As South Africa’s cities burn: we can clean-up, but we cannot sweep away inequality

ABSTRACT

In July 2021, large swathes of South Africa experienced several days of intense violence and looting, nominally stemming from political causes, but rooted more deeply in spiraling inequality and growing poverty. As the violence slowed, the “clean-up”, began immediately, with South Africa’s citizens banding together to sweep away the collected waste and debris left behind. Yet, as South Africa’s most populous provinces burned, the detritus of their destruction is another poignant reminder that without addressing growing inequality, both domestically and globally, it will always be one-step forward, two-steps backwards for trying to create cleaner communities and to solving our interconnected waste management and climate change challenges. Written in the aftermath of July’s events, the purpose of this viewpoint is to call for a centering of inequality within waste management academic discourse. Inequality, and its causes, must move from the fringe, to the mainstream within our collective body of work. Specifically, we must continuously, and meaningfully, engage with the systemic socio-economic and socio-political conditions responsible for our waste problems if we are to address them. Moreover, we, as academics should always be mindful of the ways in which our work relates to, or possibly contributes to, inequality, through (in)accessibility within communities or to systemic inequalities between the Global North and the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Global South
• SDG10 reduced inequality
• SDG1 no poverty
• SDG11 sustainable cities and communities

1. Introduction

In July 2021, large swathes of South Africa experienced several days of intense violence and looting which caused catastrophic damaged to the country’s logistics, retail, and commercial centres, leading to more than three hundred deaths and 2,500 hundred arrests, while shaking the nation to its core. Largely centred on the country’s Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, in the cities of Johannesburg and Durban, the looting and immediate damage to property ravaged many of South Africa’s retail, industrial, and logistical hubs, resulting in hundreds of billions of Rand in immediate loss to the national economy, and leading to short-term shortages in food, fuel, and other basic goods. Already restricted to home from Covid-19 regulations, most South Africans watched events unfold with a sense of powerlessness, while many others took to the streets to protect their neighbourhoods in the absence of an over-stretched police force and a slow to arrive military presence. Nominally sparked by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma the previous week for contempt of court, the cause of July’s events run deeper. Many more thoughtful and learned diagnoses on these events have, and will be written than what I can provide. For instance, I have particularly enjoyed the following takes, (cf. Canham 2021; Everatt 2021; Givetash 2021; Lebakeng 2021; Reddy 2021; Tolsi 2021). However, regardless of the more pernicious political causes, a persistent picture has emerged of a South African society stretched to its limits, and of a poor majority that had reached its breaking point. Taking a step back however and looking at South Africa for what it is: the most unequal country in the world,¹ the explanation can be easily discerned: rage. The rage of the unemployed left desperate and hungry during a seemingly never-ending Covid-19 crisis. The rage of the have-nots who have long been forced to look at a lifestyle that would never be attainable. The rage of communities left un-cleaned and un-serviced, while the rich and white neighbourhoods nearby enjoy both. The rage of a population that has been repeatedly looted by its government and now felt its turn due.

A number of powerful images have emerged from the July unrest, both from traditional reporting and on social media. Pictures and videos of chaotic scenes of mass looting at stores and warehouses, acts of violence between fellow citizens and from agents of the state, and spontaneous acts of heroism and community. Yet to me,² the most evocative and persistent themes to spring from July’s events have centred on waste. As the July events unfolded, hundreds of images circulated across all forms of media of heaps of trash spilling out into the streets of Durban’s central business district (CBD) from looted shops (see Figure 1), of ransacked shopping centres, grocery stores, and malls, and of highways strewn with debris, as looters pushed or carried goods home from gutted warehouses. Even popular discourse centred on waste, with Durban and Johannesburg commonly referred to as “trashed”, while within the numerous pictures of ransacked and gutted shops, the damage and devastation left behind, was just as conspicuous as the multitude of goods that had been carried away. So much destruction, and so much waste: how would those affected, many of whom had lost everything, begin to put their lives back together? Buried under a mountain of trash, and still the scenes of sporadic violence: how would South Africa’s cities ever begin to pick up the pieces?

Figure 1. The aftermath of looting in the Durban CBD (Photograph by Rajesh Jantilal).

2. “Cleaning-up”

Yet, once a relative calm had returned, the first act of returning to a previously held normality in most affected communities was to clean-up, with volunteers joining with municipal workers to bag trash and sweep the streets. Although the actual clean-up would take weeks (especially in poorer communities), in many parts of Johannesburg and Durban, the clean-up was rapid, with most visible reminders of the past events quickly “swept away” (or in the case of the dozens of gutted shopping malls, scrubbed-clean), leaving the harder tasks of repairing broken shop fronts, replacing smashed windows, and re-stocking empty shelves. Indeed, images of these impromptu clean-up operations circulated nearly as widely within South Africa on social media as the images of violence and looting had just a few days before, and for many represented an essential, national healing process (see Figure 2). In fact, the clean-up efforts resonated nationally so profoundly that President Cyril Ramaphosa (2021), in his July 15th address to the nation, after the worst of the violence had passed, expressed hope that communities would, from this experience, develop a culture of self-cleaning, “This cleaning-up campaign can become a continuous process of our country where we all work together so we can emulate countries that have clean streets.” Of all the lessons to impart to the nation, after one of the most violent weeks in South Africa’s history: if we all work together, we can keep our streets clean.

