At the end of 2015, university students across South Africa embarked upon protests, brought campuses to a standstill, interrupted exams, and marched to the seats of government in Cape Town and Pretoria. During these encounters, authorities repeatedly assaulted, tear-gassed and detained students. Throughout, these students appealed to the idea that the post-apartheid order is a rights-based order, and repeatedly insisted that they possessed a “right to protest”. In the face of repressive policing, they condemned the state and university administrators for not recognising this right.
In theory, the post-apartheid constitution protects a range of political rights: the rights to free expression and association, the rights to participate in political organisations and to stand in public elections, and the rights “peacefully and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket and to present petitions.” Taken together, these rights appear to set out a broad and permissive space within which public forms of political activity, including protest, can take place.
As I argue in my book, protest provides the opportunity for unrecognised groups to constitute themselves on their own terms. In doing so, they disrupt—and potentially remake—the existing distribution of power and political identity. And yet, in practice, security forces have assaulted protestors with tear gas and stun grenades, water cannons and rubber bullets. They arrested students, dragged them into police vans, charged them with public violence, and held them overnight or longer without bail. On some campuses, authorities have evicted students from residences, barred them from university properties and otherwise punished them.
