen Stewart (2007), Ben Anderson (2009), Lauren
Berlant (2008), and Sarah Ahmed (2004) among others. I centre emotions in thinking about pro-
tests because ‘human life is constructed and lived through emotions’ (Anderson & Smith, 2001,
p. 2). It is an odd omission that South African psychology has yet to engage with social emotions
326 South African Journal of Psychology 48(3)

in thinking about the community rage that is sweeping through the country. In deploying the con-
cept of community rage, I signal to the collective nature of struggle as signified by protests
formed around common issues that enrage oppressed communities. I contend that our thinking
about protests as a broader movement for decolonisation would be greatly enhanced by directly
engaging rage as a political energy that is often palpable in these protests. Discursive sociological
approaches that have classically been used to think about social life and protests in particular are
inadequate on their own. I suggest that the study of affect is an important hinge theory to bring the
emotional into conversation with the discursive. My reading of protests and their rage can be
characterised as affective practice (Wetherell, 2012) which allows for a discursive interrogation
of affect. Here, the possibilities of the body are entangled with meaning making. Writing about
black rage, Canham (2017) has argued that rage can be read as a response to White supremacy
through the systems of colonialism, apartheid, and neo-liberalism. He notes that it has three pos-
sible outcomes: destructive consequences, cathartic release of pent up sedimented anger, and is
‘simultaneously an expression of self-love’ (Canham, 2017, p. 1). In this conception, rage is both
destructive and productive.
The rage that is present in a substantive amount of protests in South Africa (Alexander, 2010)
do not spread like a virus. Instead, it presents as an ‘opportunity, an identity, a formulation of a situ-
ation, and a solution that is transmitted’ (Wetherell, 2012, p. 21). Anderson (2009) describes the
conditions for the transmission of affect as affective atmospheres. The affective component of rage
can lead to a shared affect where rage travels between surfaces and is shared across settings
(Anderson, 2009). Jordan (2014) notes that in spaces of protest, oppressed people generate a shared
affective energy based on a common desire for liberation. Here, Jordan challenges the reductive
view of mob mentality and suggests an affirming oneness of intense shared emotional energy
which is underpinned by a yearning for freedom. While it is informed by contextual arrangements,
rage has characteristics of situated solidarity between bodies in spaces of protest. The group
response in the form of protest is an illustration of the possibilities inherent in solidarity and a
reflection of Anderson’s (2009) invocation of atmospheric affect which posits that bodies generate
atmospheres that travel between them. The affective energy which moves between bodies in the
case of protests travels primarily between largely young bodies that are socially bound by margin-
ality in the form of unemployment, financial, and epistemic exclusion.
Borrowing from Wetherell (2012), the practice component of affective practice is a way of
‘conceptualising social action as constantly in motion’ (p. 23) while simultaneously recognising
that the past and its predecessors is a constraint on both the present and future. Therefore, protests
of this decade have a particular logic and sameness which both differs and is similar to protests of
the 1980s. The motif of fire has returned indicating a measure of stability but the verb part of prac-
tice carries the possibility of movement – the current fires no longer burn the transgressive impimpi
(informer), they burn the known structure in which communities now have different emotional
investments. These include libraries, clinics, schools, and burning road blockades. These material
structures have failed to deliver on the promise of a better life for all (Canham, 2017).
In a study on community protests in Cato Manor, Lodge and Mottiar (2016) observed that protest
activity demonstrated agency by claiming their leadership of the protests and emphasising solidarity
and cooperation with other communities. One of their participants stated, ‘We also link with other
communities’ (Lodge & Mottiar, 2016, p. 825). Solidarities between community members and com-
munities are crucial for creating networks. According to Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans (2013),
these networks transform individual grievances into shared problems and structure anger as a col-
lective emotion. They are also efficacious as they mobilise communities into collective action.
Networks are generative for enabling social embeddedness of emotions of rage which creates a
space for political discourse that links oppression to the socio-political world. Van Stekelenburg and
Canham 327

Klandermans (2013) thus assert, ‘when the personal becomes political – motivation to protest
increases’ (p. 61). The theorisation of rage enables us to observe how emotions travel across spaces
by creating generative networks for political conscientisation. By harnessing the movement of emo-
tions, we can more deliberately think about how decolonisation can be attained.

