Language of the unheard: police-recorded protests in South Africa, 1997–2013

ABSTRACT

South Africa remains beset by protest. Notwithstanding an impressive literature, quantifying protests remains problematic; most attempts extrapolate from samples or media-derived data sets. Applying machine learning to the world’s largest publicly available, single-country public-event database – the South African Police Service’s Incident Registration Information System – the article classifies 150,000 events into type and levels of ‘tumult’. The author provides the first holistic picture of all police-reported protest in South Africa over a given period (1997–2013), showing a count increase (partly confirming the ‘rebellion of the poor’ thesis), while more nuanced measures (i.e. protestors per capita) demonstrate a less urban and tumultuous phenomenon than previously theorised.

RÉSUMÉ

L’Afrique du Sud demeure assaillie par les manifestations. En dépit d’une littérature impressionnante, la quantification des manifestations reste problématique; la plupart des tentatives extrapolent à partir d’échantillons ou d’ensembles de données dérivés des médias. En appliquant l’apprentissage machine à la plus grande base de données au monde accessible publiquement répertoriant tout cas d’événement public dans un même pays – le « système d’information d’enregistrement des incidents » du service de police sud-africain – l’article répertorie 150 000 événements selon leur type et leur degré de « tumulte ». L’auteur fournit la première vision globale de toutes les protestations signalées par la police en Afrique du Sud sur une période donnée (1997–2013), montrant une augmentation des dénombrements (confirmant en partie la thèse de la « rébellion des pauvres »), tandis que des mesures plus nuancées (c’est-à-dire le nombre de manifestants par habitant) montrent un phénomène moins urbain et moins tumultueux que ce qui avait été théorisé auparavant.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• protest
• civil unrest
• South Africa

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Mouvements sociaux
• protestation
• troubles civils
• Afrique du Sud

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges Kate Alexander, Mark Orkin, Carin Runciman and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable guidance in the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See for instance Rodrigues (2010) or Odendaal (2016).

2 Runciman et al. point out that in 2013, Police Minister Mthethwa announced that South Africa experienced over 46,000 protests between 2009 and 2013, all of which were ‘successfully stabilised’, conflating crowd events and protest events. They also note that other scholars (Bond and Mottiar 2013) make the same mistake.

3 See, for example, De Juan and Wegner (2019) for an analysis of the role of inequality in animating ‘service delivery protest’.

4 This phrase comes from Hannah Arendt’s On revolution (1963), which Alexander reclaims for the Left.

5 Alexander suggests that South Africa has the world’s highest number of ‘days lost’ per capita per annum. This appears to be false: the same International Labour Organization data set suggests that Cyprus had 0.33 protests per 1000 workers, whereas South Africa had 0.15 (in 2012).

6 Where a score of 1 implies that all protests were violent. This calculation (see Bekker 2021) applies a uniform weighting to municipalities.

7 Even this is likely to be an undercount; conservatively, I equated protests of ‘uncertain’ size to 15 people gathering.

8 For example, Friedman's (2013) rebuke: ‘Calm down, the poor are not about to revolt.’

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the South African Research Chair in Social Change, administered by the National Research Foundation and funded by the Department of Science and Technology, ref. no. 71193.

Notes on contributors

Martin Bekker

Martin Bekker is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg, having accepted a ‘global excellence stature 4.0 fellowship’ at the Faculty of Humanities. Bekker is a computational social scientist working at the intersection of development studies, sociology and artificial intelligence.