The ‘ballot and the brick’: protest, voting and non-voting in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, protest has become an enduring feature of the post-apartheid political landscape. Despite this wave of protest, the African National Congress (ANC) has largely retained its dominant status. The endurance of the ANC’s electoral support in spite of the high levels of protest has led Susan Booysen to conclude that protests in South Africa form part of a ‘dual repertoire’ of political contestation. She argues that protests are used to signal grievances to the ANC between elections but that, ultimately, people remain loyal to the party of liberation. This article interrogates Booysen’s claim through advancing an analysis of voting district and ward-level data in protest hotspots. The article highlights weaknesses in the methodological base of Booysen’s thesis. By analysing the support for the ANC amongst the estimated eligible voting-age population, this article suggests a different relationship between voting and protesting in post-apartheid South Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• voting
• non-voting
• post-apartheid politics
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jacob Potlaki, Lindiwe Ngene and Nhlakanipho Lukhele for their assistance in surveying the number of households in the three case-study areas. Thanks are also due to Tapiwa Chagonda, Chana Teeger and the anonymous peer reviewers who read and commented on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note on contributor

Carin Runciman is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Change in Social Change, University of Johannesburg. Her research specialises in the politics of protest and the analysis of social movement mobilisation post-apartheid. She can be reached at: [email protected]

Notes

1. This article follows the general conventions used in analysing ‘race’ in South Africa. Thus, the term ‘Black’ refers to all the non-white groups designated under apartheid (Black African, Coloured and Indian), while also using the terms ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’ to refer to certain sections of the Black population. While using these terms may run an acknowledged risk of reifying ‘race’, the particular history of apartheid means that these categories still have a lived reality both in terms of how people identify themselves and in the enduring patterns of socio-economic exclusion.

2. The voter turnout figures for 1994 have to be interpreted with caution, as there was no formal voter registration and statistics for the population are unreliable in this period.

3. The term ‘hotspot’ is used to denote an area of sustained protest activity as identified by the Rebellion of the Poor protest monitor at the University of Johannesburg. This term is used to distinguish these areas from areas of more sporadic or ‘one-off’ protest activity.