INTRODUCTION

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Democracy's Infrastructure, Apartheid's Debris

In July 2004, just over ten years after the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's first democratically elected president, a violent protest occurred in Diepsloot, a mostly informal township settlement inhabited by about 150,000 residents north of Johannesburg. Trash cans were overturned, sewage spilled in the streets, two council offices were burned, and the major road leading to the wealthier suburbs was blockaded with burning tires. Cars that dared to drive past were pelted with stones. The police responded with massive force, deploying water cannons, stun grenades and rubber bullets. The entire settlement was blocked off and designated a crime scene, a blanket indictment reminiscent of apartheid policing tactics during the 1980s. For three days, only minibus taxis were allowed in and out of the area, while journalists and other onlookers were barred from entry.

One of the first large-scale violent expressions of discontent in the postapartheid period, the protest caught government officials, politicians, and the police off guard. It also starkly interrupted the nation-wide celebrations of ten years of democracy that had begun three months earlier. Most immediately, it was unclear how the protest should be handled and by whom. Senior police officers deployed in the area appealed to the provincial government arguing that this was a "political situation" that required the intervention of the ANC-led government. The provincial minister for housing, Nomvula Mokonyane, countered that residents were involved in "criminal acts," which, as such, she maintained, were the responsibility of the police. This initial interpretive quarrel already hinted at the incomprehension and bewilderment the protests had caused amongst government officials and public commentators alike. Although many within the ANC establishment had been quick to dismiss previous, smaller demonstrations as staged by "ultraleftists" or disgruntled former party members, given its scale and intensity, the situation in Diepsloot was left in an interpretive vacuum for days. Who were the protesters, and how could residents be so ready to resort to violence and destroy public infrastructures? Through what interpretive grids could protest in the postapartheid period be rendered intelligible?

Initial media accounts of the protesters as irrational, faceless mobs soon gave way to interpretations translating them into more familiar vocabularies. As a media report by a prominent journalist put it, clearly in an effort to render Diepsloot and its predicament legible to his largely middle-class readership, the township was "not much like a luxury holiday resort" and could only be described as a "sprawling, dusty, rubbish-strewn area." This characterization, of course, described many places in South Africa and could not fully explain the situation. Meanwhile, government and ANC commentators cast the demonstrations in conspiratorial terms, arguing that the protesters had been incited by "outside forces" with criminal or even counterrevolutionary intent. Others suggested that the protesters had yet to learn the proper codes for civic engagement in a liberal democracy. Eventually, President Thabo Mbeki himself publicly deplored the residents' lack of patience and understanding of the functioning of democracy. The protests thus also became an occasion to dispel latent anxieties over postapartheid state legitimacy and the rule of law by forcefully reasserting the state's monopoly on violence; at issue here too was a battle over the intelligibility of state authority (Roitman 2005). Casting the protests as criminal rather than political acts served to transcend such uncertainties and re-established boundaries around the shape of legitimate civic behavior.

The Diepsloot protest, as an event, shook the public imagination, precisely because it posed a challenge to the very project of postapartheid "transition." Indeed, the protest challenged not merely a particular policy or a specific local councilor; more fundamentally, it challenged the dominant imaginary of South Africa's liberal democracy, in which the political domain is clearly delimited, where violence is the prerogative of the state, in which citizens have "channels" of communication, and where a thriving public sphere provides the location for deliberation and debate. Thus, the protest could be seen as not merely a moment of opposition, but as an instance of what Rancière (1999) calls "disagreement," that is, a challenge to the very terms and assumptions of an existing political language game. Perhaps most glaringly, the protests exposed the growing chasm between the ANC-led government and many poor residents of informal settlements and townships, and the declining capacity of the nationalist language of liberation to rein in discontents.

The standoff was eventually brought under control by a mix of police repression and attempts at conciliatory meetings with residents, but Diepsloot was only the spectacular beginning of a series of protests all over the country that would continue in the years to come. Year after year since then, demonstrations, "riots" and public violence have preoccupied state officials and the public imagination. Various initiatives to address them have been unable to stem the tide of discontents. By 2013, police statistics showed a massive incidence of protests while many journalists regularly called South Africa the "protest capital" of the world. Two years later, in 2015, the Gauteng Premier announced that the province was setting up "war rooms" in each municipality to deal with the protests directly.

Over time, the term "service delivery protest" has come into common usage, often entirely independent of the form or content of such protests. "Delivery," the fetishized goal of the immediate postapartheid period, conjures up histories of unfulfilled expectations for transformation, but also narrowly circumscribes the terms through which such protests can be understood. Framed in this way, the protests become simple, if perhaps "unreasonable" and "impatient," claims for material resources from the state, often linked to an assumed, deeply embedded "culture of entitlement" amongst residents of townships and informal settlements.

Less often remarked upon is the striking form many of these protests take and the centrality of infrastructure as both object and medium of making claims on the state: protesters have spilled sewage and rubbish in the streets, destroyed water tanks, blocked roads, and ripped out pipes and meters; indeed, it is often this feature that leads many...