Abstract
Is violence a form of communication? This study examined why, in contemporary South Africa, “service delivery protests” were typically violent and why violence has appeared to become synonymous with such protests. Could it be that citizens, particularly the youth who participate in these protests, engage in acts of violence to communicate their discontent with unfulfilled aspirations, poor service delivery by government and its contractors and subcontractors, and systematic exclusion from political and economic participation? The study examined the real or perceived turn to violence by black youth in post-apartheid South Africa service delivery protests and asked how, if at all, violence constitutes a form of communication. The deeper fascination, in the end, was with an account of violence-as-communication and participation-as-communication that adequately foregrounds the interaction, on the one hand, between spectacular violence and systemic violence and, on the other, the complex praxis of communication and participation. The study, located in the informal settlement of Thembelihle which experienced major protest upheavals in 2015 (leading to then president Jacob Zuma to intervene directly), deployed a qualitative research design to investigate participation by the youth of Thembelihle’s in so-called service delivery protests, and probed what they thought they were doing in the process. Using semi-structured face-to-face interviews and focus groups, and the theories of violence by Zizek and Fanon, the study found that indeed violence is a form of communication, but not only in the ways we conventionally understand communication. Rather, such communication is bound up with questions (and contradictions) of identity, participation, equality and justice which not only defeat easy generalisation but also transcend the discipline of communication. Before, during and after a protest, violence is transformed into a multifaceted communication tool through which the full subjectivities and politics of the subaltern youth emerge, while at the same time calling into question both the future of the poor black youth in South Africa and the direction of post-apartheid democratic South Africa.
M.A. (Fundamental Communication)