A Close Look At How The Net Has Tightened On The Right To Protest In South Africa

JANE DUNCAN

SOUTH Africa’s public order policing is as ill as it ever was. This has been illustrated in recent student protests spreading across the country’s campuses. In Johannesburg police shot dead a pedestrian at a protest outside the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

In March 2020 the government imposed a ban on political gatherings as part of a host of interventions aimed at managing the COVID-19 pandemic. The move was unprecedented in the country’s post-apartheid history.

Since then there has been a distressing level of uneven and inconsistent policing of gatherings. The message this has sent is that the police were going easy on some gatherings, while taking tough action on others to suppress dissent.

As a scholar of the right to protest I have not been surprised by the heavy handed action. In my view the state has merely been reproducing behaviour patterns entrenched over the past