Implications for psychology and praxis

Decolonisation is not an abstract phrase. It is a verb and it implies action. As observed by Fanon
(1963), this action is collective and necessarily violent in character. Moreover, decolonial action is
resisted by the privileged classes and the state that is caught in the snare of neo-liberal forces.
Violence is driven by rage which operates as a political force for change within a particular logic.
However, the failure of South African psychological scholarship to directly engage with affect
(Canham, 2017) means that rage is largely seen as an irrational and rogue emotion (Von Holdt
et al., 2011). Theorising community rage thus allows us to engage the productive potential of emo-
tions and the central role they play in decolonial praxis. Emotions do things. They order and pro-
vide the substance of life. Like decolonisation, rage is active. Our scholarship is poorer for not
productively engaging with both decolonial discourse and action.
However, as this Special Issue and recent conferences suggest, psychology has belatedly joined
the decolonial fray. Scholarship is produced in the classroom, the broader curriculum, in the com-
munity and in scholarly production. Within the formal educational context, there has been diffi-
culty in bringing rage to the classroom. I sketch out the implications for psychology here. The
theories that are taught in the classroom cannot be exclusively western or parochially South African
(Carolissen et al., 2017). Importantly, the theorisation of collective rage needs to be centred within
the curriculum without prioritising violence prevention but in ways that think about the causes and
potential of rage for freedom. I contend that thinking from our location will produce theorisation
that addresses the issues that African communities face. Here, Mignolo’s (2009) concept of epis-
temic disobedience is apt. African psychology should therefore seriously consider the geopolitical
location from which we think. This might mean challenging accepted ways of thinking about emo-
tions such as rage. Importantly, if decolonisation is to occur, we require decolonising knowledges
which aid this process. In Mignolo’s (2009) conception, these knowledges allow for ‘imagining
and building democratic, just, and non-imperial/colonial societies’ (p. 2). Here, I connect Mignolo’s
injunction for epistemic disobedience to Fanon’s (1963) call for breaking the colonial yolk of
oppression. In this article, thinking and working with rage is a decolonising act as it breaks the
tradition of consigning rage to the realm of illegitimate emotions. Rage is therefore both legitimate
and necessary for completing the long overdue task of decolonisation.
Praxis demands that knowledge production occurs in concert with community action. This sug-
gests that psychologists should be partnering with communities in participatory action research to
productively engage the rage that is prevalent in communities. Fine and Torre (2006) model how
scholars and communities can work together. They argue that scholarship that is in solidarity with
oppressed communities magnifies the voice of communities by enabling their cause to reach public
officials and to influence policy changes. Participatory action researchers can strategically insert
the voice of communities in the cacophony of voices that generally tend to delegitimise the strug-
gles of impoverished communities. I contend that South African psychological scholarship that
critically partners with communities should position itself in concert with ‘the smoke that calls’
(Von Holdt et al., 2011). Like rage, this scholarship has an action orientation towards our collective
freedom as represented by a decolonised society where substantive rights can be enjoyed equally.
In this theorisation, action for psychology entails engaging with the struggles of the oppressed and
marginalised by working and theorising with these communities. In this context, while colonialism
328 South African Journal of Psychology 48(3)

and apartheid remain fundamental interpretative frames for current challenges, psychology must use
these frames to think ahead of the burning fires. This will help us to understand the drivers of the rage,
its constituent parts and patterns, and to create the conditions where the privileged and powerful can-
not get away with denigrating dismissals of marginalised communities. Indeed, taking rage seriously
allows us to see it as a productive energy in the service of decolonisation. Psychological scholarship
that is practised on the continent cannot be aloofly apart from the conditions that mobilise for social
equality. Critical participatory action research should take us beyond the walls of the academy and
into the smouldering streets.
Public representatives, practitioners and researchers should work with the anger that is erupting
all around us. Failure to do so ignores the possibilities of the rage that is sweeping across most of
the continent. Working with rage calls for an African centred psychology that takes community
histories, community realities, and community forms of expression into theory and action. I posit
that student, practitioner, and researcher anxieties are a reflection of a societal disconnection
between how we think about community rage and the contemporary moment of post-apartheid
South Africa. I suggest that the addition of rage in the mapping and theorising of decolonisation
will enrich our understanding of African communities. In this way, I attempt to contribute to Van
Stekelenburg and Klandermans’ (2013) call for psychological research that explores the socio-
political context that drives people to protest. I offer that this understanding is within the nexus of
the subject and the systemic.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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