Figure 2. Clean-up efforts by volunteers in the Durban CBD (Photograph by Rajesh Jantilal).

For affected communities in Durban and Johannesburg, and for South Africa as a nation, cleaning up from the July unrest was the first step towards returning to normal. For the shuttered shops in Durban’s shattered CBD, cleaning the streets, bagging the mountains of discarded plastic bags, the splinters of broken glass, and the endless piles of plastic bags, and hiding them away in landfill, was a necessary precursor to re-stocking the shelves and re-starting business as usual. However, if the July events illustrate anything, it is that we should not be looking to return to normal. Normal does not work for the majority of South Africans, and for a broad swathe of those living in the Global South, who remain trapped in poverty and lack access to basic services. Cleaning up from July’s events did not solve the problems that caused it; it just swept away the reminders. Like with most public services, inequality underpins access to waste management systems globally, structuring who can or cannot access or provide sustainable services. In South Africa, this is particularly acute, where nearly half the population still lacks access to municipal waste collection, most prominently in historically non-white communities on the peri-urban fringe and rural areas (cf. Adeleke et al. 2021; Rasmeni and Madyira 2019; Viljoen et al. 2021). Moreover, as public services deteriorate, the wealthy are able to supplement gaps in coverage with private service providers, while the poor get left further behind (cf. Kalina 2020c). While, it is clear that climate change will exacerbate this inequality both within and between nations, adding to the vulnerability of the poor and increasing the burden of many over-stretched municipal systems (cf. Barbier and Hochard 2018; Hallegatte and Rozenberg 2017; Parvin et al. 2016; Ruiz 2019).

Nor is South Africa an outlier. As inequality remains on the rise for nearly 70% of the world’s population (UNDESA 2020), and service delivery gaps, including for waste management, remain acute within most of the Global South, and within Africa in particular, (cf. Godfrey et al. 2019; van Niekerk and Weghmann 2019), a return to “normal” appears increasingly unsustainable and unethical. As South Africa’s most populous provinces burned, the detritus of their destruction is another poignant reminder that without addressing growing inequality, both domestically and globally, it will always be one-step forward, two-steps backwards for trying to create cleaner communities and to solving our interconnected waste management and climate change challenges.

3. Centring inequality

If it is our goal to safeguard the environment and create cleaner communities, inequality must take centre stage within our waste and climate change discourse, both within South Africa and across the Global South. I have made this call before (cf. Kalina 2020b, 2020c; Tilley and Kalina 2020), and although there has been recent progress, the interdisciplinary field of waste management studies has not been great, historically, at reckoning with inequality. I have in the past pointed to the Discard Studies movement as providing a necessary space for, contextualised, critical, and informed discussion around the relationships between waste and society, and fortunately, class and inequality has taken increased prominence within climate, waste, and environmental justice literature (cf. Baumann and Massalha 2021; Borowy 2019; Kalina and Tilley 2020; Masud et al. 2018; Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2021; Tilley and Kalina 2020; Valenzuela-Levi 2019; Valenzuela and Böhm 2017; Vieira and Matheus 2018). Yet, much of this work, unfortunately, remains on the fringe of mainstream waste management academic discourse. Inequality, and its causes, must move from the fringe, to the mainstream within our collective body of work. What does this mean for those of us in waste management, or sustainability studies more broadly? Quite simply, research that does not challenge, or even address, systemic inequalities is missing an opportunity to be more meaningful. As I have pointed out before, this does not mean that every scholarly contribution within waste management studies needs to include nuanced class critique (cf. Kalina 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). Nonetheless, we must continuously, and meaningfully, engage with the systemic socio-economic and socio-political conditions that created, and continues to create, our waste problems, if we are to address them. Furthermore, as academics we should always be mindful of the ways in which our work may contribute, even inadvertently, to inequality. As such, interventions that are designed for low-income communities or south nations that are not accessible to the communities they are designed for are not helpful and may even be harmful. Moreover, work in the north that grows the technological gap between the Global North and the Global South, rather than bridging it, contributes to systemic inequality between nations.

As South Africa cleans-up, we must remember we cannot sweep away inequality. Creating cleaner communities requires meaningful change, which must begin within our own work. Otherwise, it will be our own efforts, projects, and aspirations that will be continuously swept away, in addition to the communities and lives of the most vulnerable. One-step forward, two-steps backward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 At 0.63, South Africa’s Gini coefficient, which analyses wealth distribution inequality within a country, is the highest in the world. In South Africa, the richest 10% hold 71% of the wealth, while the poorest 60% hold just 7% of the wealth. More than half of South Africa's population, around 55.5%, live in poverty (World Bank 2018).

2 Who is, admittedly, a scholar of waste.